A Pyrrhic Victory in the Hospital Wars

It’s 40 minutes in traffic from County-USC Medical Center to the little white house in Baldwin Park where Socorro Alvarado’s mother has lived without health insurance for a quarter-century. She can tell you this because the last time her mother was sick, that’s where Socorro Alvarado had to take her. Forty minutes to Boyle Heights. Forty minutes back. Not counting the five-hour wait.

Forty minutes, too, for Daniel Redman’s mom, who’s pregnant again, without insurance. Forty minutes as well for Sergio Hernandez’s mother: “She had ovarian cancer. They cut it out, but she keeps having to go back.”

Yes, it’s a long way from the hospital of last resort to the working-class suburb where the county has finally, finally, finally proposed an annex.

Which does not mean that the city of Baldwin Park wouldn’t rather that new hospital go someplace else.

Here is a tidbit the average observer might have missed this week, what with all the backslapping over the truce in Los Angeles County’s epic hospital wars: The little east San Gabriel Valley city that is the key to the whole compromise isn’t exactly on board yet.

“We found out pretty much by reading the paper,” one councilman confided. “The last time we’d talked to anyone was in December, and we were told nothing was going on.”

Imagine the surprise, then, when, in the final hours of the legislative session, a deal was cut to bless Baldwin Park with an 80-bed public hospital, on a corner the city had hoped to grace with a lucrative big-box mall. A corner that had, in fact, already been half-graced--a massive Sav-On drugstore is now going up on one of the two lots the county had originally wanted.

“It’s not that I’m against a hospital for the San Gabriel Valley,” Mayor Manuel Lozano warned Tuesday as the backslapping continued. “It’s just that it takes $30 million a year to run this city, and we have a tax base to be concerned about.”

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Lozano’s concern has become the modern refrain of California municipal finance. Since Proposition 13, the tax-base blues have run through most of the land use schisms in this state. With property tax revenues cut and funneled, now, through the sponge-like corridors of Sacramento, cities have acquired a dependence on sales tax that a guy I know likens to “those pandas that have bred to the point that they can live on only one kind of bamboo.” Sales tax revenues have become the financial lifeline of last resort for cities, which live and die now on big-box retail and auto dealerships.

The upshot is that, from schools to welfare offices to health care, cities now have scant incentive to step up for the greater good. Health care is nice, but if it’s nonprofit, it generates zippo in public money; when a local Kaiser Permanente hospital converted to nonprofit status recently, one Baldwin Park city official told me, “More than $500,000 went off the tax rolls, just like that.”

So never mind that there are 465,000 uninsured people in the San Gabriel Valley, 121,000 of whom are children. Never mind that Baldwin Park has such a history of poverty that Rand Corp. once declared it a socioeconomic “disaster area.” Never mind that a hospital at the corner of Francisquito and Puente avenues would be a 10-minute walk for the mothers of Socorro Alvarado and Daniel Redman and Sergio Hernandez.

Give us Costco, the city must cry out. Give us Home Depot.

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Baldwin Park’s issues have not gone entirely unnoted. As of this week, at least one alternative site was said to be under consideration, in Irwindale. It’s hard to imagine another municipality coming through, though. The county has tried for years to get the cities of the San Gabriel Valley to step up with a spot for a County-USC annex, only to be met with suburban worries about “the sort of people who go to County” and choruses of “not in my backyard.”

Nor does Baldwin Park really expect to win this battle; the proposed local site is, after all, a shuttered ex-hospital. It’s been on the market for 1 1/2 years. There are weeds in the parking lot and boards on the rear windows. Crows peck at the trash that people toss into its shrubbery. The surrounding commerce--

aside from the great cinder-block hope of the rising Sav-On--consists mainly of gas stations and check-cashing outlets. Still, Lozano sighs, “We’ve worked so hard for so long on this city’s image, and the minute we’re on our way up--well, you know.”

It shouldn’t be this painful for a well-meaning city to do right. The greater good shouldn’t be a hazard to a place’s financial health. Congratulations, politicians, on the end of the hospital wars of Los Angeles County. Now how about some peace in the revenue wars as well?

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.