SAN FRANCISCO | Projects: Under Construction, Approved, and Proposed

[BTinSF]

Friday, January 30, 2009
Replacement for St. Luke’s coming fast
San Francisco Business Times - by Chris Rauber

Despite the California budget crisis and worldwide credit crunch, San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Center is making rapid progress on designing a replacement for St. Luke’s Hospital and is also moving forward with its proposed new $1.7 billion Cathedral Hill campus near downtown.

“St. Luke’s is moving faster, since the time frame is so compressed,” said CPMC spokesman Kevin McCormack. CPMC filed initial designs for a rebuilt St. Luke’s Dec. 19, he said, just three months after its board agreed to preserve the campus as part of a broader compromise with San Francisco officials, labor unions and community groups that appears to have rescued the Cathedral Hill project from potentially devastating political crossfire.

Plans currently call for a $200 million to $250 million replacement for 143-bed St. Luke’s, a significant jump from earlier estimates starting at $120 million.

CPMC will focus this year on designs and other documentation required for the Cathedral Hill and St. Luke’s projects, according to Geoffrey Nelson, CPMC’s director of enterprise development. It hopes to gain entitlements by early 2010, Nelson said, and start construction on both by mid-2010.

CPMC saved St. Luke’s from potential closure early in the decade but last year started taking steps to shutter it as an acute-care facility before a storm of protest caused CEO Martin Brotman, M.D., to backtrack.

Now that initial plans for the new St. Luke’s have been filed at the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, “We can focus on (more detailed) design of the hospital, obviously as quickly as we can,” McCormack said.

As part of that process, CPMC is working to refine Cathedral Hill’s environmental impact report, and talking to neighborhood and community groups about its plans for the $1.7 billion, 555-bed hospital and medical office complex at Geary Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue.

Even so, officials at CPMC and its Sacramento-based Sutter Health parent acknowledge that little is certain in the current economic environment. Nor will they yet provide details on where the $2 billion needed for the two hospitals is coming from, and if it has those funding commitments in place.

“People think that health care is immune to a recession, but clearly it’s going to take a hit just like everything else,” said McCormack. “We haven’t heard anything from Sutter saying, ‘Sorry, the money’s not going to be there,’ but obviously that could change.”

Sutter spokesman Bill Gleeson said the 26-hospital system is in the midst of a “formal capital reassessment, given the current economic slump and our concern about its duration and ultimate enormity,” the first such reassessment in three years.


crauber@bizjournals.com / (415) 288-4946

Source: http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/...ml?t=printable