Construction of Palomar Pomerado hospital begins

By: ANDREA MOSS - North County Times | Saturday, December 1, 2007 9:47 PM PST ∞

ESCONDIDO - Three years after voters approved a $496 million bond measure for a new hospital, they have their first tangible sign that project is moving forward.

A contractor working for Palomar Pomerado Health has begun grading a 52-acre site along Citracado Parkway in Escondido's northwest corner, marking the $811.5 million project's long-awaited transition from the planning phase to construction.

When the 11-story medical center is finished in early 2011, it will replace Palomar Medical Center in downtown Escondido as the hospital district's flagship property and North County's designated trauma center. The existing hospital will then be renovated and expanded.

Both projects are part of a larger effort to expand and update the public health care district's medical facilities, at a cost of at least $988.4 million.

District officials plan to augment the bond money with funds raised through revenue bond sales, fundraising and the district's future income.

Bonds sold under the voter-approved measure, known as Proposition BB, will be paid off with the proceeds of a special tax added to local property bills. Palomar Pomerado raised $80 million by selling its first series of Prop. BB bonds last year.

The district is planning to sell $250 million worth of obligation bonds in the next several weeks.

Palomar Pomerado Chief Financial Officer Bob Hemker said last week that much of the money raised by the upcoming sale will go toward the new hospital.

"The bond measure requires the money to be used for bricks and mortar, or actual construction of buildings or land," he said. "In this particular case, (spending) will be heavily focused on the purchase of building materials, labor, design work and other things for the construction of buildings at the new hospital."

Other parts of the overall expansion plan also are moving forward, though they are less visible to the public.

The progress includes the district's purchase of the fourth of five properties it needs to expand Palomar Medical Center. And on Friday, Palomar Pomerado's chief planning officer, Marcia Jackson, unveiled preliminary designs for a small medical center to be built in Ramona.

Basement hole finished

The Ramona center is one of several satellite clinics the district plans to build as part of the general expansion plan. The plan also calls for Pomerado Hospital in Poway to double in size.

The entire expansion originally was expected to cost $753 million. District officials cited escalating construction and material costs when they revised the price tag earlier this year.

The $988.4 million figure nonetheless stunned some community members and prompted criticism the district misled voters in the months before Prop. BB was overwhelmingly approved.

The new hospital was the major selling point in that campaign. The amount of time that elapsed between the bond measure's approval and the start of the hospital's construction caused some community members to question whether Palomar Pomerado would deliver the facility as promised.

Palomar Pomerado's chief architect, Michael Shanahan, said during a recent walk around the construction site that the public didn't see much happening with the new hospital for a while because the project had to go through a lengthy approval process that involved submitting massive amounts of blueprints and other paperwork to the state Office of Statewide Hospital Planning and Development.

The state agency must sign off on every aspect of the new hospital.

Shanahan said he got state officials' OK to start work on the building's foundation and basement in September. Construction workers have since dug a 25-foot-deep hole that runs the length and width of the hospital's anticipated perimeter.

The hole will house the hospital's foundation and basement, which eventually will contain the building's kitchen, loading bays and other support services. The locations of massive footings that will hold up the hospital were marked along the bottom of the hole last week, and workers were using a large, automated drill to cut through granite in preparation for the footings' installation.

A crew on another part of the property was using explosives to create a large trench in the ground.

Scott Stoddard, who is overseeing the project on behalf of contractor Rudolph and Sletten, said the trench eventually will contain an "umbilical cord" of utility lines that will link the medical center with a freestanding power plant planned for the site's southeast corner.

While such activities may be "less than exciting" in the public's eye, Shanahan said, they are crucial to the hospital's construction.

"By July, you're going to see steel starting to come out of the ground," he said. "I think people are going to be really blown away by what a magnificent building it is."

Soil issues to work out

Not everyone shares the architect's enthusiasm for the project. Critics have questioned whether the industrial park is the right location for the new medical center.

Escondido resident Robroy Fawcett is among a small group of people who have expressed concern about the project at meetings of the hospital district's board of directors, the Escondido City Council and the Escondido Planning Commission.

Talking about his position last week, Fawcett said he and others share reservations about the results of a soils report stating the ground at the construction site contains far more rock than hospital officials or developer James McCann, who sold the property to the district, have publicly disclosed.

The need to excavate and crush that rock could easily push up the hospital's cost to an astronomical sum, Fawcett said. He also said the soils report suggests the composition of soil on parts of the construction site earmarked for medical offices and other buildings will not meet city standards.

"I'm not trying to say that the hospital's on bad fill," said Fawcett. "But there's a lot of acreage up there that's not in accordance with the original design drawings and the (city's fill) ordinance."

Shanahan acknowledged the soils report in question "has some ugly numbers." State officials actually like the idea of the hospital being built atop rock, though, because that will increase the building's ability to withstand earthquakes, he said.

"A lot of hospitals in California, they put in pier systems where they actually drill down into the bedrock (to increase a building's stability)," Shanahan said. "We're not doing that because we're already on bedrock."

More recent soils reports, including one completed two months ago, suggest there will be no insurmountable problems on other parts of the property, the architect said.

Homi Namdari, assistant engineer for the city, said the concerns raised by Fawcett and others are based on a grading plan McCann prepared for the entire industrial park. And while the district will have to show that the hospital site's soil meets city standards to get building foundation permits, the engineer said, city officials do not foresee any problems that can not be worked out.

"I'm sure that there isn't anything that can't be remedied," Namdari said.