City to Consider Major Medical Center Revamp

Today the Los Alamitos City Council will consider plans to revamp the Los Alamitos Medical Center—one of the most significant development projects the city has seen in decades.

As at earlier planning commission meetings on the topic, City Council chambers will likely fill up tonight for a public hearing on the hospital’s 25-year plan to build several more buildings and a parking structure at the hospital. Projected to cost more than $50 million, while creating jobs and traffic, the project has strong cores of supporters and opponents.

If approved, the expanded hospital would anchor Katella Avenue and shape the city’s main drag for decades to come. Supporters cite the project’s potential to create jobs, boost local businesses and expand medical services to the community as reasons to approve it. Critics, however, worry that the expansion will clog traffic and give the hospital carte blanche to build portions of the project without having to follow through with the elements that would most benefit the surrounding community, such as a parking structure or additional patient rooms.

Divided into three phases of construction over 25 years, the proposal calls for the demolition of two existing buildings at the medical center and the construction of two hospital towers, a medical office building and a parking structure for paid parking. The 18.3-acre project adds hospital beds, parking and offices, but it does not actually expand the medical center’s footprint in the community, said Susan Morales, the hospital’s spokeswoman.

“We’re just developing on the land we have, not expanding our campus,” Morales said.

As for the increase in traffic, any development along the Katella Avenue corridor would increase traffic, Morales said. However, the expansion of the hospital will bolster business in the community by creating jobs and bringing additional employees who would shop and dine in Los Alamitos.

“I don’t live in Los Alamitos, but I tend to shop and eat here more than I do at home because I am here five days a week,” said Morales.

If approved as is, the development is projected to add 164 more hospital beds and 849 parking spaces, while creating as many as 1,665 jobs and generating as many as 3,900 daily car drips down Katella.

According to the city’s staff report, the project would position the hospital to better accommodate the 45 percent population growth of senior citizens by 2020.

However, it is the long-term nature of the project that has some in the community worried. By approving the development 25 years out, the city could be ceding oversight of the project—enabling the hospital to build a profitable office building but not the hospital rooms and parking spaces that the community wants, said resident Richard Murphy.

Still others worry that the city hasn’t adequately considered the impact that nearly 4,000 more car trips could have on the community. Another common concern is that the hospital would expand outward, taking over community landmarks. Still others would rather see more commercial projects in the area, with the potential to add sales tax revenue to city coffers.

Mayor Pro Tem Troy Edgar has noted that there is a strategic purpose for evaluating a development 25 years into the future. Much like ongoing plans to create a downtown shopping and dining destination along Los Alamitos Boulevard, he said, the hospital project would allow city officials to look at the big picture rather than at disjointed and piecemeal developments, as it has in the past.