New lease on life for MLK hospital

After months of deep and delicate negotiations, a breakthrough plan is being proposed to reopen Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital, combining the financial resources of Los Angeles County and the medical expertise of the University of California.

Under the unique partnership, first proposed by Supervisor Yaroslavsky in May of last year, the once-troubled hospital in South Los Angeles could be reopened for emergency and in-patient services by late 2012. It would operate as a privately-owned and operated non-profit teaching facility.

“The reopening of MLK Hospital is the county’s most important health care priority today,” Yaroslavsky said. “There is a lot of work yet to be done but the finish line is now in sight.”

Said Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, whose district includes King hospital: “Time is of the essence as communities with very deserving patients impatiently await the reopening of this important medical center.”

Under the proposal—which must now be approved by the Board of Supervisors and the U.C. Board of Regents—a non-profit entity would be created to run and oversee the hospital. The county would fund the hospital’s operations. The University of California, meanwhile, would contract with the non-profit to provide physician services and establish standards of quality assurance.

As newly conceived, the non-profit corporation would staff the hospital from scratch, hopefully restoring public confidence in a facility that for years was accused of providing negligent care, leading the federal government in August 2007 to sever funding. Since then, the hospital has provided no emergency or in-patient services.

The negotiations that led to the new proposal involved a number of powerful players that included Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his senior staff, U.C. President Mark G. Yudof and his top representatives, as well as top county officials.

Olive View/UCLA Medical Center

Northeast Valley residents can look forward to greatly expanded emergency room services at Olive View/UCLA Medical Center under the hospital’s new ER project. On April 16, Yaroslavsky and other officials broke ground for new facility, which will offer 51 treatment areas in 32,000 sq. ft of space, virtually doubling the size of the existing ER, which currently handles 42,000 emergency and 19,000 urgent care visits annually. Among the numerous state of the art amenities will be 16 adult critical care rooms, six pediatric treatment rooms, five OB/GYN exam rooms, and a new 11,000 sq. ft. acute care/isolation unit with 15 two-person inpatient isolation rooms for patients with infectious diseases.

State adds little Las Flores Canyon as new parkland in Malibu

A generous property donation by Pepperdine University has added 72 acres of prime Santa Monica Mountains open space to California’s state parks system. Known as Little Las Flores Canyon, the parcel sits above the City of Malibu and adjoins the 1,255-acre Tuna Canyon Park, and becomes part of 18,000 acres of contiguous protected open space reaching from Topanga State Park west to Las Flores Canyon.

LACMA: A picture of progress

It’s called “The Transformation”—a small catchphrase for the hugely ambitious, two-phase expansion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Already, 60,000 square feet of gallery space has been added with the opening in 2008 of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano. What’s more, construction is now finished on an open-air pavilion and a concourse that connects the east and west sides of LACMA’s 20-acre mid-city campus.

Another hallmark of the transformation’s first phase: the installation of stunning public artworks, including Topanga Artist Chris Burden’s Urban Light, a neatly aligned collection of 202 vintage Los Angeles street lamps that has drawn crowds of locals and tourists alike.

All this was financed by $201 million in donations—a figure that LACMA officials say surpassed their fundraising goal by $51 million.

So now it’s on to phase two, which is well underway. The centerpiece this time is the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavillion, also designed by architect Renzo Piano. The Resnicks donated $55 million in funding and artwork to construct the new exhibition space, located just north of the BCAM.

The single-story pavilion, scheduled for completion in the summer of 2010, will feature a twenty-foot ceiling and no interior walls, creating a flexible floor plan that can accommodate any kind of exhibition.

Also included in this phase of construction will be the complete rehabilitation of LACMA West, the 300,000 square-foot former May Company department store, built in the late 1930s as a gateway to the historic Miracle Mile.

Since the earliest stages of planning, Supervisor Yaroslavsky has been closely involved with LACMA’s transformation, championing the decade-long project in philanthropic and government circles. He is widely considered to be the board’s most ardent advocate of the arts.

“LACMA’s expansion has been—and will continue to be—a boon for all of Los Angeles,” says the supervisor, whose district includes the museum. “Whether through its architecture, its collections, its outdoor sculptures or its stellar public programs, LACMA is creating a museum in a park that welcomes every resident of Los Angeles County and millions of visitors from throughout the world.”
For pictures and more information on LACMA’s transformation, click here.

Going solar in SoCal

Los Angeles County has created an innovative, interactive “Solar Map” to help residents, business owners and public property managers quickly figure out how much money and energy they can save by switching to solar.

The new map covers more than 3,000 acres of territory, making it the largest of its kind in terms of geographic scope. Users simply enter their address and zip code, and the website automatically calculates how much electricity they can generate through roof-top solar panels, how much money they can save annually on utility bills and how much carbon dioxide emissions they can reduce every year.

Los Angeles County’s solar map also gives people fast access to a list of licensed installers so they can get cost estimates and information about tax incentives and rebates in their neighborhoods.

Existing incentives from utilities and the federal government offer up to a 62% discount for residential customers in the City of Los Angeles and up to 45% for Southern California Edison customers. With these incentives, the price of solar costs an average of between 10- and 15-cents per kilowatt hour—the amount of energy it takes to burn a 100 watt light bulb for 10 hours. That’s comparable to the cost of electricity purchased from Southern California Edison and the Department of Water and Power. Going solar will also help create a hedge against ever-rising utility costs since the cost of sunshine never goes up.

Solar power contractors will also benefit from the map’s detailed aerial pictures. They’ll no longer need to climb roofs to determine whether solar will work on a particular building. The site develops its estimate of solar capacity by measuring the roof’s pitch, orientation, shadow effects and architectural or structural elements that could reduce usable area.

Over time, contractor reliance on this technology is expected to help lower installation costs for all residents.

The Solar Map website was created through a partnership between the county’s Internal Services Department, Chief Information Office, CH2M HILL, Southern California Edison and several local cities. It cost a relatively small $93,500 by taking advantage of the County’s existing aerial imagery and applying new computer technology to get the desired information.

By creating a one-stop website for people interested in taking advantage of southern California’s solar-friendly climate, the website’s designers, who modeled Los Angeles County’s solar map after similar projects in San Francisco and other cities, hope it will help facilitate the burgeoning green power industry here, thereby reducing utility costs, fighting global warming and creating new green jobs.

As Supervisor Yaroslavsky put it during an April press conference to unveil the map: “Solar makes sense in Los Angeles and in Southern California” since “this is one of the capitols of sunshine on the globe.”

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