By EDVARD PETTERSSON
Staff Reporter
UCLA has the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Northridge earthquake to thank for more than $500 million of the $1.3 billion it is spending to rebuild its sprawling medical facilities from the ground up.
It was the biggest single allocation of funds provided by the federal disaster agency after the 1994 temblor and amounts to more than 11 percent of the $4.5 billion total distributed by FEMA to deal with local quake damage.
“We want to make sure that (hospitals) are able to stay open and provide services in the aftermath of a major natural disaster,” said Brett Hansard, a spokesman for FEMA in Los Angeles. “Mitigation in general is the driving philosophy of FEMA. We believe that for every dollar we spend now, we can save $2 in future repairs.”
Under its seismic-hazard mitigation for hospitals program, FEMA provided UCLA with $432 million for construction of its new $600 million medical center on campus, the centerpiece of the massive project.
FEMA officials said the allocation was based on the amount it would have cost to seismically upgrade existing acute-care facilities at UCLA that were badly damaged by the quake.
The federal agency is providing another $72.1 million for construction and renovation work at UCLA-Santa Monica Medical Center, another component of the medical facilities overhaul project.
But the main UCLA Medical Center replacement facility is the centerpiece of the project.
“It is considerably more expensive to build a hospital of this size than to build a large office building,” said Dr. Michael Karpf, vice provost of hospital systems and director of UCLA Medical Center. “It has to be built so it can withstand an earthquake of 8.4 magnitude on the Richter scale. It requires a complex and sophisticated technological support system in terms of, for example, plumbing and electricity.”
Bob Hanson, a technical advisor with FEMA, agreed that new acute-care hospitals such as the one being built at UCLA require sophisticated support systems.
“For example, the air-handling system is designed to prevent the spread of any contagious diseases,” he said. “In addition, there are spatial requirements, such as wide corridors, that make it much more expensive than most other types of buildings.”
In addition to the FEMA money, the state is providing $44 million of the $1.3 billion UCLA overhaul cost, with additional money coming from record-setting private and corporate gifts and the proposed sale of bonds by UCLA.
One of the largest individual donations to date has come from Michael Ovitz, former head of Creative Artists Agency and a UCLA graduate, who contributed $25 million.
Ovitz, who announced his contribution in 1997, also serves as chairman of the UCLA Medical Sciences executive board and, in that position, is chief fund-raiser for the medical center.
Renowned architect I.M. Pei was hired to design the new medical center and adjacent research facilities because he was the only one of six bidders with experience doing a major hospital in an urban setting. Karpf said the services of Pei did not significantly increase costs.
“We are not going to build the Taj Mahal,” Karpf said. “I.M. Pei and his architects have been very careful not to drive up the cost of construction.”
The first phase of the project is set to begin later this year. It will involve building a new hospital on the Westwood campus, along with construction and renovation work at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, and the building of three new research facilities on campus.
The $600 million price tag of the 1 million-square-foot campus hospital is about the same as a similarly sized medical center planned by the county to replace the aging County-USC Medical Center. That Eastside project received $422 million from FEMA.
Meanwhile, work on the medical center in Santa Monica will cost $200 million, and the three research facilities will cost a total of about $170 million.
Some of the money for those facilities will come from charitable donations raised by Campaign UCLA, a seven-year fund-raising effort that aims to collect a total of $1.2 billion for a variety of academic and campus improvement projects.
Thus far, the effort has raised $910 million. Campaign UCLA is expected to ultimately contribute $600 million to the medical facilities overhaul and other UCLA medical-related expenses.
Along with Ovitz, the largest donors include the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital Foundation, Mattel Foundation and the Resnick Family Foundation.
The Orthopaedic Hospital Foundation is contributing $30 million to the construction of the Orthopaedic Hospital-J. Vernon Luck Sr., M.D. Research Center, which will be part of the campus project. Meanwhile, the Mattel Foundation has contributed $25 million towards the Mattel Children’s Hospital at the center.
Construction and renovation of Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center will be partially financed by money from FEMA, with an additional $14.9 million coming from earthquake insurance payments.
To pay for work not covered by government funds and charitable gifts, the UC Board of Regents has approved the sale of as much as $300 million in bonds.
