The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a tentative plan to keep open troubled Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center and its badly needed emergency room by greatly reducing the size of the facility and shifting management to another county hospital.

The board decided to put the Willowbrook hospital under the day-to-day control of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center near Torrance, deciding against turning the facility over to a private hospital corporation. The board asked County Health Services Director Bruce Chernof to report back in two weeks with a more detailed plan on the transfer of management authority. Services at King/Drew would shrink and most of its staff likely would be relocated to other county facilities.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services informed King/Drew and county officials last month that the hospital had failed a crucial inspection this summer and would lose $200 million a year in federal funding about half of its budget. To keep the hospital open, an alternative management structure has to submitted to federal and state regulators for approval quickly because the hospital’s provider agreement ends November 30.

County officials had been talking with private hospital companies, including San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West, but in the end decided it would take too much time to work out an agreement.