Suspended in a haze of smoke

Fires burning off in the east cast a sickly shadow over the site of the proposed UMC today. Charity Hospital, still vacant, was barely visible off in the distance through the smoke.  As a friend agreed this morning, the acrid lungfuls are appropo for New Orleans - there's always a tinge of the apocalypse in the air.

The churned remnants of S. Johnson Street sat in the heat.

Dust from equipment on the site added to the thick air.

At the old Grand Palace Hotel, workers had the wooden cover off the entry to the former parking structure.

The sooty air lingered in the French Quarter.

It hung like a pall over the tombs of St. Louis #2 Cemetery, visible below the elevated expressway that may yet disappear.  The roofs of the Iberville Projects are visible as well - many of the buildings will soon be demolished under a redevelopment proposal put forward by HANO and Pres Kabacoff's HRI, likely under a federally funded "Choice Neighborhoods Grant."

Expropriation Law Inside the Footprint

I've noted the existence of a variety of law suits relating to the over 150 expropriations in the VA and LSU sites over time.

Derrick Morrison from the Committee to Reopen Charity recently excerpted from one that I haven't highlighted in depth to date here on the blog - the suit filed by the Blood Center of Southeast Louisiana.

The Blood Center was evicted from its facilities earlier this month after expropriation (see above notice photo and move out photo below) and is now operating temporarily out of a former car dealership in New Orleans East.

What are the chief legal arguments involved in the suit against the LSU Board of Supervisors?  Well, many of them align quite closely with the more general arguments that have been raised here and elsewhere:

The attorneys for The Blood Center make some great observations:

Here's a view of the Blood Center's current home out in The East:

Incredibly ill-advised

You heard it here first, but Fox8 News traces the hectic and premature departure of the Blood Center, long located in the proposed LSU Footprint, to a temporary facility in an old car dealership in The East:

"It's just hard to sit here and watch it. We put so much into that facility. This is my life," said Blood Center President Billy Wheales. It's really mind boggling for me considering we have been here for more than 50 years."


The state gave the Blood Center an August 1st deadline to be out of the remainder of the building.


This has made for a hectic few weeks and an unusual move to New Orleans East to the site of an old car dealership. For a facility that supplies the entire region with blood, it's been a challenging transition," he says.

And there you have it.  Functionally, by forcing the Blood Center out of the site unnecessarily, the State of Louisiana, LSU, and the UMC Board have jeopardized the blood supply, an important aspect of the metro region's healthcare.

The site plan for the UMC could have easily incoporated the Blood Center facility, but as with McDonogh No. 11 and Deutsches Haus, it decidedly quite forcefully not to do so.  There was no reason to weaken or put the blood supply at risk when the land the facility sat on was not essential to building the proposed medical complex - a hospital that does not have adequate financing or a business plan.

As with so many aspects of this process, I'm forced to sit back and ask rhetorically, once again...where are the adults in the room?  Can someone tell me what is really driving all this belligerent insistence?  One can look at land, at power, at financial greed...but this just does not make any sense.

The Issue in The East

This, increasingly, is going to play into the fate of the proposed UMC hospital.  SaveCharityHospital.com has also been focusing on the issue lately.

Specifically, the interplay between the UMC hospital and the Methodist hospital in the East - or conflict between them, really - stand to impact the financial viability, size, and public support for the UMC as proposed:

DeSalvo walked a narrow path in distinguishing the two projects. The mayor has strongly supported the teaching hospital as planned, and DeSalvo repeated that position on his behalf at the most recent UMC board meeting. But last week she said the eastern New Orleans project "is different." The teaching hospital, she said, is a regional enterprise that will attempt to draw patients primarily from a multiparish region and, secondarily, from across the LSU hospital system and Gulf Coast.

In eastern New Orleans, she said, "We have a clear demand for a specific population that is land-locked without a hospital. ... We're not trying to be a specialty hospital but a community hospital" with an emergency department, obstetrics ward and a general surgery unit that would "take out gall bladders, do heart catheterization, that sort of thing." 

Land-locked?  What does that mean?

But here's the most interesting part - really interesting.  Karen DeSalvo mentioned this:

She also cited other assets: an existing building that only has to be renovated

Last time I checked, Charity Hospital is an existing building owned by the state that only has to be renovated.  Strange that the Mayor's deputy mayors and staffers never mention or push the renovation route when talking about resolving the UMC situation.

This also somewhat odd:

The primary service area would be Gentilly, the 9th Ward and all portions of the city east of the Industrial Canal,

The Lower 9th Ward is east of the Industrial Canal.  It shares City Council representation with The East.  But it's so functionally separated/isolated from The East in terms of travel due to bodies of water that it hardly makes sense to lump it in with that neighborhood (By car: Caffin and St. Claude to proposed UMC site: 5.4 miles, 12 minutes; Caffin and St. Claude to Methodist Hospital: 9.3 miles, 16 minutes).   It's also unclear why Gentilly couldn't be served by the UMC given that it would be roughly equidistant to either hospital site.

The raw number of hospital beds, too, shows that this town ain't big enough for both the UMC Tajmahospital and the hospital in The East:

Further, consultants working for the UMC board this spring noted that Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes, the primary service area for the proposed teaching hospital, already have 2.83 beds per 1,000 residents. The national average is 2.7.

A 424-bed UMC, the closing of Interim LSU Public Hospital and the opening of a planned 40-bed hospital in Chalmette would bring that ratio to about 3 beds per 1,000 residents. Those calculations do not include putting any beds back online in the old Methodist building. 

It's clear that something has to give - both facilities as currently envisioned won't work.  Financially or in terms of having a successful model based on metro market needs.  And the TP piece reveals, indirectly, that the hospitals would be competing for patients:

Further, a 2013 opening would allow a new community hospital in eastern New Orleans to solidify its patient base before the projected 2015 UMC launch.

Why would there be any worry about solidifying a patient base...if the UMC wasn't a threat that might draw patients away? 

So, the UMC's ridiculously delayed launch is now seemingly being viewed as a benefit or an excuse to act in a way that reinforces the sense that the city's overall approach to healthcare development is confused, unsustainable, and irresponsible.   I really don't know what comes next.

The city is also seeking HUD FHA backing for its project.  Given the factors involved and the failure of the federal mortgage insurance route in the UMC situation...I don't know that it's worth bothering with for this project.  I'm seeing some of the same fatal flaws emerging.

The Blood Center is Gone

Not the physical building - not yet.  But the entity itself - the staff, the equipment, the vehicles - they've all been relocated temporarily to a location far out in The East...miles and miles and miles away from the medical facilities that are clustered in and around the CBD.  I saw the bloodmobiles next to the temporary building - a sad little affair - as I drove by on Sunday and the lonely guard in the guard tower confirmed the location when the photo above was taken on Tuesday.

Yesterday, a few last moving trucks came in with crews to finish up.

It's absurd that this useful and critical facility was forced to move...for a destructive project with no business plan and inadequate financing.

The thing that makes the least sense is that Governor Jindal, after asking the UMC Board to look at all options for the UMC, has goaded Jerry Jones on, and the contractors have just kept clearing the proposed UMC site at the state's urging.  It renders Jindal's words about studying alternatives absolutely hollow because it effectively constrains the options on the table.