The final plans for Coyote Valley development won
’t be submitted for at least another year, but Morgan Hill
already has a complicated relationship with its prospective
neighbor to the north. On Wednesday, the City Council voted to send
a letter that will “reject the vision” that San Jose planners have
for that city’s southern reaches.
The final plans for Coyote Valley development won’t be submitted for at least another year, but Morgan Hill already has a complicated relationship with its prospective neighbor to the north.
On Wednesday, the City Council voted to send a letter that will “reject the vision” that San Jose planners have for that city’s southern reaches.
When fully developed, Coyote Valley is expected to provide 50,000 housing units, 25,000 jobs and 80,000 new people to the area directly north of Morgan Hill and the council and its South Valley partners worry that the effects of such huge numbers have not been properly considered.
“We have a very strong sense that this vision does not address concerns that we’ve raised, and now is the time to change it,” Mayor Dennis Kennedy said Thursday. “They haven’t studied the effects of traffic on 101 and Monterey Road, and the proposed school sites don’t meet the educational objectives of our school district.”
Kennedy will deliver the letter to the next Coyote Valley Specific Plan Task Force meeting, on Dec. 13. But for all the reservations of Morgan Hill officials, they need Coyote Valley if they’re to fulfill one of the city’s top priorities: Bringing full-service medical facilities back to the now-vacant DePaul Health Center.
“It’s critical to the community that we get better medical facilities and DePaul is the natural place to put it,” Joe Mueller said Thursday. “The problem is figuring out how we get to the level of service we need.”
Mueller is chair of the Morgan Hill Community Health Foundation, set up by the council to help bring medical services back.
The city’s hopes that Daughters of Charity Health System would return diagnostic imaging, laboratory and urgent care facilities to the hospital that closed in 1999 were dashed Wednesday night when the Daughters reported that its financial troubles made it impossible to “turn the lights on” at the hospital.
So, on the same day the council voted to reject the Coyote Valley plan, they were reminded how much they depend on it.
“That’s what we’ve consistently told them,” said Andrew Barna, director of strategic planning at O’Connor Hospital in San Jose, which is also run by Daughters. “With the expansion of Coyote Valley and additional population to draw from, we would have a much better chance of being successful at opening both an outpatient, and eventually, an inpatient facility at DePaul.”
Daughters’ Senior Vice President Joanne Allen told the city council Wednesday night that “this is not a facility where you can stage incremental growth. It will cost $5 million just to turn the lights on.”
Daughters believes that running outpatient and urgent care facilities at DePaul will cost about $9.5 million year, a whisper of the more than $250 million a year it costs to operate O’Connor Hospital, but its cash flow has been tapped by losses of $70 million over two years at Robert F. Kennedy Hospital in Los Angeles County and an unexpected $6 million in expenses to deal with increased traffic at O’Connor Hospital due to the closure of San Jose Medical Center.
But Barna said Thursday that Daughters would have a much easier time finding the approximately $5 million of start-up money necessary to begin any sort of operation at DePaul if Coyote Valley were more of a reality.
“We could probably go ahead with outpatient right now, especially knowing that the population would need services it doesn’t currently have,” he said.
But Daughters aren’t alone in seeing that need. On Wednesday, the council gave the go-ahead to Venture Corp.’s competing plan for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) facilities at physician-owned offices planned for the Morgan Hill Business Ranch on Butterfield Boulevard.
Venture Corp. wants to construct a two-building medical center with the full range of diagnostic imaging including computed tomography, X-ray and ultrasound, but they applied only for an MRI licenses.
And though Coyote Valley’s target population is at least 15 years away, if DePaul is going to remain an attractive site for a new hospital, it needs to begin offering at least some services in the interim.
“If we can make progress and have things up and running before Coyote Valley is ready, the pattern will be set for DePaul to be the site of any new hospital,” Mueller said. “We need to have integrated services with high-revenue procedures like MRI there to support the kind of medical procedures that don’t bring revenue.”
Vivian Smith at Gilroy’s Saint Louise Hospital, which is also operated by the Daughters, isn’t convinced that South Valley will need two hospitals even if Coyote Valley develops.
“I don’t know if that will make sense,” she said. “It will depend on the population and traffic patterns. A lot of people work in San Jose and will go there. Right now, there’s definitely not a need for two acute-care facilities.”
Coyote Valley planners say its too early in the process to locate health care facilities in the Specific Plan, but they are utilizing a new zoning methodology called form-based zoning that will give them a lot of flexibility in doing so.
“What we’re thinking about is providing opportunities for physicians and clinics and looking to provide critical care,” said Roger Shanks, a senior planner with the Dahlin Group. “We’ve heard that there are almost too many beds in Santa Clara County so we’re looking at smaller, clinic-type facilities.”
If the need develops, it will be relatively easy to construct a new hospital in Coyote Valley because hospitals are subject to the same zoning regulations as medical office buildings.
Every year that DePaul stands vacant adds to the costs of reopening it. In another 20 years, Barana said, it will be cheaper to construct an entirely new inpatient facility than it will be to renovate the existing building.
“Our strategy is to position ourselves to be the provider of choice for Coyote Valley,” Barna said. “We have a lot of land on which to build, and positioning is vital. All health care is local. We’re very comfortable with our location in Morgan Hill.”
The facility is located on the southeast corner of the U.S. 101 and Cochrane Road intersection.
