Thieves strike old University Medical Center in Fresno. Could it impact pending $6M sale?
The old county-owned University Medical Center campus in southeast Fresno has a buyer pending on a multimillion-dollar sale. But as Fresno County waits for that deal to close, it will need to spend about $1 million repairing serious flood damage caused by copper thieves who struck the former hospital last month.
The county has been trying for at least five years to unload the property, and the Board of Supervisors last October accepted a $6 million bid for the 30-acre campus from Los Angeles developer Sevak Khatchadourian. He was the sole bidder in the county’s auction for the old hospital campus at Kings Canyon Road and Cedar Avenue.
The Fresno Bee reached out to Khatchadourian to ask about the vandalism and whether it could potentially scuttle the deal, but he did not reply by Tuesday afternoon.
Khatchadourian has invested in buying and renovating a number of properties in the heart of downtown Fresno, including the Pacific Southwest Building and the Helm Building, both on Fulton Street, and the former Radisson Hotel on Van Ness Avenue. In October, after his bid for the former UMC campus was accepted by county supervisors, Khatchadourian said the site “has a lot of potential,” but he didn’t offer any specifics about his plans.
The purchase hinges on finalizing a sale agreement, as well as lease agreements for at least two county agencies – the Department of Behavioral Health and the Department of Social Services – to continue using some of the outlying facilities aside from the main hospital towers. A staff report to county supervisors indicates that the two agencies expect to vacate those leased spaces by the end of 2025.
Robert Bash, the county’s director of internal services, said Khatchadourian continues to be engaged in due diligence on the sale on a near-daily basis.
But in the meantime, “we still own the property, we’re still responsible for the property,” Bash said, “and because we still have operations, we need to make sure those operations still happen.”
The main hospital facility – a pair of six-story towers and four-story connecting connection wing – hasn’t been used as a hospital since 2007. But the flooding discovered Dec. 13 inside a psychiatric health services building has also affected several other county departments that are still at least partially housed on the 30-acre campus, including the Behavioral Health, Social Services and Public Works and Planning departments.
The resulting damage is now estimated to cost Fresno County about $1 million to repair and pay for around-the-clock security for the county-owned property. The board of supervisors voted Tuesday to suspend its normal requirements for competitive bidding and authorized up to $2 million for emergency repairs.
County Counsel Daniel Cederborg said much of the needed emergency repair work “involves the power plant in the main building that provides services for county offices on other parts of the campus.”
Supervisor Sal Quintero was the lone “no” vote on the spending after Bash reported that the county had continued a “minimalistic protocol” of security and patrols at the hospital in the wake of a previous theft/vandalism incident last year.
Quintero said that at that time, “we were going to provide more security so we wouldn’t have something like this. What happened?”
“I only have so many security officers; we were doing increased patrols,” Bash told the board. “But that building is a sieve. It is very hard to keep people out of that building. It was never intended to keep people out.”
Bash added that some of the money authorized Tuesday by the supervisors would allow for 24-hour security on the hospital campus.
Supervisor Nathan Magsig acknowledged Quintero’s concerns about the additional costs. “It seems like it is a black hole,” he said. “There’s a lot of money being spent out there to repair the damage, and then more damage is caused.”
Magsig added that he’s eager for the county to completely moving off the old hospital campus. Because the central plant in the main building is necessary to provide services for the remaining county offices at the site, “it’s about $1 million a year just to keep the hospital mothballed.”
This story was originally published January 9, 2024 at 9:22 PM.
