Daily Business Report-Oct. 24, 2013
The new Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton is expected to start receiving patients in mid-December.
New $456 Million Navy Hospital at Camp Pendleton
Completed Six Months Ahead of Schedule
Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton is home to a new, $456 million Naval Hospital that will serve around 70,000 active-duty and veteran members of the military and their families on a 70-acre site near the south entrance to the base.
Completion of the 1 million-square-foot campus came six months ahead of schedule and more than $100 million under the original government budget of more than $570 million, according to Carlos Gonzalez, project director for the joint venture team of Clark Construction Group and McCarthy Building Cos. Inc., the builders.
The new hospital is replacing an older facility built in 1974 near Lake O’Neil that no longer complies with seismic and other standards for hospitals. It will be used for administrative and storage. Its patients will be transferred to the new hospital in mid-December and a ribbon-cutting ceremony has been scheduled for Jan. 31. The original timeline for the hospital seeing its first patients was June 2014.
“The replacement hospital is a facility ‘catch-up’ for the progress of modern medicine, since the last facility was built in the early 1970s,” said Capt. Mark A. Kobelja, commanding officer of Naval Hospital Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton.
The hospital will provide emergency, primary, intensive and specialty care, and have 96 outpatient procedure rooms, 205 exam rooms, ancillary departments, support spaces and 54 patient rooms accommodating up to 60 beds for non-ambulatory patients who require stays in excess of 24 hours. Reflecting the mostly young military population it serves, the hospital will also have eight labor and delivery rooms, together with 16 post-partum suites. Outpatient care alone is expected to reach around 2,000 visits per day. It will be staffed with about 1,100 physicians, nurses and support personnel. Sustainable design features include green roofs, healing gardens, and an atrium open to the sky.
The joint venture team also built a central utilities plant with 3,100 tons of cooling and redundant utility systems to allow the hospital to remain independently and fully functional for three days in the event of a power outage. A 1,500-space parking structure also was built and a 1,000-space surface parking area doubles the parking capacity of the existing hospital.
HKS Architects Inc. of Los Angeles was the project architect-of-record, while HDR Architecture Inc. of San Diego, served as the architectural designer for the new hospital. Young+Co. Inc. of San Diego, HDR Architects and HKS Architects collaborated on the interior design.
San Diego Housing Among Nation’s Least Affordable
San Diego’s housing got less affordable during the past year. A survey by a banking information website pegs the city as having the second “least” affordable housing market in the country, KPBS reports.
Interest.com surveyed the nation’s 25 largest cities. The firm measured the median home price, the cost of financing and compared it to a region’s median income. Nationally, incomes are up, but those increases are outpaced by jumps in home values and the cost of mortgages.
San Diego’s median paycheck was 37.71 percent below the amount required to buy the median priced home. That was worse than every city surveyed but San Francisco, which had a negative 48 percent rate.
Home prices in San Diego are up more than 20 percent when measured against last year’s prices. Atlanta was the most affordable city on the list. The median income there is nearly 25 percent higher than the money needed to buy a median priced home.
$120 Million Infrastructure Bond Program Proposed
A proposed project list for an infrastructure bond issue for the city of San Diego was to be announced today by Interim Mayor Todd Gloria. The City Council will consider the matter in January. It’s anticipated the city would bond for $120 million worth of needed projects, according to Gloria.
Cavignac & Associates Adds a New Principal
Matthew Slakoff has been promoted to a principal of Cavignac & Associates, the San Diego-based commercial insurance brokerage firm. Slakoff, who joined the company in May 2006, is a risk adviser and senior account executive for the firm. He designs and implements risk management programs for clients within the real estate, development, construction and manufacturing industries. He also specializes in the analysis and placement of environmental risk. Slakoff joins the company’s other principals: Jeffrey Cavignac, founder; Jim Schabarum, Scott Bedingfield, and Patrick Casinelli — in assuming part ownership of Cavignac & Associates and participating on the company’s executive board of management. Slakoff previously worked for five years as a property/casualty underwriter for the San Diego office of Deans and Homer.
ARCS Foundation Awards Funds to UC San Diego Students
The San Diego chapter of ARCS Foundation Inc. awarded 31 UC San Diego graduate students with fellowship awards totaling $222,500 for the 2013-14 academic year. A national nonprofit organization led by women, the foundation seeks to support the growth of scholarship in science, engineering and medical research. Since 1987, the local chapter has given a total of $3.9 million in unrestricted funds to UC San Diego, which students may use to complete research, cover travel expenses or fulfill other financial obligations. The ARCS Foundation has been providing financial awards to scholars since 1958 with the goal of sustaining and enhancing research in science, engineering and medicine in the U.S.
Former City COO Takes Job With Bank
Jay M. Goldstone, former chief operating officer and chief financial officer for the city of San Diego, has taken a job with The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ as managing director in its public finance group. Goldstone will be responsible for managing state and local government and not-for-profit clients and prospects. He will be based in Los Angeles.
