Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital’s interest in adjacent offices worries some neighbors

From the back of Jacob Boudewijn’s Fair Oaks Avenue cottage, the soft babbling sounds of Santa Rosa Creek can barely be heard over the monotonous droning of a temporary chiller at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital on the other side of the creek.

The chiller, he said, is just the latest hospital noise he and other area residents have had to deal with. Add to that the sounds of delivery trucks, monthly testing of an emergency generator, the clanging of cafeteria equipment and, of course, the raucous sounds of emergency helicopter flights and ambulance sirens.

So, when Memorial Hospital officials announced last month that they were vying to purchase nearby property, including 128,938 square feet of land on Sotoyome Street, Boudewijn and other neighbors began to worry.

“How are the neighbors going to be affected? Are there going to be increased deliveries and operations?” Boudewijn wondered.

Boudewijn and other residents preface their concerns by saying that Memorial Hospital has been a good neighbor and has taken steps to mitigate noise pollution, though not entirely to everyone’s satisfaction.

But he and others say they are worried that future expansion of medical services, such as creating more medical office space for the hospital’s affiliated doctors and specialists, could lead to more activity at the Memorial Hospital campus.

Officials at St. Joseph Health Sonoma County - which operates Memorial Hospital - assure local residents that nothing will immediately change if the Sotoyome property is purchased. St. Joseph already leases the 34,047-square-foot facility at 121 Sotoyome St. as an outpatient and multispecialty and radiology service center.

David Ziolkowski, St. Joseph’s chief operating officer, said that if the health care provider purchases the property, any future development would be carried out with cooperation and consideration of the local community. Recent projects, such as the $15 million expansion of Memorial Hospital’s emergency department, are a testament to St. Joseph’s commitment to being a good neighbor, he said.

The Sotoyome property is part of a real estate portfolio now up for sale. The portfolio, which is owned by a group of doctors with ties to the former Redwood Regional Medical Group, includes eight properties in Santa Rosa and two near hospitals in Petaluma and Ukiah. All of the Santa Rosa properties are located on Sotoyome Street, directly across Montgomery Drive from the hospital.

The properties were put on the market in mid-October, seven months after a group of physicians from Redwood Regional Medical Group joined Annadel Medical Group, a physicians group that is affiliated with St. Joseph Health. Annadel’s business operations are managed by St. Joseph through its medical practice foundation known as St. Joseph Heritage Healthcare.

As a result of the merger, many of the leases associated with the portfolio of office buildings now are held by St. Joseph or Annadel Medical Group. The owners of the properties hope to get about $30 million for the real estate portfolio.

Some of Memorial Hospital’s neighbors were surprised to hear that St. Joseph was vying for the property. They said that for some time now they’ve been trying to get St. Joseph to build a sound wall to help mitigate industrial noises in the rear of the hospital, particularly the emergency generator when it is tested once a month.

“Highway 101 has a sound wall, why can’t they?” said Pat Lewis, a Fair Oaks Avenue resident whose 89-year-old cottage sits near the bank of Santa Rosa Creek.

Lewis, who has lived in the house since 1996, said the regular beeping of delivery trucks backing up, as well as the laughter of work crews, overshadows what should be a serene environment.

On Doyle Park Drive, a neighbor who asked that her name not be used said traffic was her main concern.

The resident, who lives on the east side of Doyle Park Drive, wondered if there would be enough parking in the area for continued growth. She was also concerned about industrial noise.

“What we’ve been asking for is a sound wall. How can they afford to buy a whole new building and not a sound wall?” she said.

Neighbors, some of whom would like to see the hospital’s rear fence line replaced by a sound barrier, said St. Joseph officials have told them that such a structure would cost too much money to build and would likely run into regulatory problems since the fence runs along the very bank of the creek.

Ziolkowski, St. Joseph’s chief operating officer, said it is not an issue of “not having enough money.” He said it’s more a question of priorities, where the hospital must constantly weigh the immediacy of purchasing such things as CT scanning machines or MRI equipment versus the construction of a sound wall.

“I’ve never said there’s no money or not enough money, but projects do get prioritized,” Ziolkowski said.

Ziolkowski said the emergency generator emits a relatively loud noise during its once-a-month testing, which lasts about 30 minutes. St. Joseph has been trying to come up with “engineering solutions” to the generator that would muffle the noise at the source, he said.

“A sound wall just sort of deflects the noise; our preference would be to reduce the noise,” said Ziolkowski, adding that a 20-foot sound wall enclosure around the generator could cost as much as $500,000.

“That’s a pretty big investment for 30 minutes once a month,” he said.

Noise issues between the hospital and its neighbors were exacerbated after Memorial landed its designation as the region’s Level II trauma center in 2000. As the North Coast’s highest-level trauma center, the hospital receives severe medical cases such as vehicle crash and gunshot victims, which often require helicopter transport at all hours of the day and night.

The designation also brings frequent and noisy emergency ambulance traffic to the neighborhood. Memorial Hospital’s trauma center designation was renewed in 2010 until 2018.

To address neighborhood concerns over noise and other issues, the hospital meets quarterly with neighbors. At the meetings, hospital neighbors like Fred Howe, another Fair Oaks Avenue resident, have been raising concerns over the generator and helicopter noise.

Howe, who grew up on Fair Oaks Avenue, said the hospital, which opened in 1950, has been at its current location since he was a teenager. But back then, he said, it didn’t have “all the industrial stuff” it now has.

“For me, the generator noise is the issue, along with monitoring the helicopter approaches and departures,” Howe said, adding that he and others are concerned that future growth will exacerbate noise problems.

Ziolkowski said that St. Joseph does have plans to expand its operations and renovate its current facilities. For example, one part of the existing hospital will require retrofitting to meet state seismic standards by 2030.

That will mean coordinating heavy construction schedules with neighbors, Ziolkowski said.

But for now, the neighborhood impact of purchasing the Sotoyome property should be minimal, he said.

“Please remember, we currently already lease those facilities, and so in the short term we would expect operations as they are today would continue,” Ziolkowski said.

He said that for the longer term, “we do have to make sure we have facilities to support our operations and what I would consider our growing operations.”

Robert Crane, who has lived on Sonoma Avenue for 15 years, said his main concern is making sure the properties zoned for residential use in the neighborhood remain residential. He said St. Joseph previously tried to rezone a residential property it owned to commercial, but neighborhood opposition scuttled that plan.

Crane said that future development of the Sotoyome property might actually benefit the area’s residential character. He said he hoped that since the property is already zoned commercial, it would relieve the need to rezone residential properties St. Joseph now owns on streets such as Doyle Park Drive.

“I feel the neighbors have a balanced sense of what the hospital’s needs are, and what we want from the hospital is an understanding that the neighborhood truly is a residential neighborhood,” Crane said.

Ziolkowski said St. Joseph will continue to meet with neighbors to resolve neighborhood concerns, just as it has done with such things as helicopter flight paths, delivery schedules and the recent expansion of the emergency department.

“We appreciate meeting with residents, and we’re very open and transparent about everything that’s happening,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.