Healing the hospital

Local wetlands group is working to finish a new animal care facility and education center, but its money is running out.When people ask Gary Gorman when the animal hospital is going to be completed, he gives them the same answer.

“Whenever I run out of money,” he joked last week while standing in the shell of what will eventually be the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center, which sits in front of the AES power plant at the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Newland Avenue. Gorman is executive director for the Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy, a small nonprofit group that owns and manages several tidelands south of Main Street and runs the small hospital for wild creatures.

Although construction is moving along, Gorman said his grant money to rebuild the center is running out. Since 2002, when the conversancy won the $600,000 grant from the Wildlife Conservation Board, construction materials costs have gone up dramatically. Concrete and steel, for example, have nearly doubled in price.

To save some costs, Gorman has been helping out with labor on the project. He also plans to offer corporate naming opportunities and sell tile spaces for donations.

When completed, the conservancy will have a 4,200-square-foot center that will serve as an animal hospital and classroom to educate the community about the wetlands. Most of the animals the hospital treats are wounded by humans, Gorman said. Last week, nurses at the hospital treated a pelican that had suffered gunshot wounds.

“Our idea is to educate human beings about what we are doing to these animals so we can all live together on this earth,” he said.

The old hospital will continue to operate as a kitchen and emergency treatment center for animals hurt in a catastrophic event such as an oil spill. The first care center was built in 1998 with settlement funds from the American Trader oil spill off the coast of Huntington Beach in 1990.

In 2000, the center was closed for nearly a week because it lacked the money to pay for improvements required to keep its city permit. Media coverage of the closure brought in nearly $20,000 in donations, allowing the center to reopen.

Gorman said the center was able to resolve the old permit discrepancies and make it through a lengthy application process with the city’s planning department to earn its current permits. Besides the additional classroom space, the new hospital will also include x-ray machines and lab equipment, a surgery center and an observation deck with an ocean view.

The move comes as the old hospital is being pushed to its operational limits, conservancy director Lena Yee Hayashi said. The lack of an x-ray machine required the work to be outsourced and delayed, she said, and sanitary standards were compromised by a lack of partitions and storage facilities.

“We had an area for isolation, but since it wasn’t in a contained room, the animals weren’t really isolated because a lot of diseases were airborne,” she said.

The old facility will also continue to house most of the animals, while the new facility will be the base of hospital operations. In the old crowded hospital, volunteers often had little room to perform complicated medical procedures.

“This will make it so much better for the animals and the people who are volunteering,” Hayashi said. “There are so many things that are wrong with the structure we have now that will be improved in the other one.”20051208ir3v0nkn(LA)Architectural rendering shows Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in final form. The building will also house a public tidelands educational facility. 20051208ir3v00knPHOTOS BY KENT TREPTOW / INDEPENDENT(LA)Pablo Garcia drills rebar holes in foundation of Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center. The hospital is operated by the Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy, a nonprofit group that owns and manages tidelands along the coast.