News Archive | The Press-Enterprise, November 22, 2000


Medical Center Bonds Approved

Moreno Valley council members OK an $8 million issuance for a 68-bed facility for seniors.

By John F. Berry

The City Council paved the way for a new senior medical center Tuesday night when it authorized the issuing of $8 million in bonds.

“This project will do Moreno Valley proud,” project director Carl Rowe said.

The bonds will enable Rowe’s nonprofit California Drug Consultants Inc. to begin construction soon on a center that could bring 170 jobs and inject a total of $28 million into the local economy.

The council had called a special meeting on a night normally used for study sessions. But at staff’s urging, the council agreed to a special meeting Tuesday so it could formally vote on the bond. The city was under the impression that if it didn’t act, it could lose federally guaranteed financing from the federal Housing Administration.

But a spokesman with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees FHA, said Tuesday afternoon that no federal deadline exists on the project.

“The timing is not HUD's doing,” Lemar Wooley said from his Washington, D.C., office. “It’s not a HUD-pushed thing.”

But a GMAC Commercial Mortgage vice president said that the project might love federal guarantees if the council didn’t approve the bonds Tuesday.

“At some point in time, they will say we need to redo this,” Robert Starr said after a bond presentation that lasted almost three house. “We can’t afford to do that.”

A letter from HUD to GMAC did say that the federal government could kill the agreement if the entire package wasn’t ready to go by early December.

Rowe’s agency had invested more than two years in attempting to get a federal guarantee on the bonds. Tearing up the agreement would have meant starting all over.

The bonds will enable the nonprofit group to build a 68-bed senior medical center for patients suffering from many ills, including cancer, diabetes, chronic pain, heart problems or Alzheimer’s disease.


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