W. Scott Bailey
San Antonio Business Journal

Vanguard Health Systems Inc. is developing a 60,000-square-foot, three-story medical plaza on the West side of San Antonio.

Company officials haven’t put a cost on the project, but Vanguard subsidiary Baptist Health System plans to build a facility that will house imaging services, an outpatient surgical center and medical office space.

The project could be the first step to building a new hospital in the Westover Hills area of San Antonio. Baptist President and CEO Kent Wallace says the medical campus will serve a population that currently must travel to other parts of the city for health care. Ultimately, he says, the Westover Baptist Medical Campus will fill 40-plus acres and “help bring much-needed primary and specialty physicians to the area.”

Wallace says the medical office building will likely be owned by a third-party developer.

Baptist runs five acute-care hospitals in San Antonio. Last year, the health system bought six diagnostic imaging centers in the city from Radiologix for $9.7 million.

Nashville-based Vanguard owns and operates 19 hospitals and health care facilities in Chicago, Phoenix, Orange County, Calif., San Antonio and Massachusetts. The company, which was bought by The Blackstone Group for almost $2.0 billion last September, posted revenues of $994 million in the second half of 2004. Pre-tax losses for that period came in at $154 million, which included more than $182 million in stock compensation, debt retirement and other expenses related to the company’s acquisition.

By Michael Cary

Mayor Ed Garza rolled out the red carpet for Toyota in 2003, and continued to surprise San Antonio with a plan he called the Southside Initiative, aka City South, complete with El Río Collar de Esmeraldas, also known as the muddy, snake-infested Medina River.

Property prices, not necessarily values, soared like Icarus toward the South Side heavens. Prosperity for all is just around the corner, when Toyota hires auto plant production employees at $20 per hour - oops, make that $16 per hour, and the South Side will rise again.

Mayor Garza continues to nurture an economic and political plan that was implemented by Mayor Henry Cisneros in the 1980s. Garza and other mayors who succeeded Cisneros have claimed credit, but they didn’t have Cisneros’ long-term vision and charisma, which has inspired the chambers of commerce to continually push the economic envelope.

Now that vision has reached its apex. Medina River catfish are breathing emerald-hued water through their gills, the Toyota plant will roll out its Tundra pickup trucks, and underprivileged City South children will soon be enrolled at their very own Texas A&M University campus, at the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and Loop 410.

Oh, yeah. And a Houston development company under the guise of Terramark Communities has reportedly purchased 3,000 acres of largely undeveloped property adjacent to and south of the proposed A&M campus. This benevolent (aren’t they all?) firm, yet to be listed on the Bexar Appraisal District tax rolls under the name Terramark, is into real estate development and construction, including office buildings, medical/professional centers, commercial, residential, multi-family, single family, townhomes, “student housing” (naturally), and “property redevelopment and conversion.”

But as the late, great Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “Everything that rises must converge.”

Toyota is on the rise. Texas A&M is on the rise (if the legislature authorizes $80 million in tuition revenue bonds to build the campus). City South is on the rise. Hell, even the Medina River is on the rise, but for other reasons.

And Mayor Garza is, um, well, maybe not.

That just leaves approximately 100 or so property owners who have the misfortune of location in the vicinity of Roosevelt and 410, the proposed location of Texas A&M City South. The City is kicking them to the curb. Not without just compensation, as it was written in the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“We will ask for a right of entry to your property to make an assessment and present the information to you, and ask if you’re willing to sell,” Assistant City Manager Jelynne Burley told clueless residents last week at a community meeting on City South.

“Nothing will happen without your knowledge.”

In other words, the City plans to tell these neighbors exactly what is going on when it forces them to sell their property.

To loosely quote Samuel Coleridge, this is not a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

District 3 City Councilman Ron Segovia rolled out the bottom line for the area’s property owners, residents, and their neighbors across the street. “We’re not taking it away. We’re not at that point yet. If you’re still not satisfied, then we will take it from there.”

There it is, in one pretty package. Toyota. Texas A&M, City South, and prosperity for all except a chosen many. •