potrero view

August 2009

Helipad Bill Fails to Find Landing Pad

By Noah Arroyo

A bill to strip local governments of their power to regulate the siting of hospital helipads has been rendered temporarily unconscious.  Earlier this year California State Assembly members Jerry Hill of San Mateo, and Tom Ammiano of San Francisco, introduced Assembly Bill (AB) 1272, which would virtually eliminate a city or county government’s ability to stop helipad construction at hospital trauma centers.  After being amended several times and missing a key legislative deadline, the bill is currently in limbo, though Hill may reintroduce it next year.

The bill initially garnered support from the California Hospital Association and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a branch of the AFL-CIO.  AFSCME believes that helicopters can provide safe and fast transport of trauma patients, thereby increasing survival rates. The California League of Conservative Voters and the Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods oppose the bill.  

As originally drafted, AB 1272 would have eliminated local barriers to helipad development by making it clear that the state code doesn’t authorize “a city, county...to prohibit a trauma center from installing a helicopter landing pad.”  Hill authored the bill to stop neighborhoods surrounding hospitals from blocking helipads “through the county board of supervisors’ approval process or through the local land use process.”

According to Randy Pestor of the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality, there’s “no documentation that local government officials have denied installation of helipads,” a finding confirmed by the Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods and Neighbors of San Francisco General Hospital.  In 2006 voters in Hill’s own San Mateo County approved the construction of Mills Peninsula Medical Center, which includes a helipad.  Pestor’s analysis of AB 1272 also questioned whether legislation that reduced local governments’ ability “to address environmental and land use issues” would decrease the public’s confidence in the power of its elected officials. “Will the public merely object to an entire trauma center project” if elected officials can’t guarantee that the forthcoming trauma center will never, at some point, include a helipad?

AB 1272’s current version requires hospitals with trauma centers to “include within [their] trauma system plan the provision of air transport.”  This language points directly at helipads, according to Loretta Lynch, a Potrero Hill resident who is active in both the Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods and Neighbors of San Francisco General Hospital. “I only know of one means of air transport,” she said, alluded to San Francisco General Hospital’s (SFGH) proposed helipad, which the hospital put on hold because of Potrero Hill residents’ negative response.

An analysis prepared by Senate Committee on Limited Government staff criticized AB 1272 as overly vague. In a section titled “Say what you mean,” committee staff pointed to uncertainty about “how much control local governments would still have” over helipad siting. Perhaps in response, Hill pulled the bill before it could be voted on by the committee, and amended it to add a section to the Public Resources Code that would state that a “lead agency... is not required to consider noise impact...in its environmental review” of any trauma center helipad project.  This provision prompted opposition from Sierra Club California, and objections from staff of the Senate Committee on Environmental Equality. “If noise impacts cannot be considered,” the committee’s bill analysis stated, the “lead agency” would be unable to deny projects based on excessive noise; it would be unable to consider measures to mitigate that noise; and it would be unable to subsequently deny the project in the event that those mitigators were ineffective.”  After this latest analysis was published, Hill amended the bill again, eliminating the “ignore noise impacts” element. The Senate Rules Committee then re-referred AB 1272 to the Health Committee.  Because Hill repeatedly withdrew the bill before a full Senate committee could consider it, under legislative rules it will now sit idle until at least 2010.

The bill surfaced toward the end of heated public debate over whether SFGH should have a helipad of its own. Stophelipad.com, an anti-SFGH-helipad group, expressed fears that flown-in non-resident patients would displace locals in the hospital’s waiting rooms.  Critics of SFGH’s proposed helipad also pointed to state mandates, such as Health and Safety Code 1447, that a county hospital should serve county residents, and that the helicopters landing atop SFGH would primarily carry people from outside the City.  And Stophelipad.com points out that there are multiple helipad landing options in the City.  According to the San Francisco Emergency Medical Services Agency Manual, there are currently “29 Emergency Medical Service helicopter landing sites in San Francisco at parks, parking lots, playgrounds and intersections.” Though not designated and maintained helipads, these sites would allow helicopters to safely touch down in locations throughout the City.

Potrero Hill Association of Merchants and Businesses President Keith Goldstein believes that SFGH has attempted to demonize anti-helipad groups through its public relations campaign, while the University of California, San Francisco, which plans to site a helipad atop the Children’s Hospital on its Mission Bay campus, set a positive tone and “worked very hard with the neighbors.”  District 10 Supervisor Sophie Maxwell supports the UCSF helipad, which would not have been affected by AB 1272 because Mission Bay doesn’t include a trauma center.  Last month the Board of Supervisors endorsed the UCSF helipad, setting the stage for the facility to become operational in 2014.

 Subscribe to The Potrero View

All rights reserved. Copyright © 2006 The Potrero View.

Content on this site may not be archived, retransmitted, saved in a database, or used for any commercial purpose without the express written permission of The Potrero View or its Publishers.