Even as medical facilities across Los Angeles County cut vital services they can no longer afford, a hospital in the San Fernando Valley faces an uphill battle this week to win permission to build a 101-bed expansion reports the Los Angeles Times.

Providence Holy Cross Medical Center wants to add 119,000 square feet to its facility in Mission Hills, a proposal that has sparked an intense lobbying campaign involving the five county supervisors and the region’s most powerful labor official, among others.

Union leaders, neighborhood councils and a Los Angeles city councilman all are demanding a more detailed review of the project’s effect on communities stretching from Sylmar to Granada Hills. Leading the charge is the pro-union Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, which called on the hospital to complete a detailed environmental study — one that possibly would delay the new Providence wing by at least 18 months.

Healthcare executives say the coalition is little more than a labor-organizing campaign, one that is using the state’s environmental laws as a cudgel to punish the Providence chain for its rocky relations with healthcare unions at facilities up and down the West Coast. Those executives warned that an 18-month delay could force patients to travel farther for treatment in a county where 10 emergency rooms have closed since 2002.

Read it here: Holly Cross Hospital Expansion Plan Meets Resistance