• Nov 27, 2017
• The Bakersfield Californian 

Plans for the Vibra Healthcare Rehabilitation Hospital, a 50-bed facility coming to Bakersfield by 2020, will be unveiled next week, developers announced.

The hospital will be part of the Rio Bravo Medical Campus, located about one mile east of Bakersfield Country Club. It will house technologies available to rehabilitate and treat specific diagnoses, including stroke, amputation, multiple trauma, pulmonary rehab, wound care, spinal cord injuries and arthritis, among others.

“It has been a distinct pleasure to have been chosen to be a part of making this union of local physicians a reality,” said Gary L. Bruno, president of G.L. Bruno Associates Inc., which is developing the project.

The hospital will be part of the 179,000-square foot Rio Bravo Medical Campus development project, which includes an already-constructed 65,000-square foot cancer and imaging center. Construction is underway for an expanded ambulatory surgery center to be completed by March 2018. A second medical office building is scheduled to break ground by April 2018.

Plans for the Vibra Healthcare Rehabilitation Hospital will be unveiled at an open house at 5:30 p.m. Dec. 6 at the campus cancer and imaging center, 4500 Morning Drive.

• BY COURTENAY EDELHART The Bakersfield Californian cedelhart@bakersfield.com
• Jan 23, 2015

Ancient pagan Scandinavians were big believers in trees. They plopped them on top of new buildings all the time, a tradition that persists today in the form of "topping off" ceremonies commemorating the installation of the last structural beam in a new building's framework.

In the American version of the ceremony, the tree is accompanied by a flag.

On Friday, doctors, politicians and various other dignitaries watched a crane hoist the last beam onto a medical building under construction at Highway 178 and Morning Drive in northeast Bakersfield. They cheered when the beam was lowered and hammered in place without dropping the potted tree and flag stand precariously perched on top.

It was a fitting symbol for the Rio Bravo Medical Campus, a tenuous dream that has been 10 years in the making and has a long way to go, but finally seems to be making headway.

"We probably started this at the worst possible time," joked Kern Radiology CEO Jerry Sturz to the more than 100 people who had gathered under a white tent to watch the ceremony and eat hor d'oeuvres.

A bunch of Kern Radiology doctors formed the Rio Bravo Investment Group in 2007 to build a privately funded medical campus in the underserved northeast. Land prices were high then with a robust housing boom underway.

Then the real estate market tanked, and banks tightened up lending as a subprime loan crisis dragged the economy into recession. Lyles United, a diversified business group in Bakersfield, stepped in not once but twice with infusions of cash. Fresno medical complex developer G.L. Bruno Associates Inc. took an ownership stake, too.

And then there was weird stuff, such as studies to make sure the project would not hurt endangered blunt-nosed leopard lizards.

But at long last, an actual building is emerging, and the investors could be forgiven if they appeared relieved as much as gleeful Friday.

"The groups that put this together never gave up," Sturz said. "The vision sometimes became a hallucination, but they kept going."

Slated for completion this fall, the 64,753-square-foot, $30 million Rio Bravo Cancer & Imaging Center rising out of the dirt in a remote area of the city is the first phase of a 47-acre, $162 million development.

The highlight of the center will be the Central Valley's first cyclotron, a piece of physics equipment that manufactures radioactive isotopes used in cancer treatment.

Plans call for the entire development to ultimately include other medical facilities, administrative offices and retail.

A key portion of the project will be the completion of a $12 million Morning Drive extension providing access to Highway 178, which City Councilman Ken Weir said should be done this year.

Residents have been clamoring for that since Weir first took office in 2006, he said.

"We're now in the second month of my third term," Weir said. "We should have it by this summer, and believe me, that's lightening speed compared to where it could be."

Kern Radiology insists the new cancer and imaging center will complement, not compete with, existing medical services in town, reigning in the roughly 20 percent of Bakersfield residents who now leave the region to obtain medical care and bringing much-needed services to neglected neighborhoods.

"I live in City in the Hills, and for us going to the doctor usually means a 10-, sometimes even 12- or 15-mile drive," said Kern Radiology's Dr. Bernard Maristany. "We're going to be bringing good, quality services that this area really needs."

• BY RACHEL COOK Californian staff writer rcook@bakersfield.com

Sep 7, 2013

A medical complex proposed to serve the growing, affluent neighborhoods of northeast Bakersfield is gaining steam again after the bad economy slowed the project, the manager said.

Gary Bruno, president and CEO of G.L. Bruno Associates, said the project at the corner of Highway 178 and Morning Drive has picked up "incredible new momentum" in the last year.

Several leases are in the works to fill a proposed cancer center building and another has been submitted to Kern County to open an outpatient surgery center for Kern Medical Center in a different building on the campus.

"We're really only waiting on leases to be executed and all of those are simply in the processing stages now," Bruno said.

The medical campus was anticipated to welcome its first patients in late 2012, but the buildings have yet to be erected. The economic downturn slowed the project, Bruno said.

The project is backed by Rio Bravo Medical Campus LLC, which Bruno described as a partnership between Fresno-based investment company Lyles United LLC and an investment group started by more than a dozen local physicians and Bruno's Fresno firm.

A group of doctors proposed the project in 2005. Estimated to cost more than $150 million, the 40-plus acre project also includes a senior living facility and retail space.

"Our focus right now's on the medical campus," he said. "Everything else right now has taken a secondary position."

The Rio Bravo Medical Campus group has put $10 million into the project site, including road, sewer and water work, Bruno said. The project has also brought Morning Drive up to the campus entrance, ending where the road will be tied into Highway 178.

"A lot of things have been happening, it's just we haven't done the buildings," Bruno said.

Plans submitted to the city of Bakersfield in June show the medical campus' four buildings would cover 178,264 square feet.

The largest building would be the cancer and imaging center at just less than 65,000-square-feet, with about 38,000-square-feet on the first floor dedicated to cancer and imaging, and about 26,000-square-feet of doctor offices on the second floor.

The proposed outpatient surgery center would be nearly 34,000 square feet, nearly evenly divided between the surgery center on the first floor and doctor offices on the second.

The other two buildings would total 40,000 square feet each.

Bruno said he couldn't disclose what entities the group is ironing out leases with for the cancer center building.

But Dr. Bernard Maristany, a local radiologist and project investor, offered more detail when he spoke before Kern County supervisors in March.

"Kern Radiology will be opening an imaging center on this site. There will be oncology services, an urgent care center, multi-specialty physician offices and an on-site pharmacy," Maristany told the board. "This project will create 400 permanent jobs just on the medical campus alone. This will be an engine of growth in northeast Bakersfield."

Kern Medical Center CEO Paul Hensler said at the meeting that the hospital was "bumping into capacity issues" with surgery space, but hoped to attract a different market -- i.e. more patients with private health insurance -- by opening an ambulatory surgery center.

Hensler also said it would be about 40 percent cheaper to operate an outpatient surgery center than to run inpatient operating rooms.

"We do feel it is very important that this (surgery center) be in an attractive, medically-oriented plaza in order to attract the clientele and improve the payer mix," Hensler said.

In a letter to the board, Hensler wrote that the surgery center's lease, operating expenses and equipment were predicted to cost nearly $1.4 million annually, and management fees would cost about $300,000 a year.

Supervisors unanimously approved Hensler's proposal to partner with Rio Bravo Medical Campus LLC.

On Thursday, Hensler said he expects the agreement will get the green light in the next month.

"We believe that the whole Rio Bravo region out there will be developing rapidly," he said. "We think that intersection will become a hub of that whole area."

If the county approves the lease for the surgery center, Bruno said construction on that building would start within 30 days. Work on the largest building would begin 60 to 90 days after leases are signed for that space. Bruno expects those leases to be finalized in the next 60 days.

The surgery center could be constructed in 12 months and the cancer center building would take 18 months to complete, Bruno said.