Almost 15 months after Fresno County auctioned off its old University Medical Center property in southeast Fresno, the sale of the nearly 70-year-old hospital is poised to be finalized this month.

The county’s Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to approve changes to its sale agreement with developer Sevak Khatchadourian that takes $700,000 off of the $6 million price as a credit in lieu of extensive repairs of flooding and electrical damage caused by copper thieves in December 2023.

The amended sale agreement is expected to allow escrow to close on the sale on or around Jan. 18, according to a staff report submitted to the supervisors.

In October 2023, Khatchadourian was the only bidder for the county-owned, 30-acre site at the northeast corner of Cesar Chavez Boulevard (formerly Kings Canyon Road) and Cedar Avenue. Khatchadourian’s bid of $6 million was unanimously accepted by the Board of Supervisors at that time.

But as negotiations over the terms of the sale were going on, copper thieves struck the vacant buildings, causing flooding and damaging electrical systems that county officials anticipated would cost $1 million or more to repair — a cost to be borne by the county as the property had not officially changed hands.

The discounts allowed for the damage will bring Khatchadourian’s cost down to $5.3 million. Khatchadourian told The Bee in a text Tuesday that his understanding that the delay in closing the sale was because the county was seeking clearances from the state.

Khatchadourian, whose business is based in Los Angeles, has invested in buying and renovating a number of properties in the heart of downtown Fresno, including the Pacific Southwest Building and the Helm Building, both on Fulton Street, and the former Radisson Hotel on Van Ness Avenue. In October 2023, after his bid for the former UMC campus was accepted by county supervisors, Khatchadourian said the site “has a lot of potential.”

Of his plans for the property, Khatchadourian told The Bee in 2023 that “it’s going to be a mixture of things.”

“Hopefully a lot of the existing structures we will keep. I think they are beautiful buildings,” he said. “I’m willing and ready to work with the community. I think it’s a great, forgotten asset. It has a bright future.”

On Tuesday, Khatchadourian did not offer any additional specifics. “It’s a large property,” he said. “It will take time to plan it.”

Fresno County had been trying to unload the property since at least 2019, and several would-be sale attempts fell through over recent years.

As part of the agreement approved Tuesday, the property will be divided into four separate parcels, three of which will be transferred to Khatchadourian. The county will retain ownership of a small portion of the site where some operations of the Department of Behavioral Health and Department of Social Services are currently housed.

History of the hospital site

Once escrow on Khatchadourian’s purchase of the property is finalized, the county’s ownership of the property will draw to a close. A hospital has been on the site for more than 135 years.

A 75-bed hospital was built there in 1889 to replace an 1870s-era facility at Mariposa and R streets. The 1889 incarnation was destroyed by fire in 1900, and a new hospital on the site was completed in 1904 at a cost of $24,000, The Fresno Bee reported in 1996.

The current facility includes a pair of six-story hospital towers connected by a four-story wing, plus smaller buildings on the site. The north tower was built in 1955, and the south tower was constructed four years later, according to Fresno Bee archives. What was originally known as Fresno County General Hospital was renamed Valley Medical Center in 1970.

The last major addition to the primary hospital buildings was the wing linking the two towers in 1978. The emergency room and outpatient clinic were also enlarged at that time

A 1996 merger transferred the hospital’s operation to Community Hospitals of Central California and freed Fresno County from the business of running a hospital. The name was changed to University Medical Center.

The facility closed as a hospital in 2007, when Community shifted what was left of the medical functions to the Community Regional Medical Center in downtown Fresno.