Groundbreaking Commences on New Medical Clinic for Santa Barbara’s Westside

Seven high-powered movers and shakers armed with gold-plated shovels braved an excruciatingly beautiful Santa Barbara afternoon to ceremonially dig up seven shovelfuls of ceremonial dirt to launch the official groundbreaking for the new three-story medical clinic about to go up by the intersection of Micheltorena and San Andres streets on Santa Barbara’s Westside.

“Let’s get going! It’s time to shovel some dirt,” exhorted Janet Garufis, CEO of Montecito Bank & Trust and one of the two fundraising campaign co-chairs. With that, all seven — all wearing hard hats and sunglasses as they squinted into the afternoon sun — dipped their shovels into a long mound of dirt installed for easy digging purposes.

“This is more than a project,” declared Mahdi Ashrafian, CEO of the Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics. “It’s a promise — a promise to deliver care where it’s most needed.”

The new clinic will vastly expand the service capacity of the existing neighborhood clinic located right across Micheltorena Street from where the new clinic will be. Ashrafian stressed how the new clinic will provide expanded medical, dental, and mental health treatment all under one roof. Right now, the existing clinic — the first one, by the way, in the constellation of clinics started back in the 1970s by the then-fledgling Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinic — offers no dental treatment. (There are offices for behavioral health visits, but they’re located in the existing clinic’s attic space.)

In the new clinic, there will be six dental chairs. This addition will double the number of dental chairs offered by Neighborhood Clinics in Santa Barbara.

Ashrafian made a point to thank former Cottage executive Ron Werft for Cottage’s strong support for the neighborhood clinics over the years. Not so long ago, the neighborhood clinics were on the brink of going out of business when Cottage took the lead in a highly successful financial intervention effort. It would be an overstatement to describe the Neighborhood Clinics as Santa Barbara’s medical safety net, but without the clinics, the South Coast’s medical safety net would be badly shredded.

Ninety-two percent of its clients are low-income; 40 percent have no insurance. A small but significant number pay nothing for their treatment. But for the clinics, they would either wind up in the emergency rooms or go without treatment. Ashrafian said the new fundraising and construction effort underscores “the shared belief that health equity must be more than an idea; it must be a reality.”

Co-chairing the fundraising campaign is Jim Jackson of the Jackson Family Foundation. Jackson said the target is to raise $23 million. Of that, $12 million would go to construction of the new clinic; $5 million will go for the costs of a new medical data sharing platform that will enable the Neighborhood Clinics to better share patients’ medical information with Cottage Hospital and Sansum Clinics. The remaining $9 million would go to covering the clinics $3 million operating deficit for three years. After that, Jackson said, he expects reimbursement rates to increase to cover the cost of providing services.