By Mary O’KEEFE

At a recent Montrose Shopping Park Assn. meeting, Dr. Ryan Cornner, superintendent/president of Glendale Community College (GCC), spoke about the proposed plans for the PDC [Professional Development Center] and former Citibank buildings in the 2300 block of Honolulu Avenue. 

PDC has been used as a satellite campus for GCC for many years. Citibank was purchased by the college about seven years ago. Since then there have been discussions and rumors of what would happen with this vacant building.

CVW recently sat down with Cornner to go through the proposal that was shared at the MSPA meeting and find out how he feels this will affect the community.

Cornner said the overall vision is to work toward the development of an academic program in occupational and physical therapy. 

“This [idea] was brought to our attention by a community member who had served on the board for occupational therapy. She mentioned there were no public occupational therapy assistant programs in Los Angeles County,” he said.

At first he found that difficult to believe, but soon realized it was true.

“Occupational therapy has a huge footprint at the assistant level with high career wage jobs [by those] just completing the AA degree. What we found was that a majority of the students who were going through occupational therapy assistant programs in the County of LA were going through private institutions that were charging anywhere from $50,00 to $200,00 for the degree … versus a few thousand [dollars] for what it would cost at a public institution,” he said. 

College administrators started looking at adopting an occupational therapy program; they quickly realized there was a need in the community for this service.

“[We thought], ‘How can we serve that need?’” Cornner said. 

This led administrators to the idea of using the former Citibank location to provide an academic program that could also help those in the community. It would be a program focusing on occupational and physical therapy, something that many people have used and/or needed in the past and are expected to need in the future. 

“We really saw this as an opportunity to build a program that could support students with a living wage job [and] also support the community by training the workforce that’s going to be needed,” he said. 

It seemed a natural process to move the program to the Citibank property. It could be embedded in the area the community frequents and where the college wants to increase student involvement. 

“That was our organizing thesis for what we would want to do with our Montrose campus – to develop these two educational programs [occupational and physical therapy],” he said. 

The next step was to find a medical partner since the school is not a teaching clinic. So Cornner reached out to several medical groups and then focused on USC Keck/Verdugo Hills Hospital (VHH). Instead of going to VHH for occupational or physical therapy, people would instead go to the GCC Montrose campus. This teaching program for students would be supported by professionals from VHH.

Many of the merchants at the meeting were concerned about how the change would affect the area – specifically add to parking woes and change the building’s footprint.

Cornner said the building’s footprint will stay the same. At present, there is a large parking lot behind PDC, a small parking lot at the west side of the former Citibank property and a slightly larger parking lot between PDC and the former Citibank location. That footprint would remain the same. 

The big change would be the demolition of the Citibank building with a new building built in its place. This new building, Cornner said, would be in alignment with the overall look of Montrose. 

Cornner added that the program is estimated to have about 120 students annually; however, not all of those students would be at the location at the same time. 

“They would be spread out across different courses so there would be sufficient parking,” he said. 

All of these plans will have to go through a rigorous review including an Environmental Impact Report. 

“The EIR includes all of the elements [including] parking,” he said. 

There would be multiple community meetings as well once plans are drawn. 

“We would start now with the program design, [which is] essentially saying these are the components we would want in this square footage, and the occupancy that would relate to,” he said. 

Cornner added the EIR and architectural work would take a year to a year and a half to complete before something would be ready to bring to the community. 

“Once that architectural plan is selected and completed it has to go to the Division of the State Architect. The Division of State Architect is responsible for public building and [it reviews] all designs for engineering safety,” he said. 

Because it is part of a community college there are more requirements than California State or University of California schools. 

If all goes well, including community response during the EIR, the construction will begin; however, because this location used to be a bank there are a few unusual things that have to be taken into consideration like removing a giant vault that must be dismantled and discarded. 

Cornner shared with CVW the plans for the property in the 2300 block of Honolulu Avenue that had been prepared in 2019. Those plans included demolishing both buildings then constructing a large U-shaped group of buildings a few stories high that would butt up against nearby homes. He said this past proposal, done before he was in his position at the college, did not take into consideration the Montrose small town feel. That is why he worked to make sure the latest proposal would keep the same footprint of the buildings that are already in place.