Pa. Supreme Court to consider proposed UPMC South hospital in Jefferson Hills

The state Supreme Court has agreed to take up the zoning case involving UPMC’s plans to build a 63-bed hospital in Jefferson Hills amid the community’s opposition to it.

Last year, Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court overturned a decision by an Allegheny County judge and declared that UPMC could build the facility it had been planning since 2018 off Route 51 on Elliott Road.

Sixty-eight borough residents, who object to the project, asked the state Supreme Court to consider the case. On Wednesday, the court agreed.

The issues before the panel will center on how much authority a zoning officer and zoning hearing board have in considering a developer’s permit application.

The first legal briefs to the court are due Aug. 1. No date has yet been scheduled for oral argument.

UPMC initially announced plans to build an approximately 200,000-square-foot facility with an inpatient hospital and outpatient facilities on five parcels of land, which are zoned in various spots as an office park, commercial and residential.

Although UPMC, operating under the name AUUE Inc., obtained a zoning permit in 2018, the Jefferson Hills zoning hearing board revoked that permit and ruled against the UPMC South project in September 2019.

In addition to finding that the borough’s zoning ordinance prohibited the construction of a new hospital, the board also found potential zoning violations in the proposal, including related to a proposed gated access drive, parking lots and because of a lack of a direct access road.

AUUE appealed that decision to Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Joseph James, who affirmed the decision in a six-page opinion in August 2020.

James said state law shows a zoning hearing board is entitled to “great weight and deference” in how it interprets its ordinances.

“Here, the board, after holding multiple hearings, considering testimony from hundreds of witnesses and examining thousands of pages of exhibits, concluded that when read together, the ordinance and the statement of intent do not contemplate another hospital or medical center containing a hospital in the [office park] districts,” James wrote.

The board’s finding — that the ordinance allowed for the expansion of Jefferson Hospital, which is part of the Allegheny Health Network, but not a competing hospital — was accurate, James said.

However, in its decision last year, the Commonwealth Court said the zoning hearing board went beyond its authority in revoking AUUE’s permit and it should have limited its review to the question of whether the use was allowed by right.

The Commonwealth Court found that medical centers are “unambiguously authorized as a by-right use” in the borough’s zoning ordinance and that the wording “does not expressly prohibit” their construction.

When the board went beyond that question — and found the four potential zoning ordinance violations in the UPMC South application — it did not have jurisdiction to consider those, the Commonwealth Court said.

The state Supreme Court now will take up those issues.

Attorney Daniel J. Stuart, who is one of the attorneys representing borough residents, said his clients are grateful the court will hear the case.

“This case is about the responsibility of Pennsylvania’s zoning officers and zoning hearing boards to enforce local ordinances,” he said. “The residents proved over nine nights of hearings that UPMC’s application violates the Jefferson Hills zoning ordinance in several ways, and these violations should preclude UPMC from obtaining a zoning permit.“

A message left with a UPMC spokeswoman was not immediately returned Monday.