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BUILDING
DEDICATION

San Antonio College and hired an agent BCMS building East view.
to promote the lease. I don’t recall receiv-
ing any offers to lease the space, but we building that was next door to the leased space being used by the
received numerous offers to buy the medical society. The thought of purchasing a building that BCMS
building. That created a lot of discussion was not ready to move into (due to the years left on the current
among the Board members as to lease), nixed the idea of that purchase.
whether selling the building was the
right thing to do. I then met with Robin Sloan, the executive director of Tarrant
County Medical Society, to discuss her fundraising efforts for the
No one had ever even considered sell- new building their society was constructing. She made it clear to me
ing the building. The immediate re- that it takes several years for the fundraising to take place and that
sponse from the older members of the it is necessary to demonstrate to potential non-physician donors that
society was “You can’t sell the building! all society members have contributed to the building. I documented
It is our history and our home!” No one everything she said into a fundraising strategy binder which I passed
can argue with feelings founded in mem- onto the Executive Director who took my place at BCMS when I
ories and good times. So the board dis- retired in 2008.
cussed the problem and a committee was
put together to study it. It became a dis- Fast forward five years when I returned to manage the medical
cussion of the past versus the future. The society in 2013. The society had less than two years left to its lease
past was the rich history of BCMS and and no decision had been made of where the society would reside
71 years in the same place. The future in the future. Even more concerning to me was there had been no
meant moving the building closer to where the physician members fundraising for the building while I was gone. Discussions of build-
worked and lived, and getting out from under the debt of the mort- ing a new facility versus remodeling a building ensued. Together
gage while the society rebuilt its financial base. with Dr. Buddy Swift, chair of the Real Estate Committee, after
looking at a number of existing buildings which “sort of ” met our
Well, as you can now see, the future argument won. But on such requirements, we decided and recommended to the Board of Direc-
short notice, BCMS did not have a place to move to. So the search tors that we construct a building on Loop 1604 near NW Military
began for temporary quarters closer to the Medical Center. BCMS Highway.
staff found a reasonably priced, visible building that was easy to find
and had good access immediately across the freeway from the TexSan continued on page 16
Heart Hospital. A lease was negotiated that gave BCMS relief from
the mortgage it had carried, and put money in the bank for a future visit us at www.bcms.org 15
building.

Once we moved into the new space, I began to immediately sug-
gest properties that BCMS could consider for their future home.
We looked at the empty, corner lot next to the Blood and Tissue
Center. It was proposed to the BCMS Board to purchase that corner
lot for constructing the new building (the lot was listed for $895,000
for two acres). The Board turned it down when it was suggested that
the San Antonio Medical Foundation might donate land in the
Medical Center to build a building. It took over a year to assess that
possibility, only to find out that SAMF would only lease land to
BCMS at market rates. Rather than build on leased land, the Society
decided to look for either an existing building or suitable land to
build upon. While this process was going on, the Blood and Tissue
Center bought the corner lot; so it was off the market.

The next proposal was to purchase the former Bexar Electric