MOUNT PLEASANT ? Both of the companies poised to compete at delivering babies, performing operations and tending to emergencies for East Cooper residents will proceed without a fight to build their new hospitals.

The joint announcement from East Cooper Regional Medical Center and Roper St. Francis Healthcare came Tuesday after the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control reaffirmed its decision to allow both companies to go ahead with their construction projects in Mount Pleasant. Hoping to corner the area's health care market, each hospital system had filed a "request for reconsideration," citing concerns about duplication of services, following DHEC's March approval of plans for the two facilities.

"We've agreed not to protest each other's hospitals," said Roper St. Francis President David Dunlap at a press conference in Mount Pleasant Mayor Harry Hallman's office Tuesday morning. "This is the right thing, the right time to move forward."

DHEC officials did make one change to their previous ruling, by allowing Roper St. Francis to begin construction in the next year rather than waiting until March 2008. With construction costs in the Lowcountry rising by about 1 percent per month, the early start is expected to offer significant savings on the $130 million project.

But state officials still want to provide orderly growth of health care services in the growing market, said Joel C. Grice, the state's director of the bureau of health facilities and services development. That means East Cooper's facility will open first, in January 2009, said Andrea Wozniak, East Cooper's chief executive officer.

"Since that is a replacement hospital, we see it to be more appropriate for them to be completed first and have time to get cranked up first," Grice said.

The new Roper St. Francis hospital won't begin seeing patients until 2010.

The hospitals also had the option of filing formal appeals, which would have brought the often contentious relationship between the two health care providers into the court system, but after hospital leaders met with DHEC officials late last month, both opted to move ahead as planned.

With Mount Pleasant on track to have 100,000 residents in the next 10 years ? its population is growing about five times faster than the rest of the state, and the nation as a whole ? administrators said there's room for two hospitals in the area.

East Cooper plans to put up a 140-bed replacement facility next to its current hospital on Johnnie Dodds Boulevard, adding 40 beds to its capacity. Roper St. Francis will build an 85-bed hospital in the Carolina Park development off U.S. Highway 17 near Wando High School.

Both hospitals will offer general surgery and outpatient treatment, 24-hour emergency care and obstetric services.

"The real winner in this is the resident of East Cooper," Hallman said. "They're going to have a choice, and there's nothing wrong with choice ? it's the great American way."

Reach Holly Auer at 937-5560 or hauer@postandcourier.com.