Fresno-area health care giant Community Health System was one of two hospital operators that sought to acquire the financially distressed and nowclosed Madera hospital, The Bee has learned. Stell Manfredi, vice chair of the Madera Community Hospital board, in an interview with The Bee last week said only Trinity Health, owner and operator of Saint Agnes Medical Center, and Community Health System advanced their interest in acquiring the Madera hospital by providing a letter of intent. Madera hospital officials talked to eight or nine other entities, but they weren 't interested. Community Health System is the new name Of Community Medical Centers, the private, not-for-profit healthcare network based in Fresno that runs four hospitals and a cancer institute along with long-term care, outpatient and other healthcare facilities. The letters of intent were meant to demonstrate what each hospital corporation would do in Madera and were followed  by a "full-blown presentation" to the Madera Community Hospital board. Top officials from each of the two hospital corpo-u rations, Including CHS Chief Executive Officer Craig Castro,  also toured the Madera hospital facilities for about four hours each "After much deliberation, unanimously, unanimously, the board of trustees said, 'We'd like to start negotiating with Trinity, "' Manfredi said. "We did not exclude anybody that wanted to sit down with us, and we are still not excluding anyone that wants to sit down with us.” The deål with Trinity Health fell through in late December, and on Friday, Madera Community Hospital filed for Chapter Il  bankruptcy. CHS didn't respond iast week to questions for this story. It wasn't immediately clear whereCHS would have pulled funding from to acquire the cash strapped Madera hospital. Community Regional Medical Center — the downtown Fresno flagship  hospital — is at risk of losing 90% of its acute care beds if its facilities are not brought into compliance with earthquake standards by 2030, a Bee investigation found.CHS built two new patient towers at its Clovis hospital after those facilities had been planned for years to be built at the downtown campus in order to bring that hospital into state