August 2008
NEWS
The Southwest Portland Post • 5
OHSU contemplates adding up to 200 hospital beds in Portland
By Lee Perlman
The Southwest Portland Post
One of the corollaries of Murphy’s
Law is that before you can do anything,
there’s something else that you have to
do fi rst. So it is with the Oregon Health
and Sciences University, which wants to
add another 150 to 200 hospital beds to
their campus.
OHSU spokesperson Brian Newman
told the Homestead Neighborhood As-
sociation last month that the hospital
has considered seven possible sites for
such a building, six of them on their
Marquam Hill campus and one in the
South Waterfront.
This last dropped out early, he said.
“It seems to make sense to put our
outpatient facilities in the South Wa-
terfront, our inpatient facilities on the
hill,” he said. A new wing in South
Waterfront would be “like building a
brand new hospital cut off from all its
support services,” he said. It would also
create “confusion in the public’s mind”
about where to fi nd these services.
Another possibility was the current
site of the School of Dentistry. OHSU
eventually hopes to relocate this, and
many similar teaching-related facili-
ties, to its proposed new campus in the
South Waterfront.
This, in turn, would free up space
on Marquam Hill for hospital build-
ings there. However, they concede that
bringing this to fruition will take years
if not decades to accomplish. In the
meantime, Newman said, replacing
the Dentistry School is “a $200 million
problem” standing in the way of put-
ting anything else on that site.
At the moment, he said, the idea that
“rose to the top” is an expansion of the
Kohler Pavilion, best known as the top
terminus of the school’s aerial tram.
This is consistent with the Marquam
Hill Master Plan, he said. So far there is
no cost estimate for the project.
Homestead land use chair Anton
Vetterlein told Newman that Southwest
Terwilliger Boulevard is “a tremen-
dous city asset. We resisted OHSU’s
expansion so close to it.” Failing that, it
persuaded the City to attach a number
of conditions to the Kohler Pavilion’s
permit relating to neighborhood impact
mitigation, and some of these have not
been fulfi lled. “We’d oppose any expan-
sion of Kohler until these conditions are
met,” he told Newman.
In fact, Michelle Seward of the Bureau
of Development Services sent OHSU a
notice of code violations on July 2. All
violations related to failure to adhere to
conditions attached to the Kohler Pavil-
ion’s building permits and including
failure to provide landscaped screening
and screening for lights.
In a related matter, former Homestead
chair Rich Davidson inquired about
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rumors that Ronald McDonald House
may soon leave the Marquam Hill cam-
pus. Newman replied, “The model for
Ronald McDonald has changed. They
now expect the university to build fa-
cilities for them.” For this, he said, “The
fi nancing just isn’t there.” He quickly
added, “No one at OHSU wants them
to go away. They’re an asset.”