Eugene weekly., November 23, 2005, Page 9, Image 9

The Delta site is on the far northern edge of Eugene.
Triad’s
Turkey
Critics call hospital site north of
Eugene a foul choice for urban sprawl.
BY ALAN PITTMAN
S
prawl opponents are crying foul over a Triad propos-
al for a new hospital on the far north edge of Eugene.
“It’s a turkey,”said Lauri Segel,a planning advocate with
the state land-use watchdog group, 1000 Friends of
Oregon.
“It’s a terrible sprawl location,” said Kevin Matthews,
president of Friends of Eugene.“It’s crazy.”
For its new $225 million hospital with 825 employees,
Triad chose 42 acres of golf course on a rural cul-de-sac off
Delta Highway that’s outside city limits.
Such sprawl development is widely criticized for
increasing taxes because of its heavy demands for new
road and other infrastructure and services, increasing pol-
lution from car exhaust, paving over natural areas, increas-
ing traffic congestion, increasing obesity and reducing
quality of life.
“The more we spread out essential services like this,the
further we get from sustainable development in Eugene,”
Matthews said.
To fight sprawl, Eugene’s planning goals call for com-
pact urban growth. The city has been trying to get a hos-
pital to locate in the central city since PeaceHealth
announced plans to leave downtown for a similar site in
north Springfield four years ago.
But Triad, the Texas corporation that bought McKenzie-
Willamette hospital two years ago, said the RiverRidge
golf-course outside Eugene is their top choice. Chris
Holden, the regional president for Triad, flew in for the
Nov.16 press conference.“There’s lots of space, it’s ready to
go,” he said of the site.
Stuck in Traffic
But critics said the site is far from ready to go. The huge
new hospital and related medical office buildings and devel-
opment will pour thousands of cars into a freeway intersection
that’s already one of the worst bottlenecks in the region.
Drivers have complained about the Delta Highway-Beltline
Highway interchange for years.
Fixing the interchange and widening Beltline to accom-
modate the extra congestion could cost as much as $150 mil-
lion, officials have estimated. Just increasing capacity at
Delta-Beltline with new ramps and a wider overpass could
cost at least $8 million, according to earlier estimates.
Widening Beltline to the east including a wider Willamette
River bridge and ramp work could cost another $17 million,
planners have estimated.
Triad’s local hospital director Roy Orr suggested the city
should use the estimated $3.2 million a year the city will get
in new tax revenue from the hospital to subsidize roadwork
for the project. The most Holden would offer was that the cor-
poration was “not ruling out” helping to pay for some of the
road work.
Whatever Triad doesn’t pay, taxpayers could get stuck
with.
overhaul near PeaceHealth’s site were already in the pipeline
and partially funded. PeaceHealth only had to pay to speed
them up. But plans for a Beltline-Delta overhaul and highway
widening aren’t even on the drawing board and with no fund-
ing identified, would take much more money from Triad to
get fast tracked.
Even if Triad offered to foot the cost, it could take years to
get the roadwork in the funding pipeline, planed, processed
and completed. TransPlan, the region’s official planning doc-
ument, estimates that such major transportation projects “can
take as long as 10 years to complete” from inception to con-
crete.
More delay could come from requirements to amend the
region’s land use plans. The MetroPlan would require rezon-
ing the golf course from its current residential designation to
commercial. That would take hearings and majority votes by
planning commissions and elected bodies from Eugene,
Springfield and Lane County.
“It could be anything between two and five years, just for
the land use [amendments], assuming everything goes swim-
mingly,” Wilson said. But things won’t go swimmingly, she
said, since legal appeals against the controversial siting deci-
sion are likely.
Wilson and Segel said such appeals would have a good
chance of winning. State land use goals and regulations pro-
tect farm land from urban sprawl and limit rezoning residen-
tial land to commercial if there’s inadequate supplies of resi-
dential land, as homebuilders have argued for years.
To meet urbanization rules, Triad could also have to argue
that it had no options within the city to build a hospital,
despite the city offering numerous other sites, Segel said.
“That would be a hard argument to make.”
Matthews calls Delta tragically similar to PeaceHealth’s
RiverBend site. “One sprawl hospital is bad enough. We don’t
need two sprawl hospitals.”
While PeaceHealth was able to use local political muscle
and land use expertise to pull off its deal eventually, Matthews
doubts the Texas corporation has the same local clout.
Wilson agrees, “we’re working with a Texas company that
doesn’t have a clue.”
Ploy?
With so many transportation and planning obstacles, crit-
ics wonder if Triad is actually serious about the Delta site.
“It’s a ploy,” said Segel, who suspects Triad must know
that the site is “completely unrealistic.”
“It can’t be a real [sitting] decision, it doesn’t make sense,”
Wilson said. “This site is not happening,” she said.
“Something else is going on.”
Critics speculated that Triad may have no intention of
‘It could be anything between two and five years, just for the land
use [amendments], assuming everything goes swimmingly.’
— Jan Wilson, CHOICES
That’s not fair, said Matthews. “People here are taxed for
growth that often reduces the quality of life for the people
who are already here,” Matthews said. “They need to pay
their own way.”
Any taxpayer subsidies for the site will increase Triad’s
corporate profits. Triad is one of the nation’s largest for-prof-
it hospital chains with more than 50 hospitals in the South and
West and almost $5 billion in annual revenues.
State regulations may force the corporation to cough up
more than it expects for the road work. A citizen lawsuit
forced PeaceHealth to pay $17 million for freeway and other
road work around its RiverBend hospital site near the clogged
I-5 and Beltline interchange. Like Triad now, PeaceHealth
argued that it wouldn’t have a big traffic impact and wasn’t
responsible for solving traffic problems. But state land-use
rules require big projects to have adequate transportation
infrastructure in place, and the hospital lost in court.
Triad may have to pay even more than PeaceHealth,
according to Jan Wilson, an attorney with CHOICES
(Coalition
for
Health
Options
In
Central
Eugene–Springfield). Plans for an I-5-Beltline interchange
actually locating at Delta and could be using the site to get in
line for a required hospital certificate of need (CoN) from the
state. Earlier this year, the state refused to process Triad’s
application for a certificate concurrent with PeaceHealth’s
application for more beds at it’s downtown facility. After lob-
bying from PeaceHealth, the state said Triad needed a solid
purchase agreement on a site before it would accept the appli-
cation. Triad complained that PeaceHealth would gobble up
the limited number of new hospital beds available and sued
the state, but lost.
With a purchase agreement for the Delta site, Triad said
last week it would immediately re-apply for the state CoN.
Another ulterior motive, critics speculated, could be to
pressure property owners at other sites or the city of Eugene
to offer a lower land price or greater subsidies.
Triad may also be using the site as a political bludgeon,
critics speculated. An outcry by progressives on the council
against the site could allow Triad to blame them for chasing
the hospital out of Eugene.
Pro-sprawl interests have already sought to blame council
progressives for chasing PeaceHealth to Springfield. The
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