B R I C KS $ M O R TA R
ment. It was close to major highways. It was big enough
for the county and PeaceHealth buildings and parking.
And it was inside Springfi eld’s urban growth boundary,
so it could be built on.
The county staff , the majority of county commission-
ers, and PeaceHealth gushed about the benefi ts of the
site and a joint facility.
The problem of the restrictive zoning was barely
mentioned in county documents and meetings in the
fall of 2024.
In an October 2024 meeting of county commissioners,
the county’s capital projects manager, David Ward, told
commissioners the county would “look at rezoning that
property… we’re moving to rezone that, with a medical
component.”
IN THE LEGISLATURE
In early 2025, the county quietly switched from the
idea of asking the Springfi eld City Council to rezone the
site to seeking the super-siting law.
After the Legislature convened in January, there ensued
months of back-room wrangling between the county
and city of Springfi eld legal staff and lobbyists over the
super-siting language, public records show. Through-
out, the county kept its language secret from the city,
the city’s lobbyist told the Springfi eld City Council in a
memo last summer. Among the city’s worries about the
project: Would it increase traffi c jams on city streets and
the nearby Interstate 5/Beltline interchange?
The county disclosed its fi nal super-siting language
to the city only in the last days of the session in June,
the city lobbyist wrote. In the end, though, the county
“addressed our most critical concerns,” the lobbyist wrote.
The lobbyist wrote that the city — it’s unclear who in the
city — decided not to oppose the bill, even though “the
city does not support super-siting policies in general.”
Once the bill was signed into law, Giustina and Rich-
ardson were left with a daunting option: to try to undo
the law itself.
In their lawsuit, they fault the secrecy of the county
and of the legislative process, and the scant time anyone
— legislators, lobbyists, the general public — had to scru-
tinize the giant bill.
Giustina and Richardson are prominent names in
Eugene-Springfi eld’s business elite. Giustina heads a
family ownership group that owns dozens of major estate
holdings throughout Eugene-Springfi eld and beyond, plus
extensive timberlands. Richardson’s factory is touted as
a national-level sportswear success story.
vote on whether to annex the International Way site
into the city limits. Until the property is annexed in, the
county can’t legally build on it. Will the council oppose
or support annexation? Does it even have the legal right
to reject the annexation? There must be a public hearing
before the vote. What will the public say?
The county earlier this month fi led its annexation
request, which will come before the council in the next few
months. Annexation applications are typically routine: a
landowner wants to annex, explains that the development
will obey the city’s existing zoning and other rules, and
then gets a unanimous thumbs-up from a happy council.
‘These types of
facilities, there are
a lot of people who
don’t want it in their
backyard.’
— FLOYD PROZANSKI,
OREGON STATE SENATOR
This annexation is anything but routine. In its paper-
work, the county invokes the super-siting law to override
the great majority of the city’s “campus-industrial” land-
use rules and other restrictions. In eff ect, the county says,
the city is obliged to annex the land and let the project
proceed. Does the city agree? That’s not yet clear.
The City Council has the power to deny annexation if
it fi nds a project is not consistent with the city’s zoning
and other rules, says city spokesperson Elyse Ditzel. Also,
the council can set conditions for annexation and “has
the discretion to weigh competing or confl icting policies
and determine which are paramount to the city,” she
tells Eugene Weekly.
In its communications to the county, the city contin-
ues to complain the county has not suffi ciently addressed
traffi c jams the facility might cause, city records show.
FULL SPEED AHEAD?
Is the road ahead clear for the health-care project?
That’s hard to know.
The supersiting law left intact several technical local
land-use hoops the county must jump through.
A key one is this: the Springfi eld City Council must
MORE QUESTIONS
Many questions linger.
Loveall, Giustina and Richardson have asked: Why
doesn’t PeaceHealth put the project on its own vacant
land next to RiverBend? There, PeaceHealth owns a 35-acre
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tract of open, multi-family-zoned land that it has listed
for sale. It also owns parcels ranging from one to eight
acres, totalling 40 acres, that are separated from each
other by a web of city streets and access roads.
A PeaceHealth executive told the county Board of
Commissioners the joint facility could not be fi tted onto
any of those pieces. Loveall, Giustina and Richardson
don’t buy that.
“The people I represent still have some heartburn
with PeaceHealth not being overly transparent with the
75 acres of land they have, of developable property around
[RiverBend],” Loveall told commissioners in a meeting
last July. PeaceHealth pushed for the International Way
fi lbert orchard site because hospital executives “haven’t
fi gured out yet” what to do with their land, he said.
PeaceHealth anticipates selling the 35-acre residential
tract and wants to keep the remaining 40 acres of small
parcels “for future services which are required to be
located immediately next to the emergency department
or operating rooms,” says Alicia Beymer, chief administra-
tive offi cer at RiverBend. The county stabilization center
and PeaceHealth psychiatric hospital “do not require that
proximity,” Beymer tells Eugene Weekly. PeaceHealth does
not want RiverBend to become “landlocked,” she says.
As for Giustina’s and Richardson’s pitch that the fi lbert
orchard should be preserved for industrial development?
County leaders and staff don’t buy that.
The fi lbert orchard has been designated for industrial
use for decades, and no buyer has materialized. Some
other corporate or industrial uses in the Gateway area
have fi zzled: The Sony CD disc manufacturing plant shut-
tered in 2003 and laid off all its workers. The factory was
bought by PeaceHealth and turned into a lab and offi ces.
The former Royal Caribbean call center building has sat
vacant for six years and is now for sale.
A religious-facilities loophole in Springfi eld’s campus-in-
dustrial zoning rules allowed the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints to build a colossal temple on Inter-
national Way, a fi fth of a mile from the planned county
project.
To rebut Giustina’s and Richardson’s arguments, county
staff produced a study that found the 18 acres the county
and PeaceHealth want for the health center are a fraction
of the available campus-industrial-zoned land in Gateway.
The county project “is the continuation of the shift [away
from industrial] rather than the initiation of the shift on
International Way,” a county staff er told commissioners.
Residents of Springfi eld and the rest of Lane County
“are suff ering because we do not have a complete behav-
ioral health care system,” says Commissioner Trieger.
“This facility will benefi t everyone. It will become a crit-
ical piece of our health care infrastructure.”
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who
worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-
2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development
and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.
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