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"This is a once-in-a-century opportunity for us to make an investment in the future health care for this community," Sacred Heart (PeaceHealth) CEO Alan Yordy said in a press release. But critics say the move is a once-in-a-century blunder. Moving the county's largest private employer to the edge of the city will devastate downtown and create urban sprawl and a snarl of traffic on already clogged north Eugene roads, they charge. "Taking such a large generator of traffic and employment to the edge of the city greatly stresses our transportation system and infrastructure and also takes a lot of vitality out of downtown" says Rex Redmon, who leads downtown work for the Friends of Eugene civic group. "This is one of those pivotal times in the history of our community where we ought to take the time and make sure people have the incentives to do the right kind of growth," says Kitty Piercy, a former state legislator for north Eugene. Yordy and Sacred Heart Development Director Jim Werfelmann did not return calls requesting comment. Sacred Heart's press release states that the higher cost of expanding downtown drove the hospital to choose the field for the hospital. The hospital claims expanding downtown would cost $423 million compared to $308 million for building a hospital with 2,200 employees on the edge of town. "It may be the best thing for the hospital but I'm not sure it's the best thing for the city," says Dr. Tom Bascom, a local surgeon who works at Sacred Heart and is concerned about the traffic impact. "I think it's horrible for the community," says Sue Wolling, a hospital intensive care nurse who bikes to work and heads the Eugene Bicycle Coalition. "It's sprawl, it goes against all the principles of what we want our community to look like."
Clogged
Arteries Hospital officials "didn't do any traffic analysis" before they chose the site, McNeel says. "They haven't had any conversations with anyone in traffic planning." Bus service to the Crescent site is very limited at this time, according to McNeel. At Sacred Heart's current site near the UO, LTD runs 296 buses a day. At Crescent, only 24 buses a day serve the area, none before 7 am. "This is just a gigantic difference," McNeel says. "You'll have former transit riders driving to work." That's "just the opposite" of what the city has been trying to do for years in promoting alternative transportation to control road costs and promote livability. LTD has specifically targeted its proposed new Bus Rapid Transit system to serve the current hospital site, one of LTD's biggest destinations. "There's no way they can provide that kind of [frequent bus] service on the fringe," McNeel says. Moving the hospital out there, "just doesn't make any sense." The hospital move will create even more traffic when you add in all the restaurants, businesses and medical offices that are likely to move to the area to serve the facility, McNeel says. Intersections in the area are already nearing failure, he says. The Register-Guard offices and industrial park, Costco, Levi Strauss, U-Lane-O, the Baptist Church, a large apartment complex, housing and other new development have already overtaxed the area's road system. At Chad and Coburg just south of Crescent, "it's quite the traffic jam out there," McNeel says. Sacred Heart Emergency room Dr. William Miller says he's "stunned" the hospital would propose moving to such an inaccessible area. "What a sprawl!" he says. The emergency department has 45,000 visits a year, not counting family members visiting patients. "That's a lot of car trips," he says. McNeel says the traffic jams could spread to the already choking Beltline I-5 interchange and the city's limited number of bridges that are also near capacity. McNeel says the jammed streets could create major problems for ambulances headed to the new hospital. "Unless they're going to put in an air ambulance system, they're going to have a really tough time."
Low-income patients and their visiting families, many without cars, may also have trouble getting to the new hospital, worries Sacred Heart Dr. Stephanie Jocums. "Are homeless people going to go up to Costco and get the care they might not get elsewhere?" Not only poorer people will have trouble, says John Porter, the city's former planning director from 1966 to 1982. With the new location on the far edge of the city, "it's going to inconvenience a good two-thirds of the community." City officials anticipate funding will be scarce to fix the coming traffic problems. Sacred Heart will pay systems development fees for its project, but "it wouldn't be anywhere near what's needed," McNeel says. Just fixing the Coburg-Beltline intersection near the new hospital could cost $20 million or more, McNeel says. A recently completed onramp system for a similar freeway intersection in Salem cost $30 million and the destruction of many surrounding businesses. "They basically came in there and tore down everything," he says. The city can't afford such improvements. Eugene has a $54 million backlog in just maintaining the streets it already has. The state doesn't have the money either. Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) funds are very limited and the state currently has no plans for improvements in the area, according to ODOT's local area manager Bob Pirrie. "We don't have any plans to do anything." ODOT's local planner Tom Boyatt notes that the agency already has a "long line" of projects waiting for funding. A decade ago, the agency had a budget of $200 million a year for road improvements, now the budget's down to $33 million for the whole rapidly growing state, he says.
Downtown
Loses Vital Organ "Every time the downtown looks like it's getting better it takes another hit," says Howard Bonnett, a member of the city Budget Committee. Sacred Heart and Symantec are joining the long list of businesses leaving for the outskirts. "Symantec and Sacred Heart, boy it will take a long time to recover from that." Downtown will suffer with the departure of all the Sacred Heart workers, says City Planning Director Jan Childs. "The Sacred Heart facility is a primary greater downtown anchor." Childs says the move goes against years of city efforts and plans to promote a compact livable city with a vibrant, walkable downtown served by convenient alternative transportation. The hospital move would make many of the city's alternative transportation and downtown plans "obsolete," says Redmon. "We're just taking giant steps backward." The "automobile-dominant" hospital development "will put major pressure to expand our urban growth boundary into farmland," Porter says. "You just don't put that type of a major urban service on the edge, it doesn't make sense." "We'll be spread out all over creation," Dr. Miller says. The hospital is a large growth industry that should be a vital part of downtown, Miller says. "Sacred Heart is going to be here forever. It should be right in the center of things." The hospital has said that it will leave a branch clinic and medical offices with 1,800 employees in its current Hilyard Street downtown location. But the hospital plans to close it's clinic building at Willamette Street and 12th Avenue and tear down almost half of the buildings at the Hilyard location. Dr. Rich Coolman, a pediatrician and member of FoE, says the hospital is unlikely to keep many employees downtown after it builds the new hospital. "Eventually physicians are going to want to be close to their inpatient setting rather than drive back and forth," he says. "It's only a matter of time," says Coolman. "They are abandoning downtown completely."
Saving
the Community The Crescent site allows the construction of a hospital with a conditional use permit (CUP), says Childs. The City Council cannot vote on granting the permit. A hearings official decides whether or not to grant the permit and with what conditions and modifications based on a list of set criteria which include traffic issues. The hearings official decision can be appealed to the Eugene Planning Commission and then to the state Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA).
McNeel says it's unlikely that the CUP process would block the development. "I don't think there's ever been a development [in Eugene] that's been denied on a traffic standpoint." Sacred Heart officials would have a bigger hurdle if they follow through with plans to try to acquire additional adjacent land from the city and School District 4J to access Coburg Road directly. Using the additional land for a hospital would require a rezoning and amendment to the Metropolitan Plan that would have to be approved by the City Council, Childs says. ODOT and the state Land Conservation and Development Department could comment on the plan amendment and appeal it to LUBA if it violated state planning goals for compact growth and limiting traffic. Sacred Heart has plenty of money for lawyers to fight any citizen and city opposition. The hospital's parent PeaceHealth corporation reported $596 million in revenue in 1998 with surplus earnings of $36 million, according to tax returns for the non-profit. PeaceHealth spent $115,000 on political lobbying that year. Sacred Heart could also count on powerful support from developers who could profit from sprawling growth in North Eugene. The Register-Guard stands to profit from a Chad Drive business park near the new site that could fill with hospital spin-offs. Carolyn Chambers, owner of KEZI-TV and the Chambers construction company, also has property for sale in the area. Chambers also serves on the hospital's Board of Directors. While developers may make money from the move, citizens will get stuck with the hospital bill. To serve the sprawl, "there's going to be a huge public expenditure for infrastructure for roads, sewers and everything else," says Bern Johnson of Citizens for Public Accountability (CPA). "Every citizen is going to be subsidizing that." "It destroys our community and we have to pay to do it. That doesn't make any sense at all," Redmon says. "We should look at really recouping the actual cost." Charging higher development fees for such sprawl would remove the incentive of using public subsidies for new roads and other infrastructure to build on the edge of town, Redmon says. "The downtown site would actually look really affordable to them if we weren't subsidizing it [Crescent]." ODOT's Pirrie says the agency will ask Sacred Heart to help pay for some of the major roadwork on Coburg. "We would like to have participation." But ODOT's Boyatt says developers often hire lawyers to fight against paying for road improvements farther from the site. City planners recently took the developer's side in one such dispute over improvements to access I-5 from the Moon Mountain development in south Eugene. ODOT won the case on appeal to LUBA. McNeel says the city will side with ODOT this time. "I don't think we're nearly as enthralled with this development." Several city councilors said they want Sacred Heart to pay for its full impact to the road system. One way to do that may be to set up a method of systems development charges (SDCs) that increase for edge areas not served by adequate existing infrastructure. "If you're going to build in the downtown, then the SDCs should be less," says Councilor Gary Rayor. A city rates advisory committee is studying such differential fees, but the city is moving at a slug's place in implementing the growth management technique. "The process seems to be taking forever," says Eben Fodor, a local land use consultant and expert on SDCs. Responding to council direction, Eugene staff have been studying increasing development charges to pay the true cost of growth for three years but have yet to increase any of the fees. Many Oregon cities are far ahead of Eugene in charging fairer SDCs, says Fodor. "Eugene is always acting pretty cowardly in its policy development." Councilor David Kelly says he and several other councilors are interested in the concept of differential SDCs, taxes on surface parking and zoning changes that could "level the playing field" between sprawl and downtown development. "We can do better from a policy standpoint." But Kelly says such measures "are challenging to translate into policy and challenging to get the political will to pass them." But after losing Symantec and Sacred Heart to sprawl in the last few months, Childs says, "We will certainly be looking at whether or not there are things the city could be doing differently." To encourage Sacred Heart to stay downtown, several councilors appeared willing to seriously consider changing any local zoning or other legal issues that might stand in the way of hospital expansion. "There are lots of opportunities to collaborate and keep the hospital in south Eugene if that's what the hospital wants to do," Councilor Bonny Bettman says. Some critics of the move pointed to the large surface parking lots of the hospital's nearly two-block medical group site off Willamette Street as a place with room for expansion that would help downtown and not disrupt operations at the current hospital. "They actually have quite a bit of property they could develop," Childs says. Piercy says many other underused areas in the central downtown are also ripe for redevelopment. "Frankly, it seems like now they could have the whole downtown."
Community
Spirit Sacred Heart doesn't pay taxes because it's supposed to serve the public good, Porter points out. "They're a non-profit because they're a community service." "You have to grow with some responsibility to the environment. Not only the business environment, the living environment," Dr. Miller says. "A decision like this has enormous impact on Eugene," Johnson of CPA says. "Building a huge hospital out there will just be a disastrous engine for sprawl from here to Coburg. The community should have a public discussion about whether we want that to happen." "I really feel like there ought to be more public discussion about it," Bascom agrees. Sacred Heart's mission and values statement stresses accountability, community collaboration and "responsible stewardship in the allocation and utilization of human, financial, and environmental resources." But the hospital, has taken a more bottom-line, corporate bent of late. Sacred Heart is one of the most profitable large hospitals in the state, but one of the stingiest in providing charity care, according to state data. A few years ago, Sacred Heart replaced its unpaid nun director with a CEO making a salary of more than $330,000 a year. Bringing Sacred Heart around to expanding downtown will require some aggressive leadership from city officials. Such leadership in controlling sprawl is unlikely to come from Mayor Jim Torrey. After Symantec announced plans to leave downtown for the Gateway mall area, Torrey praised the development in his state of the city address. "I want to compliment the city of Springfield and its planning staff for having the foresight to develop that area out in the Gateway section." Miller says city staff should put as much effort into keeping Sacred Heart downtown as they put into luring Hyundai to west Eugene with wetlands fill permits and tax breaks. "Sacred Heart's location is much more important than the federal office building downtown," Porter says. "The city ought to be aggressively working to keep these employers in the central area." Sacred Heart is also much more important than the city's latest downtown visioning plan to revitalize the area, says Redmon. Redmon hopes a rising public outcry will save the city from one of the biggest planning blunders of the century. "We need to get the word out and get a groundswell of public awareness of what kind of a devastating impact this could have."
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Sacred
Heart Hospital has announced that it will leave downtown Eugene and build a new one
million square foot hospital in a 38-acre field on the northern edge of the city.