Fish or cut bait.

Byline: The Register-Guard

If Triad Hospitals Inc. chooses to build its new $225 million home for McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center anywhere but in the Eugene city limits, it will represent a colossal failure of political and economic leadership on the part of Eugene's elected officials.

Granted, city officials have tried awfully hard to make good on their top priority of luring a full-service hospital to Eugene. But voters, like corporate stockholders, rate performance above passion in their assessment of public servants.

The fact remains that Triad, which desperately wants to build in Eugene, is perilously close to cutting its losses and heading for Glenwood because, frankly, Eugene can't seem to get the job done.

Eugene's list of lost opportunities is becoming legendary: PeaceHealth's $350 million regional medical center, a dead lock for Eugene when the project began, ends up in Springfield, due in no small part to a disastrous City Council effort to discourage PeaceHealth from building on its Crescent Avenue property in north Eugene. (Hold that thought.)

Springfield also beat out Eugene for Royal Caribbean's $60 million call center, Symantec's massive relocation and expansion project, Sony's compact disc manufacturing plant, PacificSource Health Plans' headquarters and the relocation of Williams Bakery.

Now, a stable business with 825 family-wage jobs yearns to build a $225 million hospital in Eugene - a for-profit enterprise that will pay almost $3 million in annual property taxes. But Triad's executives say Mayor Kitty Piercy is sending them strong signals that the city isn't interested in landing their project if it's located on the same Crescent site the city shooed PeaceHealth from in 2001.

As a direct result of the city's negative reaction to Arlie & Co.'s Crescent Village site, Triad punched out of productive negotiations with Arlie and began listening attentively to Springfield Mayor Sid Leiken's pitch for a Glenwood site.

It would be beyond all but the most cynical assessments of Eugene's self-defeating ambivalence for economic development to believe the city could stampede a second hospital off Crescent and into Springfield. Astonishingly, that already may have happened.

No one disputes the wisdom of the city's efforts to site a hospital near the downtown core. A downtown location south of the Willamette River supports worthy urban planning goals.

To that end, the City Council and City Manager Dennis Taylor committed serious financial resources and a lot of staff energy to the effort to make the Eugene Water & Electric Board's riverfront property work for Triad. But after what in hindsight amounted to a gigantic waste of precious time, the EWEB site's numerous problems ultimately doomed it as a viable choice.

One by one, other favored alternative sites bit the dust. Maybe Triad was too picky, or maybe its executives believed the EWEB site would emerge miraculously from the ashes.

Through it all, Arlie's Crescent site was a dark horse, a last-ditch option, and for obvious reasons. Arlie already had secured city approval for a huge mixed-use development on the property and was proceeding to install infrastructure on the site.

Triad officials also were aware of the parcel's troubled history as a potential hospital location. They knew that land use and traffic questions were likely to provoke opposition.

Still, Arlie let it be known that it would explore ways to accommodate a hospital on the Crescent property if Triad were unable to secure any other suitable site in the Eugene city limits. Triad apparently decided it had reached that fork in the road. In a letter to Piercy, Scott Diehl, Arlie's chief operating officer, confirmed that Triad had been seriously negotiating with Arlie about the Crescent site from mid-August until late October.

That's when Diehl says Piercy queered the deal by telling Triad officials that the Crescent site would become "politically explosive." Piercy maintains she said no such thing but acknowledges telling Triad the "site would be difficult for some (city) councilors and some community members."

Whatever was said, Triad terminated negotiations with Arlie and began earnestly looking at Glen- wood. And so the city of Eugene has also come to a fork in the road.

One path leads, ultimately, to the City Council making good on its pledge to bring a full-service hospital to Eugene. Wherever that $225 million facility lands, adjacent retailers can expect substantial sustained increases in sales from the 825 employees and from the hundreds of patients they serve. In addition, some existing medical offices that might otherwise need to relocate would stay put to be near the new hospital, saving hundreds of local jobs and hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual property taxes.

The other path leads to a familiar spot for Eugene's economic development efforts: nowhere.

If the city's choice is between fighting to make a new hospital work on Arlie's Crescent site or losing the whole enchilada to Spring- field, the right call is a no-brainer: Piercy, Taylor and the entire City Council ought to be on the telephone with Triad right now saying, "What do we need to do to get this done?"

They'll have their work cut out for them, because Springfield's city leaders have already made that call, and they have a much better track record of success in such efforts.