Getting it right.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Some people fervently believe McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center's Delta Ridge site in north Eugene will never be right for a hospital. They'll have ample opportunity in the coming months to make their case.

But those who are withholding judgment until they see how hospital officials respond to the challenges posed by the problematic site just got some important - and encouraging - information.

The Oregon Department of Transportation on Wednesday finally approved McKenzie-Willamette's plans for improvements to the dangerous Belt Line Road/Delta Highway interchange. Over the past year, the state had rejected three previous proposals from the hospital, forcing McKenzie-Willamette to repeatedly wear a path back to the drawing board.

Opponents seized on the successive state rejections as evidence that the traffic problems created by adding a 200-bed hospital to the already inadequate Belt Line/Delta interchange were too large and too expensive for McKenzie-Willamette to solve. Triad Hospitals Inc., majority owner of McKenzie-Willamette, said it was willing to commit about $3.5 million to traffic improvements, an amount most experts dismissed as unrealistic.

After the state's engineers pointed out that some of McKenzie-Willamette's proposed improvements actually would make the situation worse, skepticism grew. Triad's lowball financial commitment fueled speculation that its attachment to the Delta Ridge site was tenuous.

The transportation system problems in the Belt Line/Delta area are complex and expensive to fix. The state controls Belt Line and Lane County owns North Delta Highway. The two jurisdictions have disagreed for the past 20 years about how to solve the area's problems.

Along comes Triad with a $234 million hospital project that would generate more than 1,600 vehicle trips daily at a site that now sees about 40. The state requires transportation improvements that, at a minimum, would accommodate the increased traffic without making the interchange any worse than it is today.

Triad and its transportation consultants responded to the state's concerns by reworking designs and adding enhancements. The medical center finally acknowledged that the improvements necessary to win state approval were going to cost upward of $10 million or more, and that Triad would bear the full cost.

The transportation plan that won state approval this week does more than maintain the status quo. Most of the work would have to be completed before a new hospital opened. That means there will be a period of several years when Triad's traffic enhancements will make the Delta/Belt Line interchange substantially safer than it is today.

Those advantages will diminish as the hospital build-out is completed and the area adds population, but all the while, they are buying the state and Lane County valuable time to come up with the Big Fix. This is a private project that is not only integrated into a larger upgrade of the public transportation system, but also one that helps the public agencies gradually marshal the planning, engineering and financial resources needed to address the bigger pro- blems.

All that bodes well as a preview of what to expect from Triad as the project moves forward.

If McKenzie-Willamette handles its land use concerns at Delta Ridge the way it dealt with transportation issues, neighbors should see that no expense will be spared to make certain the project is done right by an organization that does much more than the minimum to satisfy re- quirements.