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Later today, the Springfield City Council is scheduled to decide whether to annex 18 acres on International Way for Lane County’s crisis stabilization center and PeaceHealth’s Timber Springs Behavioral Health Hospital.
Most of the talk has been about whether the project fits the city’s plans for that land and what the neighbors think. Almost nobody is talking about jobs. So, let’s do that.
I live in Springfield, about two miles from the proposed site. People sometimes worry about what goes in their backyard. I count this one as mine, and I want it here. I also spend my days trying to bring employers and good jobs to empty lots like this one, so I went looking for the numbers.
Business Oregon’s economist, Damon Runberg, ran the numbers on the stabilization center. Here’s what he found: Once fully staffed, the center will employ 93 people with an annual payroll of about $10.5 million. Count the local businesses the center buys from and the paychecks its staff spend around town, and it supports about 280 jobs. It adds more than $49 million a year to Lane County’s economy and generates about $8.6 million a year in local, state and federal tax revenue.
Construction is a one-time boost on top of that. The $35 million build supports as many as 170 construction jobs at its peak and about $25 million in economic activity over three years.
Those figures are for the county’s center alone. They leave out Timber Springs, the larger of the two facilities. The full campus would go well past anything in Runberg’s analysis. Lane County estimates the campus would generate about $2 million a year in property taxes, because the companies operating it aren’t tax-exempt. That money would be shared by the city of Springfield, Springfield Public Schools, Willamalane Park and Recreation District, Lane County, Lane Community College and Lane Education Service District. Springfield’s new payroll tax would apply to these jobs, too.
That land is set aside for jobs. These are good jobs. If a manufacturer offered to create nearly 100 jobs averaging $113,000 a year on an empty lot, we would be rolling out the red carpet.
The campus would hire psychiatrists and nurses, but also counselors, peer support specialists, technicians and support staff, and some of those roles don’t require a four-year degree.
Through a healthcare partnership convened by the nonprofit I lead, Collaborative Economic Development Oregon, I sit at the table with Lane County’s hospitals and clinics, and I listen. The thing I hear most: we don’t have enough places to train people. Nursing and behavioral health students compete for a limited number of clinical placements, and behavioral health placements are among the hardest to find. A campus built for crisis and inpatient psychiatric care would give students more places to train here.
Also, there are economic costs if we do nothing. People in a mental health or addiction crisis often end up in a hospital emergency room or in jail. Both are expensive, and neither is designed for this kind of care. An ER bed holding a patient in crisis isn’t available for the next person who comes through the door. This community already knows that problem well.
Timber Springs would also add inpatient psychiatric beds for adolescents, which Lane County doesn’t have. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that adverse childhood experiences can hurt education, job opportunities and earning potential into adulthood. Getting kids help close to home, before a crisis turns into a pattern, is about as basic as workforce development gets.
Waiting is risky. The county has assembled about $35 million for the stabilization center, including $14 million in state lottery bonds that can be used only on this site. PeaceHealth has said it needs annexation by Dec. 1 to keep Timber Springs on budget and on schedule. Money like this doesn’t wait around.
Springfield’s councilors have a hard job, and the land-use questions are theirs to weigh. I hope that as they weigh them, they count what this campus would bring: hundreds of well-paid jobs, tens of millions of dollars a year in local economic activity, and care our neighbors need.
In my line of work, we spend years chasing projects like this. This one is already here.
