Mayor Janet Taylor concedes that she can’t win her longshot campaign to change the location for a planned state psychiatric hospital in Salem.

Taylor, in an e-mail to the Statesman Journal, said she now accepts that the existing Oregon State Hospital campus in central Salem will be used for construction of a new 620-bed facility designed to replace the much-criticized 125-year-old hospital.

However, she continues to call for state officials to prune the project’s size to 320 beds or fewer, and she calls for them to construct another psychiatric facility north of Marion County — possibly in the Portland metropolitan area.

“We need new mental hospitals in Oregon, and I accept that one needs to be in Salem — just not so large,” Taylor wrote in her Friday e-mail to the newspaper.

In recent weeks, Taylor waged a public campaign aimed at persuading state leaders to shift the Salem project to the city’s fringe. She suggested moving it to vacant state Department of Corrections land in southeast Salem.

As Taylor told it, relocating the project to the city outskirts and cutting its size would ease social and crime burdens that Salem allegedly has shouldered while playing host to a large psychiatric facility in the city’s core.

The city also would benefit, she said, by having the state free up the existing hospital campus for sale to private developers, providing a fresh makeover in the central Salem neighborhood and adding property to the city tax rolls.

Taylor’s capitulation on the hospital siting issue came in the wake of a Wednesday forum, sponsored by the state Department of Human Services, at which she forcefully repeated her objections to having the new hospital built on the existing 144-acre campus along Center Street NE.

Her forum remarks sparked an outpouring of sharp criticism — along with some praise — on the Statesman Journal’s Web site.

Perhaps more significantly, her pitch to shift the hospital’s location mostly was rejected by Salem’s legislative delegation.

In interviews after the mayor’s forum presentation, four of five Salem lawmakers — Democrat Senate President Peter Courtney, Republican Sen. Jackie Winters, Democrat Rep. Brian Clem and Republican Rep. Vicki Berger — said they didn’t support her call to move the project.

Taylor’s objections came too late, lawmakers said, and they stressed the need to keep the hospital replacement project on track.

“We’ve got a full-blown crisis before us,” Berger said, referring to a slew of hospital flaws and failings recently cited by federal investigators. “It’s going to take time to dig ourselves out of the hole we have dug ourselves into. Everybody needs to be kind of pulling on the same oars.”

Taylor has emphasized that she previously raised concerns about the hospital replacement project, as early as 2006, in letters to state officials and during meetings with local lawmakers. But her intense public opposition only surfaced in recent weeks, with repeated calls to change the project’s size and location.

“Her explanation to me was that she was sort of slow to tune into these issues,” Berger said, recounting a recent discussion she had with Taylor. “Then she realized the lateness and said, ‘OK, I can just say I’m too late and go away or I can stand up and say what I truly believe.

“If that isn’t Janet to a T — I mean, she is that kind of a person. I’m not going to criticize her for it in any way, shape or form. But on the other hand, I have to say back to her, ‘Janet, too late. You may be right and you may be wrong, but that bus has left the station.’ ”

Construction of the Salem project is planned to start in 2009, with completion targeted for 2011.

Winters said the state can’t afford to downsize the project or consider building a companion psychiatric facility north of Marion County, as requested by Taylor.

“When you start talking about going from 600 (beds) to 300, that would mean that you’d have 300 in Salem and you’d have to acquire land in Portland to do the other 300, plus what we’re doing in Junction City,” Winters said, referring to plans to build a 360-bed psychiatric facility in the Lane County city. “It just doesn’t cost out. We eliminated Portland because of the cost of land acquisition.”

Winters added: “The questions that she’s raising, those questions were vetted when we had the siting work done, looking at all the various options. So we’re way beyond that now.”

Clem, whose district includes the state hospital campus, credited Taylor with raising valid concerns about Salem receiving a disproportionate share of patient discharges from the hospital’s forensic program for the criminally insane.

Even though he did not support Taylor’s call for shifting the hospital location, Clem said he was pleased that she was able to express her views at Wednesday’s forum.

“For me, I was glad that she got a chance right in front of DHS to make her entire case,” he said. “I told her I would support her right to make her case, but I wasn’t going to be able to second guess the actual criteria used to make that (siting) decision. It seemed to me that the process was pretty good from a technical standpoint and examining the different sites and costs to the state.”

Courtney, a leader of the push for new psychiatric facilities, took a conciliatory tack in commenting on Taylor’s proposals for altering the state’s plans.

“We’ve worked on this for four years,” he said. “We will continue to work with all people to make sure that as we go ahead on construction of this incredibly important facility, we do it in a very sensitive and careful way to all persons involved — workers, patients, as well as neighborhoods and the community.”

Republican Rep. Kevin Cameron was the lone Salem legislator saying that he favored moving the hospital project to vacant state prison land in southeast Salem.

“Certainly from a state resource standpoint, I would think that it would be a more efficient way to go about this whole thing,” he said. “Then you’d turn some of that (hospital campus) property over to private industry if they wanted to take on the expense to remodel it, keep it as an historical thing or turn it into a small community. It certainly would help the city out, as well.”

Is it too late to shift the location of the much-needed hospital replacement project?

“Obviously, a shovel has not been moved,” Cameron said. “Are you too late in the game as long as a shovel hasn’t been moved?”

In dropping her call for the state to shift the project to the undeveloped Department of Corrections property, Taylor said she learned Thursday that the site was being “reserved for a new Corrections facility.”

The DOC property is situated near three existing state prisons, the Marion County jail and Corban College.

Although the vacant property has been earmarked for possible future use, state prison officials have not announced any plans — short term or long term — for constructing a prison there.

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