PORT ANGELES — Olympic Medical Center Administrator Mike Glenn, fresh from forging a plan to preserve primary care in eastern Clallam County, will resign Dec. 1 to take a post in Olympia.

Glenn, 44, will become associate administrator at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, Arlene Engel, OMC commission president, said Wednesday.

Providence St. Peter is a 390-bed regional teaching hospital with comprehensive medical, surgical and behavioral health services, Engel said.

In comparison, OMC is a 126-bed acute-care facility.

Glenn joined OMC as assistant administrator in 1991 and advanced to administrator in 1999.

Since then, he has overseen ambitious building and quality improvement programs at the Port Angeles hospital and its satellite in Sequim.

“I have been at Olympic for 15 years and have enjoyed nearly every day that I’ve been here,” Glenn told Peninsula Daily News.

“I’ve worked with fabulous people, both hospital. employees and physicians, and taken great pride in what we’ve accomplished.”

Glenn and OMC Commissioner Jim Cammack said Glenn’s successor might come from the hospital’s current management team that includes Chief Financial Officer Eric Lewis and Chief Medical Officer Dr. R. Scott Kennedy.

“I think there’s a fantastic group of internal candidates that I would hope show interest,” Cammack said.

However, Engel said the hospital should have no problem attracting candidates from outside the hospital district.

“We have such a good reputation at the hospital,” she said, “that I’m expecting we’ll have a lot of applicants.”

When the position last was vacant after the former administrator, Tom Stegbauer, resigned, it drew between 50 and 60 applicants.

Auditors found Stegbauer responsible for overspending, reimbursing his wife for grant-writing, buying a nursing home from a former hospital commissioner, and other shortcomings.

He left to become administrator at Gritman Medical Center in Moscow, Idaho.

The hospital has received clean audits from the state under Glenn.