Land-Use and Transportation
Kevin Matthews, Friends of Eugene
Wetlands highway - riverfront highway - upland habitat denial - riverfront commercialization - urban-renewal gerrymanders - UGB for sale.
Four years of a developer-directed City-Council majority have pushed Eugene, Oregon, to the brink of crisis.
Starting right now, the real changes in city leadership that so many of you have worked so hard and so well for, bring real new possibilities. Congratulations, Eugene, for all your participation! And, of course, to realize our new possibilities will require continued focus and enhanced engagement, both with local government and with active citizens across the spectrum.
Consensus has been growing across our community around shared visions of economic justice and environmental quality, as evidenced by election of Kitty Piercy as our new mayor, by the ongoing discussions of the Jobs and Land Use Roundtable, and by the coalition of groups bringing you this Citizens State of the City presentation.
However, contrary forces of often distantly-driven real-estate speculation, and of deeply rooted local privilege, are busily jockeying for angles of counter-attack. How shall we respond at this historical tipping point?
In essence, our continuing mission is to bring sustainability home to earth, right here in our Eugene.
Lisa Arkin has already spoken about several aspects of sustainability. Yet so much of our environmental and economic impacts have to do with the two intertwined threads of land use and transportation, that these threads call for special attention.
In short, without achieving sustainability and excellence in our land-use and transportation choices, we probably can't achieve it much of anywhere else. So much of our energy use, pollution, impervious surfaces, and local budgets are driven by land use and transportation. Someone in town recently suggested that about 90% of City of Eugene government business is related to either land use or transportation or both.
So it's no surprise that several major land-use and environmental issues currently face our community. As well as such defensive challenges - and sometimes, in the very same places - our Eugene faces a host of positive opportunities.
- Civic-Center development, done with historical and urban sensitivity, could enhance downtown. Pedestrian downtown really could be connected with a living, green riverfront. Mixed-use development of open pits and paved lots downtown could move it closer to the Node-One status it needs and deserves.
- We need an updated and improved approach to downtown planning, that is more realistic and more visionary at the same time, that goes beyond the goals of the last mayor's committee.
- We need a city-planning department that really listens when there is citizen input, or a design charette like we had for downtown, for the cannery district - where the input opposed re-routing Highway 99 along the riverfront - and for the Civic Center, where the input supported preservation of City Hall.
- We need to start saving the important buildings we have left, like the purposefully anti-monumental City Hall, and the classic industrial-Deco EWEB steam-plant building. If you start a development project by tearing down a usable public building, and an important piece of community history, there's no level of green-building rating points that can make a replacement building net-sustainable.
- We need improved hospital planning. That should be helped by the recent CHOICES/FoE state appeals court victory against shotgun zoning changes for hospital siting by the City of Eugene.
- We do need a hospital in central Eugene, like we have now. But we shouldn't put it right on the downtown riverfront; we shouldn't sell off the EWEB headquarters at 1/4 or 1/3 of its value to do it; and we shouldn't cut the 800-foot Patterson Trench - up to 20 feet deep and maybe 60 feet wide - under the tracks right at the riverfront. A private hospital building, twice as tall as the EWEB headquarters and probably twice as wide, right across the river from Alton Baker Park, blocking the view of Spencer's Butte from the Ferry Street Bridge, surrounded by parking lots, and accessed via the Patterson Trench, is not the way to "connect downtown to the river." On this image, taken from the top of Skinner's Butte, the shadowed area representing the rough massing of the proposed Triad hospital shows how it would block the view from the butte.
- In contrast, Millrace daylighting could emerge as a magically inspiring downtown-to-university connection strategy. Activity-friendly development and detailing could fight back against obesity in Track Town.
- Reclamation of the rail yards, when the time is right, could foster myriad improvements in our central neighborhoods.
- Protection of upland-wildlife habitat and all our open waterways could ensure living, green hills for the future.
- Despite our standing policies and regulations, development has breached the wooded ridges of our South Hills both in the east, like around Spring Boulevard, and in the west, like around Hawkins. Protected only by the difficulty of development and by the historic South Hills Study, these areas that are essential for habitat and for recreation need more protection. The image shows one of the areas where ridgeline protection has broken down badly, around Spring Boulevard.
- We should continue to protect and restore Amazon Creek, starting with acquisition of the Amazon Headwaters Keystone at Martin and West Amazon, and continuing all the way through town. In contrast, actual logging continues in this highly sensitive key link in the Amazon watershed system, deep within the city limits.
- We should not be exploiting precious public open space and natural areas as siting opportunities for local pork-barrel construction projects. When the city tries to push through park-construction projects against the wishes of the neighborhoods that would supposedly benefit, something is seriously wrong.
- An urban land trust could start to protect pocket parks and trail and habitat ribbons by assembling voluntary conservation easements, as well as key acquisitions in situations where the city can't respond.
- We need to work together - city, neighborhoods, sympathetic developers, and Friends of Eugene, backed up by 1000 Friends of Oregon - to restart the city efforts on Nodal Development. Urban villages in several neighborhoods could increase density and living quality mid-way between downtown and a better-protected Urban Growth Boundary. Our nodes need to be real nodes, and development subsidies currently targeted to the Royal anti-node should be re-directed to where they will help, not hurt, the goal of developing real urban villages.
- To make nodal development begin to work here - as it is working already up in Portland, and down in Berkeley - we could use a new name, like "urban villages." More importantly, we need a real and specific definition of the goals and attributes of an urban village to focus our efforts.
- We've shown quantitatively that developing the Royal Node - or any node at the urban fringe - would actually increase car miles; whereas, the main point of nodal development is to naturally ramp down car miles. It is time for the city to pull its head out of the sand and cancel all nodes at the urban fringe.
- On December 9th, in this very room, 48 citizens testified against the draft Regional Transportation Plan, the RTP, which is partially replacing TransPlan. No one spoke in favor of the draft plan. The Metropolitan Policy Committee, the MPC, then voted to pass the plan, 8 to 1. I'm pleased to announce that on December 30, 2004, Friends of Eugene filed an appeal of that rushed-through RTP. We are going to stop the WEP! To do it, we need your help. Please visit our web site at "FriendsofEugene.org" to support this effort.
Ultimately, to succeed with our humanistic and environmental vision, the progressive community in Eugene needs to both coordinate and cooperate with, and yet also to counterbalance business-as-usual interests. Those interests together fund the equivalent of at least three, and possibly many more, full-time, paid lobbyists to work on our local governments.
Friends of Eugene has had a key role in trying to balance those special interests, with the PUBLIC interest. Our goal is to continue to nourish and support and help provide necessary community infrastructure for proactive, technically robust, progressive planning - a strong organizational center that can help the diversity of progressive organizations in Eugene transform collective dreams for this community into reality.
This community infrastructure is needed to support visionary city leaders, who cannot always rely on the established city administrative structure to deliver timely new thinking and frankly critical, incisive analysis of both potential and legacy initiatives.
And this community infrastructure crucially includes coordination with and support for other local organizations with parallel and compatible interests in local environmental quality and economic justice.
Together, we have the commitment, and expertise, and we can build the framework. Just for example, we're all together here today as part of this shared commitment to our Eugene.
So this question goes out to the Eugene community. Is it time? Are Eugene progressives really ready to step up and do what it takes to support an emerging progressive establishment? I hope so!
City government is part of the answer. But part of the answer lies, quite appropriately, outside of official government itself. It is only the participation, endorsement, and support of so many Friends of Eugene like you that give us hope for such a positive future for our community.
Kevin Matthews is President of Friends of Eugene and President of Southeast Neighbors