CC Minutes - 05/14/08 Work Session

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the same results. She said staff believed the proposal was an important element of the stormwater program that could not be addressed through other means. She said the Planning Commission voted four to three to recommend approval of the water quality code amendments and directed the council’s attention to a copy of the commission’s minutes included in the agenda packet. Mr. Clark confirmed that it was primarily TMDL in the Willamette River that was being addressed by the proposal. He asked why the proposed strategy was determined to be the best choice if there was a menu of strategies for addressing TMDL. Ms. Walch replied that the City had submitted a TMDL implementation plan to DEQ in April 2008, but had not heard yet whether than plan would be approved. She said the plan relied heavily on existing activities that already addressed water quality, including the current proposal to fill gaps in the current program. Mr. Clark said he was interested in determining why staff felt the proposal was the best approach among a number of available strategies. Ms. Walch said if the subject waterways were not protected staff was concerned that activities and uses would cause further water quality degradation. Mr. Clark asked if the adjacent lands would be excluded from a buildable lands inventory. Tim Bingham, Lane County of Governments (LCOG), said evaluation of the proposal’s impact on buildable lands followed the methodology used in the metropolitan planning process and was included in the findings. He said there were reductions, but noted that a significant portion of the impact—slightly less than 50 percent—was on public right-of-way; some of the parcels that remained were public and some were private. He said based on the maximum impact to those parcels there was still a remaining surplus supply of buildable lands. Mr. Clark commented that a recent analysis of homelessness in the community determined there were approximately 2,000 people who were homeless each night. He said the challenge was to measure the human impact on water quality and TMDL of camping activities on the river bank. Ms. Taylor said the map appeared to indicate the Amazon headwaters were already protected. Ms. Walch replied most of the headwaters were protected by Goal 5 and the ones that were not were included in the proposal. Ms. Taylor asked if the City would be penalized if it did not improve water quality. DEQ representative Jared Rubin said the Willamette River had a number of water quality concerns and was not meeting standards for things like bacteria, temperature and some metals, but that was not just a City of Eugene issue and the State was working with a number of entities to implement programs to address water quality. He said there were many contributing uses upstream and it would be difficult to penalize Eugene for not meeting standards. He said the objective was to have TMDL limitation plans in place and Eugene had complied with that requirement. Ms. Taylor noted that Amazon Creek was within the City and had been out of compliance for several years. Mr. Rubin agreed that responsibility for Amazon Creek fell within the UGB and DEQ would like to see a plan and implementation activities. He said the proposal would protect existing resources. Ms. Taylor asked if there had been any consideration of removing the concrete lining from the Amazon channel. Ms. Walch said it had been a discussion point in the metro waterways study, but it was deemed to be so constrained and expensive that it was not included on the project list. She said there was a potential project to create a low flow channel in the concrete lined section to concentrate flow during dry parts of the year and mitigate temperature problems. MINUTES—Eugene City Council May 14, 2008 Page 2 Work Session