CC Minutes - 09/29/10 Work Session

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Mr. Poling encouraged staff to reach out to the private sector to form such partnerships to help obtain the goals the council sought throughout the entire community, and not just the organization. He hoped the City's copyright was not a barrier to expanding the use of the tool. Mr. Zelenka agreed with Mr. Poling about reaching out to the private sector and noted that such filters were used quite often by the private sector. He commended the examples offered by staff. Mr. Zelenka acknowledged the many staff members who had worked on the tool and suggested it would lead to better decisions based on more well- rounded thinking. He reported that the Sustainability Commission had looked at several different TBL models and he thought the City's tool was one of the best. It struck a good balance between simplicity and complexity. Speaking to Mr. Poling's comment, Mr. Zelenka suggested the City had copyrighted use of the tool not to limit it, but to protect it and maintain its integrity. Mr. Zelenka noted staff's application of the TBL tool to the next agenda item and reported that he found the resulting information to be valuable. He wanted to see the TBL tool regularly reflected in future council agenda item summaries. Mr. Brown thought the TBL tool a good supplement to the analytic tools already in use by the City. He did not find it particularly revolutionary and suggested that depending on the project, half of the questions were unlikely to apply to most situations. He suggested they represented a useful checklist to remind the staff and council of things that they could have forgotten. Responding to a question from Mr. Brown, Ms. Osborn said the Sustainability and Planning commissions had formed a joint committee that planned to analyze the West Eugene EmX route options using the TBL tool. Mr. Brown was skeptical about that as he did not see how it would be useful but looked forward to seeing the outcome and acknowledged he could be proven wrong. Mayor Piercy suggested the TBL was a supplemental analysis tool that touched on three factors — environment, economics, and equity —that were associated with everything the City did. The tool was an attempt to keep all three factors at the forefront of the City's thinking all the time. Mayor Piercy believed the tool would help the community become more sustainable. She considered the TBL framework to be important work and hoped the City shared it with some of the national organizations it worked with as she thought they would be very interested. Mr. Smith reported that he had presented the TBL framework to attendees at the Oregon Recreation and Park Association Conference and he hoped to take it to the national convention. He emphasized the interest of those in attendance, who had evaluated the conference using the TBL tool. Ms. Taylor suggested the potential of the TBL tool would be ignored in the same way she thought the City's Growth Management Policies had been ignored. She tended to be skeptical of formulaic approaches as it was easy to fit anything into a formula. She hoped that when people talked about social equity they were thinking of long -term social equity rather than short-term social equity. There were things that might be good for the future but could appear to be hurting someone right now. Ms. Taylor asked if staff considered social equity when the library instituted fees for reshelving reserved books patrons failed to pick up. She pointed out that was harder on poor people than the more affluent. She also asked if social equity was considered when the City closed Amazon Pool for swim meets at the MINUTES— Eugene City Council September 29, 2010 Page 2 Work Session