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MINUTES <br />Eugene City Council <br />Council Chamber --City Hall <br />777 Pearl Street — Eugene, Oregon <br />May 14, 2012 <br />7:30 p.m. <br />COUNCILORS PRESENT: George Brown, Pat Farr, Betty Taylor, Andrea Ortiz, George Poling, <br />Mike Clark, Chris Pryor, Alan Zelenka. <br />Her Honor Mayor Kitty Piercy called the May 14, 2012, regular meeting of the Eugene City Council to <br />order. <br />1. PUBLIC FORUM <br />Mayor Piercy reviewed the rules of the Public Forum. She limited speakers to two minutes. <br />Mark Robinowitz, Ward 1, recommended the City adopt the recommendations of Richard Heinberg and <br />his institute. He said exponential growth could no longer continue as the planet had reached its finite <br />ability to grow. He noted the current price of oil and contrasted that to local government predictions, <br />which served as the basis for transportation projections. Oil production in Alaska had peaked and if <br />dropped 20 to 30 percent it would no longer flow in the winter. He recommended the community think <br />about the energy limits that transcended political partisanship and recognize the finite limits of the planet. <br />Mary Salinas, a Springfield resident, spoke of the plight of the homeless. Their circumstance was <br />extreme but they were human. She shared an article from The Register -Guard entitled Building Hope in <br />the Barrio, which detailed the efforts of a local resident to build houses for low- income residents in South <br />America. She contrasted the costs of those houses to the costs of the proposed Capstone development and <br />suggested that 22,000 homes could be built for the same amount. <br />Wendy Butler Boyeson, Ward 1, advocated for the West Eugene EmX route. She averred buses were <br />currently full and the route was needed, particularly for the disabled who were dependent on public <br />transit. <br />Michael Todd, homeless, averred he had been harassed because an officer passed him five times while he <br />was eating. He further averred that the homeless were given a death sentence because they had no place <br />to sleep. He questioned how the City could be short of money when it was giving out tax breaks. He <br />discussed his experience in the Municipal Court while dealing with an exclusion order. He said he was <br />barred from the bus and the mission and questioned what the world was coming to. <br />Devin Gates, Ward 7, called on the City to outsource the Rental Housing Code for greater impartiality. <br />He believed the added element of energy efficiency went beyond the original scope of the code and would <br />harm tenants in the long -term. Most landlords were not wealthy and it took time to recover one's costs. <br />The costs would cause many landlords to leave the business and prices would rise substantially. <br />MINUTES— Eugene City Council May 14, 2012 Page 1 <br />Regular Meeting <br />