Item 2A: Approval of City Council Minutes

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drug activity in the adjacent condominium. He said he had raised his concerns repeatedly with the Eugene Police Department (EPD) and the Woodtique Homeowners Association but he did not feel his allegations were adequately looked into. He stated that further information was available on his Web site seethelaw- suck.com. Zachary Vishanoff , Patterson Street, commended City Manager Dennis Taylor for his work. He likened City Manager Taylor’s departure to “shooting the messenger.” He regretted that the City would be “kicked off center” at a time of key growth. Mr. Vishanoff averred that the Police Chief had done a good job. He was glad that the Police Auditor’s office was in place. He hoped that the populace would not consider the Police Auditor to be a “magic bullet” that would take care of the problems. He felt the taser proposal was going “around the back door” of the police reform and public trust. He considered the whole council to be a police review board. He urged councilors, if they had any misgivings about the use of tasers, to hold back. He did not want a controversial item like tasers, which could potentially kill people, to come into play at this time. Mr. Vishanoff passed out copies of Radical Evolution to half of the council and indicated he would bring more copies to the next meeting. He noted that he had already given a copy to Mayor Piercy. Mark Rabinowitz , PO Box 51222, Eugene, noted that the council had just been provided a presentation by the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) on the Interstate 5 bridge project over the Willamette River. He understood that $70 million was allocated for the bridge construction and that $110 million was allocated for collateral projects, which he considered to be “unspecified costs.” He wanted the City to require a breakdown of the costs. He asserted that if the bridge was built to the standard of the width of Interstate 5, money could be saved and a “fancier bridge” could be built. He did not believe that traffic would increase between now and 2030. He alleged that as gasoline became more expensive and “gas rationing was implemented,” traffic would be reduced. He believed that part of the environmental impact of the bridge was its size. Mr. Rabinowitz registered his unhappiness with the basketball arena, which he asserted was erroneously proclaimed to be a carbon-neutral project. He said he had heard that LTD would spend more money on the EmX route because mistakes had been made on the original route. He closed by saying that accountability was the prerequisite for democracy. Majeska Seese-Green , PO Box 1214, Eugene, said she had been pleased by Ed Russo’s article in the newspaper regarding the City’s city manager/city council form of government. She thought the piece in the paper written by the EPEA representative complained about things having to do with the independent police auditor related to this form of government. She had sought to learn about the City’s form of government and understood it to delineate that the City Manager and the City Council had equal power but that the power was carried out in different ways. She believed that the community needed to have a discussion about the city government and that it needed to revisit the City Charter. th Eric Gran , 808 West 10 Avenue, recalled that he had come before the Budget Committee and City Council one year earlier because the situation at Monroe Park had reached a crisis. He said there had been groups of 50 to 60 “partiers,” drug dealers and users, prostitutes performing sexual acts on “johns,” and other situations that compromised the safety of people who wished to use the park for recreation. He stated that police bicycle patrol teams had been funded to improve the behavior of the park users and the improvement there had been profound. He asserted that the funding had been diverted and he was already MINUTES—Eugene City Council June 11, 2007 Page 2 Regular Meeting