CC Minutes - 02/12/08 Joint Elected Officials

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Commissioner Sorenson remarked that he would prefer that the group give some direction and say that the MPC process should be reformed. He reiterated that the number of jail beds would be reduced to 12 under the proposed budget and pointed out that currently the Lane County Jail housed eight people suspected of murder. He questioned why a process would be set up to meet quarterly if they were not meeting about “front burner issues.” Councilor Zelenka did not want to create more bureaucracy. He averred that they should fix what they had instead of creating something new. Councilor Zelenka thought the largest problem with the TransPlan issue was that it needed a functional prioritization scheme for the community about what the transportation needs were and where the funding should go. He hoped they would end up creating some committees made up of equal representation from the three different bodies on transportation, on planning, on public safety, and potentially on homelessness issues. He thought the committees could create work products for the review of the whole body. He echoed Councilor Taylor in that these were the issues that the individual jurisdictions could not do alone. Councilor Ortiz acknowledged that there was a looming crisis. She did not want to walk away from the meeting without having a mechanism in place to address some of the issues. She said while fixing the roads and amending the Metro Plan were important, if they were not keeping the community safe and were not addressing issues with Emergency Medical Services and the youth issues then they were not tackling real needs. Mayor Piercy said she would like to know how the City should look at the situation the other jurisdictions were in and to identify the challenges and determine how to get together to work on them. She also thought they needed to find ways to address these issues legislatively. Councilor Woodrow remarked that part of the problem with understanding Lane County’s situation was that the cities did not have the same information that the County had. He envisioned the process that Commis- sioner Green suggested as providing the public complete access to this information. Councilor Woodrow said the people who work on the MPC did not work on public safety. He agreed that the Joint Elected Officials should meet quarterly and also supported statements made that suggested that any subcommittees of this meeting should report to the quarterly meeting and not individual jurisdictions. Councilor Pryor did not want to create something that duplicated what already existed. He felt that if the MPC was working it should be kept as it was. He also supported quarterly meetings of the Joint Elected Officials. Regarding the formation of subcommittees, Councilor Pryor said the groups should have defined purposes and mandates and when the work was completed, the groups should be disbanded. Councilor Bettman did not think “spawning” subcommittees would answer the questions. Commissioner Green related an example of a jurisdictional partnership that had been formed to collabora- tively address a service provision issue. He stated that the City of Charlotte, North Carolina and Mecklen- burg County had gotten together over 20 years ago because the county had arrived at the conclusion that it could no longer afford to provide the full services of the county. He said the county approached the City of MINUTES—Joint Elected Officials— February 12, 2008 Page 6 Lane Board of County Commissioners and Eugene and Springfield City Councils