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EUGENE CITY COUNCIL AGENDA ITEM SUMMARY Work Session: Downtown City Space Master Planning Meeting Date: February 23, 2005 Agenda Item Number: B Department: Central Services Staff Contact: Mike Penwell www. cl. eugene, or. us Contact Telephone Number: 682-5547 ISSUE STATEMENT This work session is a follow-up to a January 10, 2005, work session, requesting council direction on implementing a master planning and public participation process for the development of a downtown city government complex. BACKGROUND In 2001, the council began considering a long-range plan for replacing City office space in the downtown area. Since that time, numerous council meetings have taken place and decisions have been made to develop the long-term plan. A summary of the council's direction on elements of the Downtown City Space Plan to October 2003 is included in Attachment A. The council action history through January, 2005, is detailed in Attachment B. On November 22, 2004, the council agreed, in concept, to move forward with a master planning and public participation process for the purpose of informing future decisions related to a city government complex. The council did not support committing funding for a master planning process without more information. Staff indicated it would return to the council with a more detailed scope of work related to this process and to ask for authorization for budget resources for this purpose. On January 10, 2005, the council reviewed the staff recommendation to implement a public participation and master planning process in stages, providing council the opportunity to authorize the funding level at each step in the process. The recommendation was to fund an initial process scoping element at the level of $75,000. The council provided staff with comments on both the process and the range of issues to be addressed in the design of the public participation component of the master plan. The council also indicated that the cost of the scoping component still seemed high, and requested staff to come back with a more defined process. Mayor Piercy requested that the council provide specific direction to help staff refine the project proposal, and encouraged staff to elicit information from councilors in order to reflect all of the council's concerns. Councilor Bettman provided comments to staff through e-mail, as she was unable to attend the work session. In reviewing the January work session, the council's comments can be grouped into two broad policy directions (the council's comments are summarized in Attachment C). On one hand, the council is supportive of involving the public in a range of policy questions related to a City Hall Complex, and would like a collaborative level of public involvement in developing the master plan. This general direction could lead to the council "delegating" some level of decision-making responsibility to these public involvement processes. One suggestion included use of a "citizen jury," which in its purest form would actually delegate to the citizen jury the authority to make final decisions on the policy questions submitted to the jury. L:\CMO\2005 Council Agendas\M050223\S050223B.doc