Item A: Annual Joint Meeting with Eugene Planning Commission

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Letter. from Larry E. Reed August 11, 2006 Page 2 · A shortage of residential land has helped (major factor) in driving up land costs, housing costs (i.e., cannot justify building a $200,000 range starter home on $100,000 to $130,000 priced lot. This has caused young families, lower/medium income people to look elsewhere for housing. This, in turn, has increased the price of rental ;housing. Others must look outside the metro area to meet their housing budget. · The community's failure to expand the Urban Growth Boundary has caused premature regional growth in Veneta, Junction City, Harrisburg, Creswell, Pleasant Hill, Cottage Grove, etc., communities without corresponding jobs. · The people that live in these outlying communities work in the metro area and are creating a need to widen existing highways and build.new roadways. Such roadway: improvements will be costly, since they will be for longer distances and go through more environmentally sensitive areas. · Eugene is becoming an elitist, two-class community, without any working middle class. Residents will just be the upper, middle, and higher income households, including wealthy retirees, and the working poor. This will create the need for public housing (homeless issues). As a planner, I want to be optimistic and believe we can do better than simply b,e an elitist community. · The utility companies cannot do proper nor adequate utility planning unless they know where growth will occur. Such improvements are expensive and must be phased in over years. My guess is that utility companies are 15 years behind in planning for major system expansion needed to handle the coming growth. You could ask them! 3. In Oregon, transportation and land use are tied together. All land use planning, and even minor changes in plan designation and/or rezoning must be supported by the transportation system. Eugene was 15 to 20 _______y~ar~J?ehinq in meeting_ its tran~ort~!ion need~~____Ih~_g~_9~ioIlJQ.J1ot____.__u_______________________ construct the West Eugene Parkway or some other improvements mean Eugene is even further behind.. All land use planning over the last 35 years relied on either having a new roadway called the Amazon Parkway, Roosevelt Parkway, or the West Eugene Parkway. This mitigation was needed for the planned land use and projected growth in traffic. In addition, the traffic congestion in west Eugene continues and is diverting (out of direction travel) to the Beltline Highway. This diverted traffic and the community's failure to provide additional connections across the river 19