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e e e City boards and commissions. We now have six percent of all those on boards and commissions represented by minority groups. Our target is at least eight percent, and I am confident that we will make that. The Eugene police respond to hate crimes and do not dismiss them, because we recognize that we have to be on top of these things because if we are not, we open the door for hate groups coming into our community. Ed Coleman gave us a challenge at one meeting: he said, "Jeff, we need more minority police officers. Hire ten." Ed, I appreciate your doing that: we have hired one and we're on our way. We said we needed to do this respecting the pocketbook of the taxpayers, and so we have done this while living within our means. And the council is to be commended, along with the community, for giving energy into these areas. But that was the past, and we could say many more things, but time would not allow us to do that. I want us now to focus on some new challenges, three challenges to be specific, for the future. Challenges dealing with housing, sports and recreation, and downtown. The first of these is, I believe, to be our number one social concern. And that is the issue of housing and homelessness. As you may recall, housing and homelessness has been the council's number one goal for the past two years. It is time that we finish that work and get under construction in 1990. And who are the homeless? These are people who cannot improve their situa- tion without proper help, and they are often invisible--the people we see on street corners are people who often need professional help, they need treat- ment, but for them housing is not a priority. We're talking, when we talk about the homeless, of the 12 percent who are families with children; the 20 percent who are working but cannot afford housing; the 30 percent who have some mental problems but they still can function, but they're just poor because of that. Many are just poor folks trying to make it in life, trying to cope. It may surprise you, but in Lane County, nearly one living unit in 12 has two families in it. Two families living together. Also, more than one in five low-income Lane County families pay 75 percent, 75 percent of their income for housing. This is indeed America's disgrace and we cannot allow it to continue. But we must say no to the suggestions that we can solve the homeless problem by allowing people to sleep in their automobiles, or to camp in our parks, or that somehow the Federal government will come to our rescue, or somehow rent controls will build more houses in this community. Because these will do nothing to solve the problem. We need both a short-term and a long-term solution. I am proposing that as a community, we work together in a short- term solution and support a long-term solution that the council has recom- mended already. The short term solution I propose is that we open to the homeless families in our community our churches, our synagogues, and our lodges, to one homeless person at a time. Where we can limit the hours of their being there to the evening, where we can staff them with volunteers, where we can coordinate them through many different areas. We cannot inflict the people who have STATE OF THE CITY ADDRESS: MAYOR JEFF MILLER January 8, 1990 Page 3