Item 3A: Approval of City Council Minutes

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overview the recommendation of the Public Works Rates Advisory Committee (RAC). He acknowledged the complexity of developing an systems development charge (SDC) methodology and recognized the members of the advisory committee: Michael Roberts of the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce, Paul Nicholson of the Friends of Eugene, Merle Bottge of the League of Women Voters, Paul Harrison of the Citizens for Public Accountability, Barbara Roberts representing professional engineers, Doug Weber of the Lane County Home Builders Association, David Hinkley of the Neighborhood Leaders Council, Scott Clark of the Voter Pool, and John Prior of the Neighborhood Pool. He thanked the RAC members on behalf of the Public Works Department for their commitment and involvement. He also acknowledged staff contributing to the effort and thanked consultant Debbie Galardi, who was present, for her assistance. Mr. McVey said the two issues before the council were the applicability of parks SDCs to non-residential development and the growth allocation method to be used for neighborhood parks. Regarding the first issue, Mr. McVey reminded the council that the examination of the applicability of the parks SDC to nonresiden- tial development was pursued at its direction. He reported that the staff team worked with the RAC and developed what it believed was the basis for a rational and defensible nonresidential charge; but the RAC disagreed, believing the staff recommendation was both difficult to explain, administer, and defend. The RAC instead recommended a hotel/motel charge as an aspect of the residential charge. However, staff prepared an ordinance consistent with the council’s earlier direction to forward to a public hearing. Mr. McVey addressed the second issue, that of methodological choice as it applied to the allocation of capacity to growth attributable to neighborhood parks. He reminded the council that the Lane County Home Builders Association raised issues earlier in the review process related to the use of the system-wide capacity analysis used in the methodology, which lead to further work by the RAC, resulting in the development of a service-based allocation method to be applied uniformly to all development regardless of geographic location. Mr. McVey said staff also provided a summary of the key elements of the parks SDC in Attachment C to the AIS. Table 1 of the AIS provides the relative effect of the various options before the council; the numbers were based on figures that were two years old, and he recommended the application of an inflation factor. Mr. McVey said that throughout their development of the proposed SDC, staff and the RAC considered the issues of legislative compliance, public acceptance, administrative feasibility, revenue adequacy, equity, and technical defensibility. He believed the proposal met those criteria, and hoped to have a final methodology available to the public by mid-November, prior to the public hearing schedule for January 16, 2007. Mayor Piercy called on the council for questions and comments. Ms. Bettman averred that the RAC was heavily weighted in favor of the development sector. As the SDC methodology was a technical matter and the City had engineers that could develop the methodology, Ms. Bettman questioned whether the City needed such an industry-weighted committee to work with staff to bring policy to the council. She did not think it was fair; staff should bring the council a recommendation, which should then be open for public discussion and possible modifications. She also thought the committee process dragged out the timeline for the SDC to be revised. She maintained that, after participating in the development of the SDC rates, the industry members sued the City. She called for the RAC to be sunsetted. Regarding the staff recommendation for the nonresidential parks SDC, Ms. Bettman said the staff recommendation was a justifiable calculation. She thought just charging hotels was arbitrary and not supportable. MINUTES—Eugene City Council October 25, 2006 Page 5 Work Session