CC Minutes - 09/09/02 Work Session

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number of trips. She questioned whether the adjustment was a fair way to assess the impact of a development. She had some doubts it was fair. Ms. Bettman said that the issue was a complex one. She thought that large commercial uses on the periphery were attractors and became destination points, forcing the City to provide the infrastructure for residents to reach them. She suggested that the policy issue before the council was whether the City should subsidize development on the fringe, or attempt to recover as much of the cost of infrastructure as possible. She said that what was not paid by development was paid by the taxpayer either in the form of money or diminished services. To access a development built on the periphery, a resident had to drive both there and back; at the current time, the methodology only charged for one-half the trips such development generated because the average trip ends were allocated to the person accessing the development and the other half was allocated to the development. However, it was the decision of the development to locate in the periphery, creating the need for the additional infrastructure. She did not think there was any argument that such decisions had a geographic and economic impact. Ms. Bettman pointed to council policies calling for full cost recovery, and further noted that Eugene was in the lower one- third of Oregon cities in terms of SDC rates. Mr. Kelly shared Ms. Nathanson's concern about the lack of data to support an adjustment. However, he believed that there was a great deal of information to support the concept of a geographic adjustment. He pointed to Growth Management Study Policy 14, which stated that "Development shall be required to pay the full cost of extending infrastructure and services, except that the City will examine ways to subsidize the costs of providing infrastructure or offer other incentives that support higher-density, in-fill, mixed-use, and redevelopment." He said that a geographic adjustment addressed both the first element of the policy by recognizing the higher cost to serve development on the periphery, and by recognizing the need for the fee structure to reflect the lower impact of development in the core. Mr. Kelly thought options 1 and 3 were a way to help implement the policy if it was to have meaning. Mr. Meisner shared the concerns expressed by Ms. Nathanson. He wanted a stronger statement of how each option accomplished the council's goals and how each implemented the council's policies, rather than know how much revenue was raised. He wanted to know why the committee recommended no change in light of the policies the council said it wanted to implement. Mr. Meisner said that he did not know how such adjustments worked. He said that he understood wanting to encourage development downtown. However, he pointed out that people had to travel downtown to reach downtown and it had an impact on adjacent residents, and to the extent the council was encouraging people to travel downtown, it was creating a "commuter transportation hell" for older streets, citing Jefferson, Chambers, and Polk streets in particular. Mr. Meisner said that impact needed to be recognized. He did not want to give up the principle involved but did not know what the options did to accomplish the goals. Mr. Rayor agreed that the issue was complex but he thought it was reasonable to have such an adjustment. He asked City Attorney Jerome Lidz to comment on the legality of the adjustment. Mr. Lidz confirmed that a geographic adjustment to the SDC was legal if there was an engineering basis for the adjustment. He added that the methodology for the SDC should reflect the impact of the development on City infrastructure, so if development in different pads of the city had a different impact, it would be appropriate to charge a differential fee. MINUTES--Eugene City Council September 9, 2002 Page 5 Work Session