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Councilor Bettman said that the document should be a reflection of City policy and a way for lobbyists to represent what was in the City's best interest. She called attention to page 7 of the document and asked if the City of Eugene was on record as supporting electric utility deregulation. Councilor Nathanson said that it was not the City Council's choice to support or oppose deregulation since it was something that would be imposed by the federal government and State legislature. She said that, in the past, the City had worked with public utility districts and Congressman Peter DeFazio's office on developing proposals for how the State would actually implement deregulation. She commented that the Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB) had a different perspective on what the solution should be, so the current document's language needed to show that the City would act to protect the broad constituency that the council represented and not actually support specific proposals. She stressed that the council was not on record supporting deregulation but wanted to participate in shaping its administration. Councilor Bettman said that the language in the document could be stronger to reflect Councilor Nathanson's comments. Councilor Bettman called attention to Item b on page 21 of the document. She said that the text ".establishes system maintenance, preservation, and operation as a top, but not the only, priority for funding" did not fit the definition of a top priority. She suggested, "operation as a priority for funding" as alternative language. Calling attention to item f. of the same section, Councilor Bettman suggested strengthening the language to address implementation and call out specific efficiencies and alternatives like nodal development. There was general consensus. Moving on to page 22, Councilor Bettman called attention to recommendation 2. She said that it was premature to cite the downtown visioning document in legislative policies since there had been no work session on it yet and it had not been adopted as a plan. She called for the references to the downtown visioning document to be removed from the legislative policies. Mayor Torrey stressed the need for practicality in what the council asked its staff to do in Salem. He said he met earlier in the day with staff from the Oregon Department of Transportation and believed the legislature would be lucky if it managed to deal with the issue of transportation financing. If it did, he believed that any additional moneys allocated would be strictly targeted. Councilor Bettman called attention to page 26 of the document regarding congestion pricing. She said that congestion pricing was a viable strategy but that it never rose to the top of the list of strategies and having it present in the document took away from some of the other language that she was suggesting and some of the other priorities that had been brought up at City Council meetings. She believed that it diluted the rest of the recommendations. Mayor Torrey suggested taking the entire transportation question and send it back to staff or to the CCIGR to review it and finalize it. He commented that, at the current time, "It was just a bunch of words." Ms. Hamlen said that the Transportation package was currently being discussed at the legislature and was one of the subjects, along with Ballot Measure 7, that was changing on a daily basis. She suggested either making the section comprehensive for the many new legislators who would MINUTES--Eugene City Council December 11, 2000 Page 10 Regular Meeting