CC Minutes - 11/25/98 Work Session

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Mr. Johnson contrasted the current neighborhood recognition policy and the proposed mission statement and said they were substantially different. He perceived a major change in what was being proposed, suggesting that it was more "outside of the box" than it appeared. Mr. Johnson said the first two bulleted items in the statement, Sponsoring neighborhood improvement projects and social events and Providing a forum to identify, discuss, and resolve neighborhood issues, were key. He said staff was seeking confirmation of the policy direction, and would return with specific proposals for implementation. Ms. Taylor said that newsletters were at the heart of helping the groups to exist and succeed. She believed the more active groups were those that managed to get out a newsletter. Ms. Taylor said that newsletters let residents outside the board know when general membership meetings were happening. She believed neighborhood organizations needed to hold at least four to six general membership meetings each year and that those meetings needed to be held soon after the publication of the proposed citywide newsletter. She said the newsletter should include a description of the issues the council was working on to generate input from the meeting attendees. Ms. Taylor said that the neighborhood organization meetings were a good venue for a discussion of citywide issues as well as neighborhood issues. Mr. Meisner did not think there was a one-size-fits-all solution to the Neighborhood Program redesign. He said neighborhoods differ from each other, and there were sometimes differences between subneighborhoods. He said that the most effective neighborhood effort he had seen during his tenure on the council was that organized around the A&K development proposal. Mr. Meisner suggested that communities could be built at the neighborhood level by empowering neighborhood associations, local businesses, residents, community groups, and other interested people to organize themselves either on a neighborhood basis or around an issue. He noted that on the Whiteaker Community Council, all residents, property owners, business owners and operators were considered members but could not vote unless they had attended at least one meeting in the last year. He suggested that was a problem because not everyone was free to attend meetings. Mr. Meisner was interested in the concept of the matching grant because it would require the neighborhood organizations to put forth an effort to receive the support. He said that if that approach was chosen, he hoped it could be sufficiently flexible to allow small groups of neighbors to take advantage of it. Mr. Meisner was cautious about focusing neighborhood organizations around elementary schools because it would create the potential for many more organizations; however, he believed that many organizations represented neighborhoods so large and disparate that the organizations do not work. Mr. Tollenaar agreed with Ms. Taylor that the newsletters were essential to the success of the neighborhood organizations. Newsletters kept residents "plugged in" even when they could not attend meetings. He said the neighborhoods needed assistance with both production and distribution. Mr. Tollenaar said that in some cases it would not be useful to redraw neighborhood boundaries, but in other areas it was needed. He favored aligning neighborhood boundaries with elementary school attendance area boundaries and urged that the concept be followed up in areas where it would enhance the program, such as in his ward. He said that there were 26 elementary MINUTES--Eugene City Council November 25, 1998 Page 6 11:30 a.m.