CC Minutes - 07/15/08 Joint Elected Officials

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B. WORK SESSION: Public Safety Commissioner Stewart recalled that at the previous JEO meeting they had tried to find a long-term solution for public safety. He asked County Administrator Jeff Spartz to work through the item that was in the packet in order to garner direction. Mr. Spartz observed that everyone was aware that public safety in Lane County was heavily dependent on funding in the County’s General Fund and with the failure of Congress to reenact the Save Our Rural Schools appropriations in this fiscal year it had experienced a huge shortfall. He said going forward into the next presidential administration there was some hope that a successor program to the funding would be created but there was no certainty of that. He stated that the swap the County had made with the City of Eugene would help in the present year and the next year but it still left the County with a reduction of $13 million in public safety which would reach a magnitude of $15 million when the agreements with Springfield and Eugene run out. He declared that this was both a mid-term and a long-term problem. He suggested that a subcommittee or subgroup of the JEO that was cross-jurisdictional should be convened. He felt the lack of jail space was the “tip of the iceberg.” He wanted the JEO to consider what role the Public Safety Coordinating Council (PSCC) should play, what models should be used for the staff report, and how it should get the necessary public involvement that would fully appreciate the nuances of the issues and drive the group forward to a decision-making model. Commissioner Fleenor said he had raised the question in community dialogues of what it meant to be safe and how they should achieve public safety. He declared that they needed to get “back to basics” and ask fundamental questions like why Lane County existed and why the City of Eugene existed. He challenged the JEO to answer the question of what it meant to be safe. He averred that they would never reach the target if they did not know what the target was. He remarked that more people died on Highway 126 than died as a result of crime. Councilor Bettman asked what a third party evaluation of the system would mean. She believed that the County wanted to move toward a regionalized model with regionalized decision-making. She did not understand under what authority the JEO could be a decision-making body. She averred that the City of Eugene had different community values; it had a Police Auditor and the other jurisdictions did not. She thought a merge of public safety services would cause Eugene to lose “what [was] very specifically Eugene community values.” While she was concerned about the County’s public safety crisis she thought the proposed model was “going down the wrong path.” Eugene Councilor Clark noted that they had already “gone down the road” of proposing a public safety district. He surmised that regionalizing the response to public safety issues contained some challenges. He pointed out that criminals did not respect boundaries and he did not imagine that the public safety response should either. He admired what the combined fire departments had done in their third battalion response between Eugene and Springfield. He related that they look for how they could fill in each others’ gaps. He liked the idea of looking into creative ways to collaborate. He believed that regional economic development was the answer as it would provide the appropriate tax base to address the shortfall on a countywide basis. Eugene Councilor Poling concurred. He believed the discussion should be on a broader spectrum and should address the prevention, intervention and treatment services. He said the perpetrators did not care about city limits and a person calling for help did not care what color the car or uniform were of the respondent to the call. He remembered the discussion they had several years earlier about combining some of the present MINUTES—Joint Elected Officials— July 15, 2008 Page 7 Lane Board of County Commissioners and Eugene and Springfield City Councils