10/23/08 City Council Newsletter

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approved the project. Once built, the A-gate infill project increases the amount of rentable square footage in the terminal building. This lowers the rates and charges for each airline serving the Eugene Airport. For more information contact Eugene Airport Director of Marketing and Public Relations Cathryn Stephens at 682-5430 or email to cathryn.e.stephens@ci.eugene.or.us. Eugene Airport Ranked First Place for Facility Management The Eugene Airport has been awarded the first place Airport Facility Council 2008 Award for Facility Management Excellence by the International Facility Management Association (IFMA). The award is designed to recognize and advance excellence in the field of airport facilities. This is the second consecutive year the council’s highest honor has been presented to Eugene Airport staff in recognition of outstanding achievements in facilities management. A panel of IFMA Airport Facilities Council judges determined the award winners in five categories based on the airport’s number of annual passengers. For airports with enplanements of less than one million, the Eugene Airport was again ranked number one. Award submissions were evaluated using the following five criteria: leadership, innovation, sustainability, customer service and operational efficiency. IFMA is the world’s largest and most widely recognized international association for professional facility managers, supporting more than 19,000 members in 60 countries. For more information, contact Director of Facilities and Development Brad Black at 682-5430 or bradley.g.black@ci.eugene.or.us. Public Works Receives $204,000 Grant to Help Restore Delta Ponds The City’s ongoing habitat enhancement project at Delta Ponds was recently awarded a $204,000 grant from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board (OWEB) to continue enhancing the riparian area of the ponds. The funding will be used to plant and establish native trees, shrubs, sedges, and rushes on 13.5 acres of riparian habitat and to control invasive species on 40 acres of riparian habitat. A portion of the grant funds will help vegetate over three acres of gently sloping riparian benches that were constructed this summer with partial funding from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The OWEB grant also complements additional riparian planting work being funded by an $86,000 grant from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Over the past several years, the City of Eugene has collaborated with local, state, and federal partners to restore this side-channel habitat of the Willamette River. The primary goals of this effort are: 1. Re-establish hydrological connections between the mainstem Willamette River and the Delta Ponds so that the Delta Ponds system serves as a side-channel to the Willamette River (as it did historically). 2. Improve in-stream and riparian habitat for a wide variety of species including Chinook salmon, American beavers, western pond turtles, river otters, and neo-tropical migratory birds. 3. Provide appropriate levels of interpretation and public access to the Delta Ponds. This work has helped make Delta Ponds one of the premier wildlife viewing areas in Eugene. Bald eagles, osprey, river otters, and a wide variety of other bird and wildlife species are regularly seen at Delta Ponds. For more information about the OWEB grant or the Delta Ponds Restoration Project, please contact Natural Resources Manager Eric Wold at 682-4842 or Principal Landscape Architect Scott Milovich at 682-6086. EPD's Website - The Latest! EPD's website is currently under incremental construction with the goal of making it a primary site for information on crime prevention, public safety, police activities in the community, and other news. The most recent addition - called The Latest! - is video content that will cover a range of topics and be refreshed twice monthly or as needed for breaking or high visibility topics. This is part of a move to position EPD's site as a primary place to come for EPD news. The first topic is an address by new Interim Chief Pete Kerns. Earlier this month, new graphic buttons were added to highlight the most popular and frequently accessed web features. To further streamline the community’s access to police dispatch information, EPD developed and launched a new web-based dispatch log. The new log, which automatically updates every few minutes to show police calls for service as they are concluded, provides police dispatch information much more rapidly than the previous web log, which was manually updated once each weekday. To view the website, go to www.eugene-or.gov/police. For more information, please contact Melinda Kletzok at 682-5124. EUGENE CITY COUNCIL NEWSLETTER PAGE 2 October 23, 2008