Item B: Ordinance Concerning Goal 5 Natural Resources Study

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RECEIVED OCT - 3 2005 friends o feu g e n 13 CITY OF EUGENE ~ PLANNING DEPARTrv1ENT Date: To: From: Re: 3 October 2005 City of Eugene, Mayor, City Council, and City Staff Kevin Matthews, Friends of Eugene Goal 5 Ordinances and Water Resources Conservation Plan Dear Mayor, City Council, and Staff, Our community has worked long and hard on Goal 5-mandated natural resources planning. For the strong environmentally-concerned majority of Eugene citizens, protecting our rivers and ridges and wetlands is one of the fundamental roles of local government. Unfortunately, the clear and long-term public interest in strong protection of the best of our local environments comes sometimes into conflict with the private interests of real estate developers, builders, and speculators, and individual property owners are easily recruited to one side or the other. Ideally, the natural resource planning process provides a strong scientific basis for transparent, values-bases community decisions about environmental protection. I hope we can approach much closer to that ideal in the crucial next round of our natural resources planning process, scheduled to address 1900 acres of our best wildlife habitat, which are missing from the current proposal. The recent review and approval process for the the current Goal 5 proposal was very skewed toward service to individual property owners, while functionally obstructing public interest group engagement. Just for instance, the publication of the proposal online in the form of dozens and dozens of fractional PDF files, linked from across several different web pages, may have served the individual property representative who only needed to cross-reference to one site. But for public interest environmental advocates - who should really be a key constituency of Goal 5 planning efforts, the blizzard of pieces made constructive review next to impossible. This is our community's primary generational environmental initiative, and the surveys, analysis, ESEE and evaluation process should have been opened up to public engagement all along the way, instead of being polished to "completion" virtually behind closed doors. The next phase represents an important opportunity to do this right. The staff history in their council memo is he.lpful for context, but it doesn't acknowledge previous public involvement in the NRS, such as the special contribution made by 80 organized citizens via the Citizens nature Project. Nor does it even mention recent council policy regarding the excluded draft inventory items. Throughout, the proposed setbacks and protections are severely minimalist. Friend of Eugene · 10/3/05 · Page 1 /,.~eats /f=aE