Item B: River Avenue Improvements

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River Avenue Stakeholders Minority Report Received 11/17/05 River Avenue Stakeholders Minority Report This report is submitted by the River Road Community Organization representatives Krista Rojas and Teresa Damron. Rob Handy served as an alternate representative and has contributed as well. We appreciate the Eugene City Council's direction to staff to gather more input from the community before proceeding with the River Avenue Road Improvement Project. It is in the spirit of building on the values that emerged from the River Road Santa Clara Urban Services Committee of voice, equity, collaboration and trust that we offer our report. While the majority report covers the stakeholders meetings primarily. we are including our sense of the larger process, including stakeholder conversations and recent developments. We address two areas: the public input process and our recommendations for the actual road improvement project. Improve the public input process for future projects. We believe Council's intent is to increase communication and trust between the City of Eugene, the adjacent property owners and the River Road neighborhood. Unfortunately increased trust was not an outcome of this process. For that reason we are very concerned to hear this process being publicized as a "model" for future road improvement projects. Our concerns are not personal in nature; we commend the staff for their professionalism and hard work on a challenging project. We do however believe the process can and should be improved for future projects. We recommend creating written goals and procedure. Perhaps City engineering staff. the facilitator and interested members of the Neighborhood Leaders Council and this stakeholders group could meet to debrief and develop process guidelines for the future. In addition to the absence of clearly defined goals and procedures, the public and engineering department staff disagreed from the outset about the scope of the specific options that should be considered. The public issues pertinent to this project that we felt should be included were: . questioning the classification and design requirements of River Avenue . consideration of future transportation needs given pending ODOT study of Beltline . whether a simple overlay could be done for part or all of roadway until the ODOT study was completed . safety . bicycle and pedestrian access . trees and green spaces along roadways . stormwater quality and collection systems . property owner's assessments . preservation of neighborhood character River Avenue Stakeholders Minority Report Page 1 of 3