Item 2A: Approval of City Council Minutes

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ATTACHMENT G January 13, 2009 Joint Elected Officials Meeting City of Springfield City of Eugene Lane County Page 7 of 10 Road and Santa Clara were finally getting some notability, because when Bethel was incorporated, there was not conversation with those citizens. That needed to be avoided in the future. Commissioner Fleenor said he was not proposing to destroy the Metro Plan, but rather evolve it to a point where they looked at it layer by layer to see where the Metro Plan ended and the Comprehensive Plans began. He believed that the vast majority of the Metro Plan was the individual Comp Plans that had been incorporated. Every city had to have a Comp Plan. His proposal was to look at what was under the umbrella of the Metro Plan, and determine if there was a way to separate it into the separate Comp Plans, and he felt this could happen. He disagreed that there was no way to get rid of the Metro Plan. He was interested in looking at the Metro Plan only if we could get more efficiency at a lower cost. In the process of their analysis, they needed to make sure efficiencies and costs were considered. Commissioner Stewart said he would like to know from staff the status of the Metro Plan and what could or could not be done with the plan. He believed that in the current economic times, we needed to work together as partners, with the ability to have good communication and the ability to make decisions. Some of the frustration was not being able to make final decisions in these joint meetings. He would like to be able to make decisions, make a case about the issues and work together as team. They were all equal partners and all dealt with these issues. Commissioner Handy said he appreciated the comments from Commissioner Stewart. How we worked together was important. A large number of residents in Santa Clara and River Road were impacted by these issues. He asked staff for the relationship of urban and rural reserves and the coterminous of changing the Metro Plan boundaries. Mr. Howe said the Metro Plan boundary proposal to move the outer Metro Plan boundary to the inner UGB was somewhat separate from the discussion of urban reserves and could be done by this body. There were provisions in the statutes for how the urban reserves were identified. Rural reserves were only in State statutes for the Portland Metro area, not outside that area. That didn’t mean that farmland protection areas couldn’t be developed by the Metro partners and adopted to apply in the same fashion as a rural reserve area. Commissioner Dwyer said rural reserve concepts were not only for the metropolitan cities. The County didn’t need the cities’ permission and could do it on their own. If they were created unilaterally, there would be benefit as the cities moved towards those areas. He felt a smaller subcommittee was needed (2 Commissioners and 2 Councilors from each city) to figure out the issues and package them. They could then vote as an entity on the whole package. He said he loved this community and wanted to preserve the quality of life for his family and future generations. They needed to think about their strategy as a whole package. Eugene City Manager Jon Ruiz said he had grown up in Los Angeles and appreciated the interest by this group in trying to do some current and long-range planning of land use. The way Eugene staff could help the most was to know what the policy makers wanted to accomplish so they could work with staff from the other jurisdictions to figure out how those things could be accomplished. They would work at the timing requested by the policy makers. Lane County Administrator Jeff Spartz said they all served the same constituents whether the Metro Plan was in place or not. They needed a vision on how to work together and that could be the appropriate task