Item 1: Key Urban Services/Jurisdictional Authority

Home Browse Search

greatly influence future growth, infrastructure, and density issues. Small rural communities struggle to survive. Technology is constantly changing and presenting a new wave of issues for the future in terms of shopping, entertaining, working, and commuting. E. ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THE EUGENE/SPRINGFIELD METRO PLAN The Metro Plan has logically developed in certain ways that have resulted in a number of significant accomplishments: 1.It was the cornerstone of LCDC acknowledgment - greater certainty and local control was returned to the region. 2.It treated the urban area as a region - common waters, airshed, transportation links, transit system, scenic assets, and recognized common interests in the housing market, jobs, commuting for workers, shopping opportunities, social interactions, cooperative government services, and higher education. 3.It contained general goals and objectives - and policies that covered gaps in local master planning. 4.It allowed each jurisdiction to develop more detailed goals and policies (Like Eugene’s Community Goals and Springfield’s ‘Project Listen’ and Springfield Tomorrow). It allowed each City and Lane County to construct their individual zoning and ordinances (within the general goals and policies of the Metro Plan). 5.It continued the basis for the Metropolitan Policy Committee (MPC) and regular coordination meetings of the Metro Planning Directors. 6.It established stability that made it possible for progress in servicing River Road and Santa Clara with needed sewers, bringing fire protection to Douglas Gardens and parts of South Springfield, and developing plans for Glenwood. 7.It set the stage for the urban transition study - and the decision of the County to concentrate its planning administration on rural Lane County and to get out of the more intensive administrative urban planning and building permit business (the County did not directly provide water or sewers - two major growth-controlling urban services). 8.It allowed for private development that has been successful in creating housing and economic development during the past 27 years and that has made the Eugene/Springfield Metro area the second largest economic engine in Oregon. The Metro Plan is viewed in its original form as a general plan within which the individual governments could control more local, refined planning to suit their unique situations, attitudes, and politics. The Metro Plan has been viewed at times as a source of pride and accomplishment because it expressed our community's direction and met the statewide framework, and it reflected our cooperative approach. It embodied the spirit of a community unlike most others, where we found more in common and worked out our differences through thoughtful negotiations. The Metro Plan also allowed the partners to be different. The Metro Plan reflected a spirit as much as a substance about colors or lines on a map, or a specific policy. 4