CC Minutes - 03/03/09 Joint Elected Officials

Home Browse Search

March 3, 2009 Joint Elected Officials Meeting City of Springfield City of Eugene Lane County Page 8 of 11 communities and one transit provider. Their Council’s acted independently with their individual Comp Plans. They also had more than one county involved. Mayor Leiken clarified that the Bend metro area only included Bend and the Medford metro area only included Medford. He discussed his disappointment with the Big Look that was recently concluded. He was concerned the Metro Plan would be diluted. With the implementation of HB3337, the major components of the Metro Plan would be taken out, and now each jurisdiction was putting forth separate Transportation Plans. He asked if the Metro Plan would be in name only in order to save money on developing separate Comp Plans. That was fine if it was needed to save funds, avoid legal costs and be supported by DLCD. He felt they would end up developing separate Comp Plans with the title of Metro Plan. He did not want to dilute this and develop a Metro Council. He was totally opposed to that. Those were issues to consider. There would be separate autonomy between the two cities. Future elected official, could decide to move toward developing separate Comp Plans. Councilor Lundberg said she totally agreed with Mayor Leiken and was fine with having a discussion whether or not the Metro Plan was a viable document. There was now a method to deal with Fire and Life Safety, water and sewer and other metro services. Once they had separate plans and separate UGBs, there wasn’t much left. There would still be times when they would want to collaborate and cooperate when appropriate, but she wanted to know what the jurisdictions wanted to do with the Metro Plan. Some of the issues such as farmland and sustainability may not all lead to the Metro Plan. Autonomy was very important. Councilor Zelenka said the next meeting needed to be more specific, with a conversation about the threshold of questions the Mayors mentioned. They needed to talk about specific fixes within this conversation. He asked staff to work on focusing the issues by calling their elected officials. He noted that he had grown up in the Bay Area where there was no planning, and felt that planning had served our area well and prevented a lot of bad things from happening. He was concerned this would go to an anti- planning conversation. He would like staff to work on focusing this conversation for the next meeting. Councilor Pryor said he could live with whatever was decided. The outcomes created less friction than the process. They needed to come up with a clear outcome, a way to get there and how they would govern how we got there. They needed to work hard to reestablish trust and accountability. He wanted respectable interactions along the way. II. Economic Development Response Team. Eugene City Manager Jon Ruiz said the planning for this item came out of a meeting with the Mayors and Commissioner Fleenor regarding economic development and job creation. They thought there could be value in creating a JEO subcommittee to have a coordinated effort around this topic, recognizing each jurisdiction would pursue some independent job creation and economic development, but that there was also value in coordination around this issue. The subcommittee could be represented by elected officials and coordinated through Springfield/Eugene/Lane County (SEL). They could help to form an economic development summit and could be used to help form some of the coordinated responses for stimulus packages. That coordination was already happening at the staff level. It could also help plan for some regional coordination around specific economic development tools and what they wanted the region to look like in the next economy. They were not asking to solve all of those issues today, but to get support from each jurisdiction to assign elected officials to work with staff to coordinate those efforts.