Item C: Eugene Comprehensive Lands Assessment

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Recommendations for Baseline Assumptions ECONorthwest April 2009 Page 2 provides further direction. First, the Eugene City Council expanded the analysis to look not just at land (housing needs), but at land as well. Second, the residential employment scope is about collecting data and making extrapolations of land need based on existing policy and on market conditions and trends; it is not about researching, suggesting, or adopting policies that could change those trends. The written products for this project will ultimately comprise dozens of analyses, tables, and maps. Making sense of them as an integrated analysis is difficult enough for people involved in the analysis, and more difficult still for community members who want to understand the implications for City land-use policy at a general level. With that point in mind, ECONorthwest proposed in its work plan that the technical information be consolidated and represented in The most important land-use scenarios. land-use scenario, and the one that the staff technical work and CAC review will be focusing on, is the one related to historical trends and current policies in land use consumption. If there is a broad range of uncertainty about some of assumptions that compose the historical-trend scenario, then it may make sense to run some variations on that scenario. This memorandum describes the land need based on historical trends, which reflect the impact of current policies on residential development in Eugene. It presents the key assumptions about historical trends. Based on the CAC’s and TAC’s discussion of this material the consultant team will (1) do more work to refine the assumptions that define the need side the historical trend analysis (ECO), (2) make final adjustments to the buildable lands inventory (LCOG), and (3) combine the results of ‘1’ and ‘2’ to assess whether Eugene has enough land within the UGB to accommodate expected growth given existing policies. City staff will present a tentative schedule for that process to the City Council at the end of April. The remainder of this memorandum discusses key assumptions in the land needs analysis. 2 K EY ASSUMPTIONS In previous meetings and memoranda, ECONorthwest described the assumptions that are needed to model land need for the Eugene UGB over the 2010-2030 period. Table 1 lists these assumptions; underlining denotes what ECONorthwest believes to be a key assumption and one that the CAC, Planning Commission, or City Council may wish to comment on. Key assumptions are assumptions that (1) potentially have a large impact on land needs, and (2) are most likely to be affected by City policies. Subsequent sections of this memorandum provide information about those key assumptions as they relate to historical trends.