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ECLA: Baseline Assumptions ECONorthwest July 2009 Page 2 <br />provides further direction. First, the Eugene City Council expanded the analysis to look <br />not just at land (housing needs), but at land as well. Second, the <br />residential employment <br />scope is about collecting data and making extrapolations of land need based on existing <br />policy and on market conditions and trends; it is not about researching, recommending, <br />or adopting policies that could change those trends. <br />That last point led to a scope of work for 2008-2009 that is only part of a full UGB <br />evaluation. It makes the analysis sequential rather than simultaneous. It does not work <br />back and forth between estimates of land need, new policies that might change land <br />need (e.g., policies to increase density), and new estimates of land need. Rather, it aims <br />at making a determination of whether historical trends in growth and the type of land <br />development that accommodates that growth (or divergences from those trends based <br />on reasonable expectations about changes in market conditions) would result, over 20 <br />years, in an amount of buildable land consumption that is equal to or less than the <br />amount of buildable land estimated to be in the existing UGB now. <br />If so, then the City can use that determination to meet the requirements of HB 3337. If <br />not, the City will probably need to do additional work to either (1) identify land-use <br />efficiency measures to accommodate expected growth, (2) expand the UGB, or (3) both. <br />The discussion of land-use efficiency measures or UGB expansion is beyond the scope <br />of this project and beyond 2009. The scope of this project is limited to the collection and <br />assessment of existing data to (1) estimate the existing supply of buildable land inside <br />the Eugene portion of the current UGB, and (2) forecast the need for buildable land <br />based on an extrapolation of recent market trends in the context of existing City policy <br />(or reasonably expected changes in those market trends in the context of existing <br />policy). <br />If the analysis in this study demonstrates that the City is unlikely to have sufficient <br />land within the UGB, that does mean that the City must expand its UGB. Rather, it <br />not <br />means that the City must take another step to make that determination: it must identify, <br />evaluate, and discuss policies it could adopt to reduce the land deficiency. The City’s <br />ultimate determination of whether the UGB needs to be expanded must be done in the <br />context of policies that it will adopt that can reasonably be assumed to reduce the need <br />for that expansion (these policies are referred to collectively as “land –use efficiency <br />measures”). Evaluation of efficiency measures, if required, will occur in 2010 and <br />beyond. <br />The written products for this project will ultimately comprise dozens of analyses, <br />tables, and maps. Making sense of them as an integrated analysis is difficult enough for <br />people involved in the analysis, and more difficult still for community members who <br />want to understand the implications for City land-use policy at a general level. With <br />that point in mind, ECONorthwest proposed in its work plan that the technical <br />information be consolidated and represented in land-use scenarios. The most important <br />land-use scenario, and the one that the staff technical work and CAC review has <br /> <br /> <br />