CC Minutes - 06/08/09 Meeting - Laserfiche WebLink

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M I N U T E S Eugene City Council Regular Meeting Council Chamber—Eugene City Hall 777 Pearl Street—Eugene, Oregon June 8, 2009 7:30 p.m. COUNCILORS PRESENT: Chris Pryor, George Brown, Andrea Ortiz, George Poling, Mike Clark, Alan Zelenka, Betty Taylor, Jennifer Solomon. Her Honor Mayor Kitty Piercy called the meeting of the Eugene City Council to order. 1. PUBLIC FORUM Mayor Piercy reviewed the rules of the Public Forum. Judith Van , 89326 Old Coburg Road, noted that she had spoken to the council on a prior occasion on the issue regarding the Local Improvement District (LID) on Chad Drive/Old Coburg Road. She declared that the City could not afford it and neither could she. She also did not want the improvements and did not believe it would benefit her. She opined that it would not provide the City with $2 million in benefits. She said she would be losing her trees and most of her frontage. She averred that because it was a detriment to her property, she should not be assessed the amount the City intended to assess her. She did not want to pay for improvements that would not help her property. She said she had done everything but beg. She related that she could not afford to pay $13,000 and she considered the interest the City would charge to be unjust. She indicated her willingness to pay for the sewer line, however. She felt that the street assessment policy was not an appropriate way for the City to conduct itself. Teri Reifer , 695 Crest Drive, asked the council to delay the Crest Drive project until after the City Council reconsidered the assessment policy. She noted that the last code change had taken two years, but she did not think another code change should take that long. She had heard a lot of the councilors indicate that a remonstrance would give them pause. She understood that the bids had come in lower for the project because of the economy, but said it was important to remember that the economy was hurting the residents, too. Kim Heddinger , 763 Crest Drive, Ward 2, shared her comments regarding the Crest Drive/Storey Boulevard/Friendly Street project. She averred that the streets had not been maintained “at all” since they had been annexed into the City. She objected to assessing only a small number of residents with street frontage for the project. She found it “ironic” that the road was smooth once it was out of city limits. She felt that the problem was that the City “never bothered” to maintain the road. She opined that the Eugene City Code was so complicated that citizens would need “a degree from Harvard” to understand it. She considered the input from the City engineer to be “double-speak.” She believed the assessment should be one price for all. She was disheartened that the street classification had been changed from a collector because stimulus funds were available for collector streets. She suggested that a charge to the entire City would help the assessment to not be a “life changing” event. She also suggested that the City should resurface the street over its existing footprint and charge everyone in a specific ward or at least the people who could not access their residences without using the streets that were being assessed. She believed that the neighbors in her area had been very articulate in their opposition to what she considered to be a “very MINUTES—Eugene City Council June 8, 2009 Page 1 Regular Meeting