CC Minutes - 11/28/11 Work Session

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MINUTES Eugene City Council McNutt Room —City Hall 777 Pearl Street—Eugene, Oregon November 28, 2011 5:30 p.m. COUNCILORS PRESENT: Betty Taylor, George Brown, Andrea Ortiz, George Poling, Mike Clark, Chris Pryor, Alan Zelenka, Pat Farr. Her Honor Mayor Kitty Piercy called the November 28, 2011, work session of the Eugene City Council to order. A. WORK SESSION: Envision Eugene Senior Planner Robin Hostick of the Planning and Development Department joined the council and led it through a PowerPoint presentation entitled Envision Eugene: Project Update for City Council Work Session November 28, 2011. The presentation included an update on the multi - family housing land need and commercial land demand. Mr. Hostick reported that staff found a multi - family housing land need of about 6,340 units with a 55/45 single - family /multi - family ratio and a need for commercial land sufficient to accommodate 16,000 jobs. He suggested there were interventions the City could employ to facilitate development, such as mixed -use development and the rezoning of industrial areas for commercial and mixed use. Councilors asked questions clarifying the details of the presentation. Mr. Brown determined that staff had an assessment of vacant office space and intended to review it more carefully.as the inventory was a constantly changing moving target. Mr. Brown requested that information when it was available. He also requested a more fine - grained map of commercial employment and the industrial lands proposed for redesignation to commercial. Mr. Pryor observed that many of the topics mentioned in the presentation, such as financial incentives and EmX, were controversial and difficult. He did not envision the process ahead would be easy. He believed each issue needed to be addressed in the context of the overall goals and the connections between items clearly mapped. He asked staff to provide the council with information about best practices in other areas and the "track record" of recommended choices. Mr. Clark agreed with the remarks of Mr. Pryor. He observed that many of the incentives mentioned in the presentation were already used to achieve the goal of greater density and more mixed -use development. He recalled that the City offered similar incentives when it identified areas for nodal development without significant success and hoped the City could think more creatively about additional incentives. Mr. Clark said the City was basing its land need on the State's projection rather than its own aspirations. He challenged the council to do better than that if it was serious about increasing employment. He did not think. the State's .9 percent job growth number was adequate because the community needed more jobs at a faster pace. MINUTES— Eugene City Council November 28, 2011 Page 1 Work Session