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The development will have onsite staff and security: six to eight full-time jobs and six part-time jobs. The full-time staff will consist of a property manager, an assistant manager, a leasing director, a leasing professional, a chief building engineer, a maintenance technician, and porters. The proposed construction schedule would be 14-16 months long and provide an average of 120- 150 construction jobs. If the MUPTE is approved, construction would begin in February/March 2014. Project Parking The surface level secured parking on-site would be accessed from Ferry Street with a key card system. The parking will be fully enclosed as part of the architecture of the building and not readily apparent. A second parking area is proposed to be a surface parking lot nearby within ¼ mile at 901 Franklin. (See Attachment B for the location of the proposed surface parking.) The property is City-owned and currently used as surface parking. The City has been marketing this surplus property for sale since 2011. Core Campus has expressed an interest in leasing or acquiring the site. MUPTE Program The MUPTE program is enabled by state legislation and designed to encourage higher density housing and redevelopment in the core area and along transit corridors. The objective strongly aligns with several of the pillars of Envision Eugene. Increasing the amount of multi-family housing in the downtown and along transit corridors helps reduce pressure on urban growth boundary (UGB) expansion and protects existing neighborhoods. The program provides a 10-year property tax exemption on qualified new multi-unit housing investments that occur within a specific, targeted area, that meet program requirements, and that are reviewed and approved by the council. During the exemption period, property owners still pay taxes on the assessed value of the land and any commercial portions of the project, except those commercial improvements deemed by the council to be a public benefit and included in the exemption. In September 2011, the council added the option to exempt the commercial portion of a multi-unit housing project to the extent that the commercial property is required or considered to be a public benefit. The council amended Eugene’s code provisions in November 2008, to assist both staff and the council in evaluating a MUPTE application with: 1) adoption of approval criteria and 2) direction to the City Manager to adopt a public benefit scoring system (described below). Staff’s review of the Core Campus MUPTE proposal is based on the current program requirements. As ideas and potential revisions to the MUPTE program have emerged from the City Council’s discussions, staff have had conversations with the developer about the possibility of incorporating elements of the MUPTE revisions into proposed conditions of approval. Public Comments A display advertisement was published in The Register Guard on May 4, 2013, soliciting comments for 30 days on the Core Campus MUPTE application. The period ends on June 3, 2013, at 5 p.m. All written comments received by staff through May 21 are included as Attachment C. The Downtown Neighborhood Association Steering Committee unanimously took a position of support S:\CMO\2013 Council Agendas\M130529\S130529B.doc