Item 2A: Approval of City Council Minutes

Home Browse Search

civic and commercial activity. She noted that the Shedd Institute currently served 700 students and approximately 200 ticket buyers, staff, and faculty each week during daytime hours. She said this was in addition to several thousand each month who attended evening concerts and public events. She stated that the business hour users were served with 36 parking spaces in their lot. She underscored that the Shedd Institute did not support providing a subsidy to businesses and disagreed with the assertion that the proposed parking garage was such a subsidy, as the Whole Foods Grocery would provide its own parking. She believed it was within the City’s role to provide adequate infrastructure parking in the downtown core and that this would support the revitalization of the area. She opined that the alternative was urban sprawl, shopping malls with acres of surface parking. Dwight Collins , 1600 Orchard Street, thanked the council for giving the public the opportunity to share its vision of the downtown area and how public monies should be spent on achieving that vision. He stated that he had owned Newman’s Fish Market for over 27 years, a business that was started in Eugene more than 115 years earlier. He joined many other small grocery businesses in their opposition to the use of public money for the public garage, which he considered to be a subsidy to a competitor. He thought there were already enough grocery stores in the downtown area. He said the free enterprise system invited growth and competition, but this growth should not be subsidized. He asserted that Whole Foods must not be meeting its parking goal given that the business made the parking structure a deal-breaker. He remarked that all businesses faced parking issues and no other business would ask the City to provide more spaces. He did not believe this was an appropriate use of public money. He said the council should show there was a great need for the parking structure and this was a good use of $8 million in public money. Michael Roberts , 1919 Myers Road, said he owned a business in the downtown area. He supported the building of the parking garage because the community had long-planned to build it. He declared that the community must support compact urban growth and not sprawl. He felt construction of the garage would foster many more projects in the downtown area. He asserted that every condominium or apartment built downtown meant one less home outside the urban growth boundary (UGB). Mr. Roberts said the “team-based delivery system” that was proposed on this construction project was currently the leading method of building projects throughout the world. He stated that his company currently delivered 80 percent of its projects on a team-based approach as opposed to a low-bid process. He averred that the low-bid process did not necessarily translate to a lower cost; it only ensured a low bid on bid day. He felt with a team of designers, engineers, and contractors working together, it would be possible to build a better and more efficient project. He alleged that a privately developed parking garage would save the City approximately $2,000 per space. Greg Brokaw , 114 High Street, recommended deferring to the staff recommendation on whether the parking garage should be publicly or privately bid out. He averred that staff had been the only people who spent “enough time with the details of this particular case to have an informed opinion.” He stated that he and his family lived in the downtown area and he also owned a downtown professional firm and a recently renovated building. He felt he and his partners were true progressives when it came to their commitment to a successful and sustainable future for Eugene. He said his business evaluated many things when considering a long-term investment in the downtown area in 2004, the most important of which had been the Downtown Plan and the wisdom and maturity of the elected City Councilors and the “sophistication” of City staff to carry out the day-to-day hard work of supporting a downtown renaissance. He related that two years earlier he had felt that a successful future of the downtown area was common ground for all sides of the political spectrum. Now, though he and his colleagues were still optimistic, it seemed that political leaders were wavering from the larger vision and this was disconcerting. He had expected unanimous support for a project of this caliber, given that it had been long planned for. He found it alarming that not one councilor MINUTES—Eugene City Council -- March 13, 2006 Page 12 City Council Meeting