Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

you you Thank you.

Welcome to the August 11, 2026 Eugene Planning Commission meeting. I'd like to call this meeting to order. Acknowledging we're starting five minutes later than usual. My name is Diane Bailing and I am the chair of the Eugene Planning Commission. To begin this evening, I'd like to call on Commissioner Clevenger for this city's land acknowledgement statement.

Since time immemorial, the Kalapuya people have been the indigenous stewards to our region, building dynamic communities, maintaining balance with wildlife, and enacting sustainable land practices. This land acknowledgement is a way of resisting the erasure of indigenous histories and to honor native communities by inviting truth and reconciliation. Following treaties between 1851 and 1855, Kalapuya people were dispossessed of their indigenous homeland by the United States government and forcibly removed to the Coast Reservation in western Oregon. As we consider the impacts of colonization, we also acknowledge the strength and resilience of displaced indigenous people. The city of Eugene is built within the traditional homelands known as Kalapuya Ilahi. Kalapuya descendants are citizens of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians of Oregon, and they continue to make contributions in our communities here and across the lands. We express our respect for the inherent political sovereignty of all federally recognized tribal nations and indigenous people who live in the state of Oregon and across the nation. Therefore, the Planning Commission recognizes that what we do today will affect the many generations who will come after us.

Thank you, Commissioner Clevenger. And thank you to everyone joining us in this hybrid meeting format. Today, our meeting will begin with public comment, followed by a work session on the draft public facilities and services chapter of the Eugene Comprehensive Plan. Anyone wishing to join the meeting online can do so by following the instructions listed on the agenda for the meeting. Planning Commission meetings can also be viewed by watching the live stream available on our website or the broadcast on Comcast Channel 21. For those who join the meeting via computer device or phone, your microphone, webcam, and phone are automatically muted when you enter the meeting as an attendee. If you wish to participate during the public comment portion of the meeting and haven't already done so, please raise your virtual hand now to join the speaker's queue in one of two ways. For those viewing the meeting on a computer, laptop, or other device, click once on the hand icon. For those listening to the meeting on a phone, press star nine. Public comment is an opportunity for individuals to speak to the Planning Commission on any topics except for items scheduled for public hearing or public hearing items for which the record has already closed. As a reminder, Your hand must be raised to be in the queue for public comment.

Thank you, Commissioner Beiling. We have no one who has raised their hand for public comment tonight.

All right. I will now officially close public comment and we'll move on to our work session. I'd like to turn the meeting over to Stuart Warren to begin the staff presentation. Following the staff presentation, the Commission will have the opportunity to ask questions.

Thank you, Commissioner, and thank you, Commissioners, for having us here tonight. We're looking forward to talking to you about the Envisioning Eugene Conference plan again. My name is Stuart Warren. I'm a senior planner on our long-range plan team, and I'm joined tonight with Elena Domingo and Rebecca Gershow as well. Tonight we're going to provide you an overview of the draft goals and policies for Chapter 8, Public Facilities and Services of the Envision Eugene Conference of Plan. We're not asking for you to make any decisions tonight. This is really just an informational update or a work session intended to bring you up to speed on the development of this draft chapter and collect any feedback that you may have. So on the agenda for this evening, I'm going to give you a brief refresher of the comprehensive plan and the current phase of its development, which is phase two. I'm also going to give you a quick refresher on the adoption process for urban growth strategies and talk about how this specific piece fits into the larger UGS adoption process. And then Elena is going to give you an overview of some of the draft goals and policies. and we will have ample time at the end for your questions and discussion. Like previous meetings on the comprehensive plan, we've drafted some discussion questions for you to help kind of guide your conversation tonight, but we look forward to all your questions and your feedback as well. So we do a lot of coordinating on our long range planning team. And it's important to acknowledge that the land use policies of the Envision Eugene comprehensive plan also advance many of our other city wide priorities, including plans such as the housing implementation pipeline, the climate action plan, the parks and rec system plan, and the city's strategic plan. Importantly, for tonight's discussion, we want to acknowledge that other city efforts that relate to public facilities and services like the Capital Improvement Program and the Stormwater Master Plan. These are not land use plans, but they identify specific capital improvement projects to meet existing needs and accommodate future community growth. The comprehensive plan is our local roadmap. It guides the city in its planning for the land within our urban growth boundary. It is informed by years of community engagement from the Envision Eugene work, which produced our community vision, to our ongoing Urban Growth Strategies community engagement work. Each chapter in the comprehensive plan has a series of goals that articulate the community's overarching aspirations on that topic. And each chapter also contains policies. These policies inform how Eugene grows in the future. And once they are adopted, the comprehensive plan guides staff, And it's planning for future growth and development within our urban growth boundary. The Envision Eugene comprehensive plan is relatively new. Historically, we've shared a regional comprehensive plan with the city of Springfield as well as Lane County. And that plan is called the Eugene-Springfield Metropolitan Area General Plan, or Metro Plan for short. Currently, the Metro Plan's public facilities and services element and its public facilities and services plan guide the city's planning for future growth and development. Due to legislative direction in 2027, sorry, 2007, let's try that again, Eugene and Springfield begin developing their own comprehensive plans to provide land use policy direction within our own specific urban growth boundaries. While we will continue to have the Metropolitan Plan for regional policies, We will eventually have all of our own land use policies for the lands within our urban growth boundary contained in our own comprehensive plan, and that's what we're working towards right now. But because of the work involved in adopting our own comprehensive plan, we're doing it in three separate phases. The first phase was adopted in 2017 and included Eugene's urban growth boundary. The second phase is the one that's underway now. And the final two chapters will be included in our third phase, and they're on resilience and natural resources. And they'll be completed in the future when funding allows. The second phase of the comprehensive plan includes six new chapters and a Eugene-specific land use designation map. Over the last year or so, we have brought all these chapters to the Planning Commission for feedback, except for Chapter 8. Tonight, we are going to provide you a short overview of the draft goals and policies for this chapter and ask you for your high-level feedback that you might have. Here's what's included in the urban growth strategies adoption packages for comprehensive plan specific items. So really just narrowing down to what we've been working on for the comprehensive plan. Adoption package one, which is the one you all just made a recommendation on, does not include any comprehensive plan work. This fall, we'll be asking the planning commission to recommend our second urban growth strategies package to the city council, which will include five comprehensive plan chapters and a land use designation map, which is shown on the left. By mid-2027, we'll also ask you to recommend another package of Urban Growth Strategies work, which is called package three right now, and includes the public facilities and services chapter, a Eugene-specific public facilities plan, and our housing and jobs land supply studies. Many policies in this chapter, chapter eight, our public facilities and services chapter, are required by Oregon statewide planning goal 11 and other administrative rules. Because of those requirements, it makes the policies and goals in here fairly technical in nature. And it's been really difficult to do broad community engagement, so we've been really focused in our efforts with our internal and external stakeholders. Like the Eugene's Public Works Department, who provides storm water, waste water collection and conveyance, parks and open space, as well as transportation facilities and services. We've been working with E-Web, or Eugene Water and Electric Board, Eugene Springfield Fire, and the Metropolitan Waste Water Management Commission. And with that, I'm going to hand the remainder of the presentation over to Elena.

Great. Thank you, Stuart. I'm Elena Domingo, Associate Planner on the Community Planning and Design Team. And I'm going to talk about the draft goals and policies for Chapter 8, Public Facilities and Services. This chapter is included as Attachment A in your packet. And I'll be providing a high-level overview of its contents. But before I get started, I kind of wanted to orient everyone and say that these are really meant to be high level policies about public facilities and services that have a nexus with land use. So more detailed facility planning will continue to be done through master plans and capital improvement programs, et cetera. And then as Stuart mentioned, I'll reiterate, many of the policies in this chapter are intended to meet statewide planning goal 11 requirements. So I'm going to start with some definitions there on page two of attachment A. So public facilities and services has a broad definition that includes water, electric, wastewater and stormwater service, police, fire and emergency medical services, the transportation network, citywide parks, recreation and library services, transit, solid waste facilities, public schools, and city land use. These public facilities and services are addressed throughout the chapter. I did want to flag up front that transportation and transit are addressed in chapter nine of our comprehensive plan. which essentially points to Eugene's transportation system plan. And I just wanted to say we'll make that more clear sort of in the chapter's introduction so it doesn't seem like that piece is sort of missing from some of the policies. And then the definition of urban facilities and services only includes the services that prior to annexation, it must be determined that they can be provided to the area in an orderly and efficient manner. So these include water service, electric service, wastewater and stormwater service, police, fire and emergency medical services and access to the city's transportation network. So we use both of those definitions in the chapter, so I just kind of wanted to call out that difference there. So this chapter has three goals. The first is about responsible stewardship of public facilities and services, essentially providing services in a reliable and environmentally responsible manner to meet community needs. Second, the efficient and orderly growth, so coordinating with service providers to serve existing and future development while being responsive to changing needs. And lastly, to strive for public facilities and service investments that provide multiple benefits like economic prosperity and housing production. Policies in this chapter are organized by topic, not by goal like some of the other chapters because many of them achieve multiple goals. And while I'll be focusing on a few policies from each of the topic areas, please feel free to ask questions about any of the policies. So I'll just say that in developing the policies with service providers, we started by looking at the policies that are in the current Metro plan chapter, looking at master plans and other policy documents that the service providers have and sort of updating and adding to them to make sure that we were keeping relevant policies. Our intention is to remove ourselves from most of the Metro plan policies in the public facilities chapter, except for a few regional policies. So the first section in the chapter is about planning and coordination, which includes policies like 8.1, coordination with providers of public facilities and services. 8.5, planning for the orderly and efficient provision of public facilities and services for urban growth boundary expansions. and policy 8.10 that adopts the Eugene public facilities plan as part of the comprehensive plan to fulfill the city's obligation under statewide planning goal 11. The second is urbanization and annexation. So these draft policies cover, for example, in 8.13, how urbanization occurs for land within the urban growth boundary and how through annexation the land will be provided with urban facilities and services. Policy 8.14, which is about annexation and how the city will make every reasonable attempt to provide for annexation on a voluntary basis and in compliance with state law and other local policies. Policy 8.17 is about how the city will not extend water or wastewater service outside city limits to serve a residence or business without obtaining a valid annexation petition agreement or when a health hazard has been identified. This is mandated by Goal 11 and there is currently a similar policy in the Metro Plan. The next section touches on wastewater and stormwater. They each have their own section of policies in this chapter. You may have noticed that there's a little more focus on these three public facilities and services. And the reason for that is because state law requires us to address these specific services in our public facilities plan that will be adopted with this chapter. And so, Um, yeah, just as kind of, um, to say it, the public, this chapter covers more facilities than our public facilities plan is going to cover. The public facilities plan will only cover water, wastewater and stormwater as mandated by state law. Um, and so in this section, all of these, um, All of these sections include a policy about planning for the timely, orderly, and efficient provision of these services to enable annexation. And then just a few examples from the water section. We collaborated closely with E-Web to draft policies that support the provision of water in Eugene. And policy 8.21 is about coordinating with E-Web to support the provision of sufficient in-city water storage capacity and pump stations, like planning for designated land uses and additional development and densification. In the wastewater section, we coordinated with the city's Public Works Department as well as Metropolitan Wastewater Management Commission to draft policies related to wastewater, including 8.26, which focuses on planning for wastewater collection and conveyance to meet the needs of the projected growth within the UGB and to support housing and economic development goals. And then in the stormwater section, policy 8.30 is about managing stormwater for multiple objectives, like flood control, drainage, and water quality treatment while protecting natural resources. And then the last section, other public facilities and services. This section includes an array of policy topics that cover the planning needs for public facilities and services like electricity planning in 8.40, which directs the city to coordinate with E-Web. Policy 8.43, about the future needs of police, fire, and other emergency services as we plan for projected growth, including land for emergency response and emergency management facilities. And 8.45, which is a policy about considering the need for an availability of parks, open space, and recreation facilities when planning for projected growth. I also wanted to point out that this section includes policy 8.4, eight, um, which addresses the long range facility plans for the four J and Bethel school districts and States that those plans serve as an element of Eugene's comprehensive plan. Um, so just wanted to note that this current, this policy currently exists in our exists in our comprehensive plan because it's needed to meet a state statutory requirement. We're just planning to move it into this chapter because it's just sitting in the administrative chapter right now. So we're just moving that one over and it is required for us to have that policy. So then I wanted to give a public facilities plan preview. So, um, as we mentioned, we are shifting from a joint public facilities and services plan, which is currently adopted in the Metro plan to a Eugene specific public facilities plan. And Springfield will also be adopting a Springfield specific plan when they have more availability to work on it. Um, we anticipate bringing that draft public self facilities plan to you all probably early next year where I'm still. Still working on creating it. And then, again, Goal 11 requires us to address water, wastewater, and stormwater, as well as transportation in our public facilities plan. And for that transportation element, we'll be pointing to Eugene's transportation system plan, which also functions as the transportation element of the comprehensive plan. So in the public facilities plan, we must include an inventory of existing public facility systems and a general assessment of their condition, as well as a list of significant public facility projects needed to support development of land within the UGB, including rough cost estimates, estimates of when the project will be needed, and maps of the project's general location and service area. So, next steps for this chapter include incorporating feedback from you all, continuing to work on drafting that public facilities plan, and then preparing the chapter and the public facilities plan for adoption as part of the third urban growth strategies adoption package for next year. So, With that, I think we have some discussion questions, but if we want to pause and answer any clarifying questions before we jump into some of the bigger picture discussion questions.

Commissioner Edwards.

Thank you. Thank you. This content is very dense and wonky. I think my question is around somewhat of the process and the community engagement and how how to make it accessible to people because I think that most people, even those of us that are studying this stuff, it's a little over, I'll admit, it's a little over my head, but then when I start to think about real world, on the ground circumstances that you realize, oh, okay, And so I guess I'm trying to understand the coordination that happens and really specifically, what does community engagement look like? I mean, if you're asking the public, I'm going to give an example and you can tell me if this is something that would have been part of this process. there's an area of the community out north delta highway sixteen hundred new housing units ish uh... that were built within the last i would say eight years and It's apartments, it's multifamily, and whatever happened during the process to plan it, there is no transit access, but also the streets were not designed to accommodate transit access. And it was something that I dealt with quite a bit because... having to respond to neighbors who are like, why can't LTD bring us transit service? It's like, well, they can't turn a bus around. They have federal regulations that regulate the way that they have to operate within the city streets. I'm using this as an example because these are the kinds of things that as I think about planning for the future and making sure everything is lining up, What does that process look like in the public to try to have lay people understand how these decisions could impact them? And I know that's a really hard question, so I apologize.

I mean, I'm trying to sort of also relate it to connect your question to this. chapter, because I think it could go bigger than this chapter. I think the goal of these policies is to sort of set the expectations for that coordination and collaboration The city cannot direct other entities on how to do things. So a lot of our policies are focused on collaborating, sharing information, planning for higher densities when our buildable lands inventory changes. And they're... You know, it's much more high level than, like, specific projects and how do things get developed. That being said, you know, it does kind of touch on the services that do have to be available in order for lands to annex. So, like, there is, you know, a minimum level of services that we need to provide in order for things to develop. Yeah. I mean, one of those things is connection to the transportation network. But...

Yeah, and I apologize, because I know my question is not really a question. But it is more of just, like, in thinking about this, it's always hard to engage the public, and this type of stuff especially, because they're just like, what would you be asking me if we were asking for feedback? Because they don't... without seeing real world examples of how different policies could impact them. And like, you know, this, we could have gone this direction or this, you know, and this policy was what established that kind of thing. It's maybe not, not so much of a question, but more just like constructive feedback that if we are going out there and talking to the public, trying to figure out a way to make it to, you know, to really kind of have it speak to people, I think, you know, I think it would be, But I'll leave it at that. You don't have to answer the question.

Someone has to turn off their mic.

I'll do it.

There. No, it's a really good question. It's one that we wrestle with all the time. And honestly, we haven't done any... public engagement around this chapter because the nature of it is so technical and there's so many state requirements around it that I think having real engagement around these goals and policies would just be a challenge. But what I can say is that the other engagement work we've been doing about understanding the community's needs, that also includes things like access to transit, access to parks, green space, those kind of things. And so while this chapter tonight we're specifically talking about just its contents, it's very much related to the other chapters, right? It's related to how do we plan for more compact development so that it's easier to provide services, so that transit connections can make sense in those options. And also it connects to other things going along in the city too, like redesigning how we design our streets. That's another project that's happening separate from this work right now too. and a transportation system plan update that's coming in 2029 or so. So while this doesn't touch all those specific things, they're so interrelated and so based off of what we know the community needs are that it does still have a community's voice built into it, if that makes sense.

Commissioner Clevenger?

I'm coming into the middle of this process, and so I'm gonna try and ask questions without derailing us beyond chapter eight. Perhaps the other chapters are a little more apparent in what application and implementation looks like, but I think my takeaway is actually quite different than Commissioner Edwards in that a lot of this is really high level and broad, and it's not, We need water. It shouldn't be brown Sewage shouldn't back up into the street doesn't feel technical and high level and it doesn't feel like anything you need feedback on either Like I think everybody can agree like yeah, that's what basic water service looks like and I get the impression that the public services plan Gets into more of the nuts and bolts of the kind of how we accomplished it But this this speaks to me as like a plan to plan and so thinking about Chapter 8, and maybe to some extent the broader document, what does implementation of the plan look like? Does any one planner have encyclopedic knowledge of bullets 8-1 through 8-50, or is someone sitting down with a piece of policy and rectifying it against all of those? What is... Yeah, what's... Perhaps that's too... removed from Chapter 8, but.

It is a little bit of a plan to plan. So when we write, like, I think of it a little bit as like planners are using it. Usually when we're like making code amendments, we need to make findings. that the changes we're making to our land use code are consistent with these like higher, you know, higher level policies and goals that we've adopted in our comprehensive plan. I mean, some of them, like I'm thinking there's a policy that's like, you know, it is very like lofty language like strive to you know, locate libraries in centers, I think is one of the goals. And so that would maybe look like, you know, if the library is looking for extensions and we, you know, we can collaborate with them on where we think a library might do well because it's part of a center or where it's more accessible to people. Or when the fire department is, when we're looking at planning the UGB, are expanding the UGB, sharing some of our buildable lands inventory and our natural resources inventories with them so that they can better understand how to serve that land that we're coming into our UGB. So it really is, those are kind of some of the applications of like, it's really just, it's holding the city accountable for collaborating and sharing information and being a part of this planning, even when we might not be the entity that's providing the services. Might have gone off. Did you have anything to add?

It's a good observation and I think you'll find that the other chapters are written to about the same level, but there's a spectrum in that level for us, right? Everywhere from strive and consider to shall. And depending on, I think, our ability to actually meet that policy at every single planning decision we have to make in the next 20 years, we will shift along that kind of spectrum. So while some of these are about coordinating, we don't necessarily need to have a policy that says, like, you shall coordinate necessarily, right? Because that's in our work. That's what we do. It just makes a lot of sense. Having a legally binding policy directing us to do that doesn't necessarily make sense. But in other places where we feel strongly about the policy directing our work, where it needs to provide enough policy support to do something we want to accomplish, we tend to use a little bit stronger language. But you're right that they are lofty, they're high level, and they're oftentimes kind of frustrating to think through. Because you're like, well, of course everybody wants this clean water, for example. Why can't that just be like, make clean water? But because of the legal ramifications of strong policy language, And our knowledge that planning is this massive thing and changes and every situation is different that we need to write some of these policies to be a little bit flexible at the same time.

I just wanted to add a couple more things. I think these guys already noted that it's really telling the city how to act. not telling our partners how to act. And two other places where there's that land use connection is with our urban growth boundary planning. I think Elena mentioned that. Internally, when we do our BLI planning, we have to coordinate with urban service providers. And so documenting that in here is important. And also, when we do our expansion planning, looking for those areas that we're going to bring into the urban growth boundary, looking at key facilities and services and where we develop that is as efficient as possible is a key piece of that analysis. So that's also noted in here. So those are two very tangible pieces for our work.

And then in the public facilities plan, so the public facilities plan is really meant to be sort of a list of projects that need to occur in order to serve the entire UGB. So that will be a little bit more tangible, but it's also still high level because it's not at the capital improvement program planning phase. So once projects get into our CIP, funding has been identified for them. They're on the immediate work plan. They're happening in the next six years. The public facilities plan will be, we know these projects need to happen. We have maybe an idea of when that might happen, but still a little bit not. It'll still be a little bit high level as well.

Go ahead. I'll just get in the queue.

Okay.

Queue me up.

In this question about process, I'm wondering also about the coordination. I'm looking from my experience at the university where you brought in all the different departments and stakeholders and did a charrette when we were gonna develop a whole new area of campus. So you had all the stakeholders involved and all the people who needed to provide anything, down to landscapers, part of the planning. And I wonder, in your future planning, are we looking at the entire existing UGB and UGB reserves and considering all the different departments and players that will need to be included in that planning and are they included in the planning in your process?

For expanding the UGB and where we expand it and how we plan to do that, In the reserves, yeah, using the reserves, which we've identified. Right, yes. Yes, they are part of that planning. And I think some of the policies mention, you know, let me see if I can find one.

Well, 8.6, that was that question I raised earlier when we talk about other service providers and their planning for long-term changes.

So we will have to evaluate even though we've done a lot of that initial evaluation to bring the urban reserves into urban reserves. There will still be evaluation that needs to happen to determine where are the public facilities going to go, where do they get connected, which way does it make sense to develop. That is part of, yes, I would say this chapter and some of these broader policies about planning for expansion. Is that, did I answer your question?

Well, partly because the public facilities plan is going to have detail of projects. And I would think if we're considering the possibility of expanding the urban growth boundary that are any of the projects to provide infrastructure going to be a part of that? Will that be falling behind?

The projects in the public facilities plan are only to serve our current UGB. We can't plan to serve land that's not in our UGB currently, so it's a little bit of a...

It's a catch-twist.

Yeah. What was I going to say? Yeah. I don't know, I lost my thought.

Yeah. That is true, and when we come in 2030 and say these are the lands that we are going to bring into the UGB, at that point we will need to amend the public facilities plan with a list of projects to, in the future, make sure that those areas are served. So we can't do it before, but we can do it at the same time or after.

I guess forward thinking and forward planning, if you were extending a new project to here, if you know that someday it might go beyond there, you might terminate it differently than if that's the end forever, if you know what I mean. And I'm hoping that that future... possibility planning is a part of all your coordination.

Yeah, and I would just also say I am not the expert in providing public facilities and services. So I kind of have the land use glasses on in this sense and have very much worked with the providers. They do, I mean, this chapter isn't going to guide Our public works teams, you know, like in the, in an, in a everyday planning or in a super long range planning necessarily. I mean, what, what it, I think of the nexus is sort of like we provide population projections to. public works teams we provide our buildable lands inventory we provide our housing needs are now through the oregon housing needs analysis we have a much higher number for housing that we're planning for so sort of like sharing the information with them so that they are able to plan for what's coming and for that growth and what we're expecting in the future so it really I guess I think of the chapter as sort of like coordinating, meaning, information sharing, and being on the same page with providers so that we can adequately extend services when we think about expanding. Yeah.

Thank you. Commissioner Beeson.

Thank you. Commissioner Edwards was asking how We would engage the public with this. I think Commissioner Clevenger was talking a bit about or asking maybe how it would be implemented. I found myself as I was going through this thing over and over coming back to this maybe a parallel or similar question of how we're anticipating that we would use this. Almost like what is it for? I went back and read Goal 11. I read your material pretty carefully. In Goal 11 and also in your material, there's a statement, and I've kind of paraphrased it, but it's pretty short, that the purpose of this public facilities plan so as opposed to the chapter, it'll be the plan, I guess, that's forthcoming, is to assure urban development within the urban growth boundary, and that it's guided by types and levels of public facilities and services that are required for urban areas being served. And I think I think that captures a lot of stuff. It would seem like as we go forward as a community, We want to be sure as the zones are established and as there is development that we're trying to do our best to be sure that the facilities are ready or are there or will be there and will have adequate capacity and they're coordinated and installed in a way, looking for efficiencies and so on to save everybody money, but that the facilities are there, particularly you think of large large customers or you think of housing developments and so on. I think of this in a way as a framework that's put together. I know that the City of Eugene is not responsible for all of the agencies that contribute to this and I get that. I'm careful going too far down any of these roads. I know you're looking for everything in high level tonight. The city is the municipality. The city basically controls, manages all of the right-of-way. I think the city, if you list all the agencies out that are involved, the city has this oversight and responsibility to help manage the right of way and has, I think, quite a bit of say in it. As I think about it, I hear this being talked about that we have the public facilities plan I know it's dictated by the state goal that says it's going to be focused on stormwater, wastewater, and water. When you write the PFP that we're going to get, I think I'm hearing that's what the focus will be. In the chapter, you mentioned that there in fact are other kinds of providers. and there are a number of them. And I find myself thinking it aside from what we have to do to comply with the goal or comply with the law, which we absolutely have to do. It seems to me the community would really like to have a public facilities plan that gives us this kind of comprehensive framework of everything that's required going forward so we can all sort of look at it together and kind of coordinate it. So I, I, you know, I, I don't get to do this or make these decisions, but I find myself wanting to have electricity in there in a way that's pretty up front and center. Electricity feels pretty important to me only because I worked with it for a while. I've mentioned that. I noticed the word communications for me is conspicuously absent. from everything that's written here. And I think about communications, whether it's broadband or phone systems or wireless or whatever. It is a kind of infrastructure and systems that we need as a community to be coordinated with all this other stuff to go forward with development. The other one that was kind of missing, again, missing for me was natural gas. Feels like a fairly significant utility. I'm throwing a bunch of stuff out, but I guess as we go through this, I guess I'm asking that maybe as you go back through this and we get it ready to finalize the chapter, that if we can consider How we talk about this or write it down or portray it in a way that provides this kind of framework for the whole community, tries to take into account all the different kinds of services and facilities that we require. We list a lot of them. You list police and fire and libraries and parks and recreation and everything. But I think to get it all kind of organized in a way, and I think to the extent we can, let me leave it at that for now. I've got a couple other things, but if that kind of makes some sense.

Well, so my first thought was about the fact that if we write policies in this plan, they become land use policies. policies, they become a land use decision. I think if the attorneys had their way, this whole chapter would only be about stormwater, wastewater, and water, and to match the public facilities plan. We have acknowledged and recognized it's important to address a lot of the other public facilities. We want to have a chapter that is a little bit more comprehensive. And, but I just, I think that is really good feedback and that's just something I'm going to have to like, would some of those utilities want to sort of be on the hook for complying with a land use decision, a land use policy. Um, I'm just, that's just where my brain first went. But, um, sure.

And I understand that we can't require them, but I think if you go through them individually, I mean, if you look at the electric utility, they're doing long range planning, they're doing it for facilities and they're looking at what is being planned in the city in terms of zoning and so on.

Yeah.

I suspect the gas company's doing that. I suspect some communications companies and, and on and on and on.

Yeah.

So, I understand. I think it's pretty clear what Goal 11 prescribes. It's pretty clear what the PFP needs to be. I think my short version of my suggestion is to the extent we can somewhere in there be comprehensive about the facilities required for our community, I think it would help everybody.

Okay. Yeah. No, that's helpful.

And if I may just add maybe an example to what we think about when we're writing these plans and how we limit ourselves. Even though we know that electricity planning, natural gas planning is an integral part of how public facilities and services are provided and how housing development occurs. If we were to say that, for example, have a policy that says you must provide communication services before you can build housing. When someone were to go through a zone change, let's say from R1 to R2, and we were to do a check with the communication provider, like can you provide adequate public facilities or your communication facilities for this zone change, and they say no, then we would not be able to rezone that property. So that's just an example. That's not how this would work per se. So when we're thinking about how we're kind of trying to keep things in certain sideboards, I guess. We're trying to keep that in mind. I don't know if that's helpful or not.

It is. I want to be careful using words like require and all of that because I understand completely what you're saying. I'm going back to Commissioner Edwards' initial comment where you have a development in a section of the city which clearly needed transit and you end up in a place where the transit can't work. We shouldn't have that. Then I think if you follow where Commissioner Behling was going, if this is a vehicle, if it could be a vehicle, as I'm leaving out the words requirement, where the providers on a regular basis do their planning collectively so that you avoid those things. I think that seems to be one purpose of a public facility plan. I'll leave it to that.

Are there places in the other chapters that include more of this totality? Like when we talk about housing or we talk about community health, compact development and urban design, perhaps there are other places in other chapters where we can bring in more of the bigger picture especially since it's at a broad level

It's a great question. And yes, definitely. They're more maybe flipped on its head. So for an example around housing, we're planning for housing around centers, right? So we know centers are places where there's great access to transit. Typically, there's typically good public facilities and services like water. There's typically good school system or access to schools. And so we're planning the things around the existing facilities in those cases.

And we might specify partly because these other infrastructure support services exist, including the communications and the natural gas and the things that Commissioner Beeson brought up. No worries.

Oh, OK. She's first. Sorry. Commissioner Beeson's questions prompted me to think of this and so I'm just going to ask it. In regards to some of the other infrastructure and whatnot, so telecommunications as an example, I'm actively working with the city to mitigate some challenges with our telecommunications partners because some of the land use there's a lot of limitations with eugenes specifically um and you know inability to expand so for example cellular towers and things like that there's some changes to policies with eweb that has now created this issue is that and now i know that i'm not talking about you know requiring requirements of any entities but is that where these type of overarching policies might exist because essentially what's happened is that our generic, generically speaking, our land use policies are the actual, you know, are things that exist in our land use policies are prohibitive for construction of new facilities. That includes during emergencies. It was something that was recently brought up with planning staff and I don't really recall the exact response but I'm just curious if this is actually where this would exist because we've been trying to figure out like what is the resolution but that has become, you know, identified as an active issue right now with the number of the service providers. So, I don't know.

Yeah, without knowing a little more, I don't think it wouldn't be a situation where one entity went to another and said, hey, look, there's this comp plan policy. You have to do X necessarily. But if the telecommunications provider had applied for a land use application and there's a policy that says... we, I mean, even most likely the policy would say like, try to whatever, try to locate them wherever, or, you know, I don't know that it would like change the scenario, but if that is something, you know, um, That is a something that we think is an important policy to be striving for or to be cooperating in a certain way that I mean that we could include it because it is related to land use. I just don't, I don't know how much like on the ground it would necessarily change the situation, but I, I also don't know enough.

That's okay.

But yeah, if you, it sounds like telecom has come up a couple of times, that might be something we look into adding a policy around.

Yeah. Okay. Okay.

I just wanted to add one quick thing about that is that it What the policies can do is help direct staff if there are future opportunities to update the code So It gives us that direction to some degree. So not on a site-specific basis, but when code's being updated

Commissioner Edwards is talking about telecom, which I think is a really poignant example of a piece of infrastructure. This process began in when? Not just Chapter 8, but the whole kit and caboodle here. 2007, is that-ish?

Probably closer to 2012. Okay.

was a different era for telecom and So I can appreciate that as this is developed chapter 8 and beyond there's this like well let's not paint ourselves into a corner because these things evolve and That makes sense to me But this is a very lengthy process, and those things do evolve quickly, how long is it expected, just having not been around for the Metro plan, how long would a plan like this be expected to be relevant? And let me just bluntly say, is the investment that has gone into it thus far justifiable for a plan of whatever number you're about to tell me years of relevance?

Thanks for that question. So to clarify the 2012 thing, I think we started developing the first phase in 2012. We just recently started working on chapter eight in the last year, year and a half. Generally speaking, we planned for 20 years through these plans. What we do with them at the 20-year mark, I think, is to be determined. The Metro Plan has been in existence for a very long time. It's had lots of amendments. I wouldn't describe the Metro Plan as being particularly relevant to the time we're in now necessarily. So I think that's really good for us to remember through this conversation is that as you're writing these policies, we're trying to make them relevant for a very long period of time. And we do have the ability to update the plan. And now that we are starting to adopt our own comprehensive plan, it's much easier for us to go through that process. With the Metro plan, when we wanted to do updates, it wasn't just City of Eugene making an update. It was the City of Eugene, the City of Springfield, and Lane County all having to come together to agree on an amendment for the most part. And it was just a very time-intensive and very expensive process. We're excited for this plan because it should make us a little bit more nimble in the future. Does that answer your question?

Yes, I think, yeah. My takeaway from that is the more that we talk about, we use the word policy, but really the less policy that this is, and the more, well, we want to be prudent, we want to be forward thinking, and we want to be collaborative, right? That rehashed several ways. I think we can iterate on that sort of philosophy that drives us more quickly and perhaps with more relevant input from the community than some of the shape that maybe some of this takes.

Commissioner Young. I have three feedbacks. The first one is that I thought by reading Chapter 8, the policies, I thought that coordination show up a lot. But I felt that it lacks something that's a bit more binding perhaps. there wasn't discussion about maybe binding service level agreements among all the players and agencies. So when Commissioner Edwards talked about that example of the 600 units out there that the transportation is not happening, I felt like if those were planning together, it's a more concerted effort in the planning phase, that could have been at least thought about. It's like cultural agreement that we all coordinate, but there's nothing that you're compelled to work together in the planning phase. That's my impression by reading it. The other question I have is that, 8.9, we should talk about capital improvement planning. I thought it's really vague. I'm really interested in, like, all this public works takes money. Like, how are we funding it? Who gets it? You know, is there the fiscal burden? Is it, you know, half private, half public? Are we tapping into developer, you know, participation of funding? I want to learn more about it. I just felt that otherwise, we are not on the money. We don't really have, can make decisions, I think. So I just want to know a bit more about what type of funding model that we are planning to go forward with this chapter eight. And the last comment I have is about 8.8. It talk about try to prioritize public facility and service investments in underserved areas when possible. I think I would delete the when possible, because it make it sound like an afterthought, like a secondary goal, if I may. I do not know if we have certain metrics or criteria that we use to define underserved areas in Eugene. Maybe just the, and I think that just general impression of that area, you know, historically, it's probably not a very evidence-driven, data-driven way to look at it. So I wonder if the city has something that's like a bit more kind of transparent metrics that we use and also incorporate the age of the infrastructure that we're trying to consider and use that to decide which areas should be considered more favorably when we decide those facilities. Those are my thoughts.

I think I'll take a shot at maybe answering one question about the capital improvement program and like who pays for infrastructure? Is it 50-50 split? So we typically charge system development charges. So the developer does end up paying a lot of times for capital investment projects, especially if it's like a large apartment building or something. Those system development charges are decided based off the actual amount of improvements that are happening. So there's a level of funding that does come from the developer. There's also a level of funding that does come from the city over time as well. And that's what those system development charges kind of go into. The Crow Road wastewater extension is a good example of a state and city partnership, where we actually receive funding from the state to do this infrastructure planning so that we could provide housing there in the future. The CIP, Capital Improvement Program, is the main system for allocated for the projects we need. So it's a five or six year program that thinks about what do we need in the near term. We have this amount of money that we can spend on it and then it gets allocated to those different projects that way. And it happens outside of the planning department. So I'm not super clear on the exact process for how those different dollars get divided up. But it's something we could definitely look into and get you more information on.

I was also going to say about the underserved areas. I think that that, when possible, snuck in there because I was thinking about, so a lot of our infrastructure is paid for, like projects are paid for through bonds. Our public works department gets bonds to... um, finish like very specific projects and that money has to get, uh, used in very specific ways. Like, so that, anyway, that was my, I think, initial reason where like, sometimes we have money that we have to use in a certain way that may go towards an area of the city that isn't underserved, but I will think more about, but that's really good feedback, and I'll think more about how we can make that policy better.

That may very well be the reality of how things got done, but I just thought that, you know, verbiage-wise, it just sounds a little funny to me.

Questions?

I came up with something. Commissioner Edwards' example of transit in this neighborhood and the streets just aren't wide enough. My understanding is that's also true of parts of the riverfront development and that that changed the one route and the plan for the one route. What is this change about the process? Who's responsible for the fact that that happened? And with this in place, what changes that that doesn't happen?

I don't know.

Transit is a different chapter entirely, right?

It is. But... I guess I'll just say that the, the policies in this chapter aren't necessarily meant to make changes to the way things currently operate or like, cause we, we have public facilities policies that currently exist in our Metro plan. Um, we've updated them, modernize them, made sure they're relevant to how things are operating with our service providers. Um, but I don't know in terms of that specific example, like if these policies would change anything on the ground of how that occurred.

Um,

Thoughts?

That's a good question. How did it occur?

Yeah. I don't think any of us here are the experts on either of those projects. Those are both land use and site-specific projects. Neither of us have worked on them. So we can speculate, which is not usually a good thing to do on the public record. And what... And Elaine is right, that this level of public facilities and services policies would not necessarily change how you review a land use application. So I'm not familiar with either of these. It sounds like, in theory, if there's a disconnect and... I can't really answer that question. But I can answer the part about how these policies are going to change. Those, probably not. That's probably something that is implemented on the ground And these are more focused on not the site-specific projects, but the long-range planning for growth and development throughout our community, not how a roadway is designed. But there is a whole transportation system plan, and the transportation system plan is being updated next year. So it's a good opportunity to get involved in that planning process.

And just to follow up on that, too, we don't know much about those situations, as Rebecca said, but it's something we can definitely talk to our partners about and learn more about and come back to you with, what happened? How did this happen? Because none of us know. This is the first time I've been made aware of any of these issues.

Yeah, anything that just, those are just specific examples, top of mind. Like, the same thing could be said, like, you know, we're codifying in here. Yes, we work with E web to plan how we deliver water. They're like, well, yeah, we do a site review and somebody makes sure to say, did you web look at this? Right. Can they get water here? Um, that's kind of part and parcel of the process, right?

Okay.

Commissioner Beeson.

So I'll wade into this pretty careful here. I, uh, And I understand it's hard to respond to specific examples. The examples, though, kinda provide some food for thought. I'm thinking back, I guess I find myself thinking about, we put all this together, and we have these chapters, and we have these policies. They provide some guidance. to all of us in the community whether you're a provider or a developer or whoever you are on how we want to try to develop our community in an effective and efficient way. I think one would hope that as you do this and part of the coordination I guess is making it available talking about doing the coordination, talking to the different providers so that these policies are in the hands of people who are, in fact, making some of these decisions so they're thinking about it and aware of it. I'm thinking back to when we did the River Road Plan a few years ago. I thought it was a really good plan. It was a plan with a set of goals and a whole set of policies. For me, what I'm thinking we do is going forward, say the Planning Commission, but others also, those policies offer this framework for us as we're evaluating different questions out in the River Road area. So if we're doing this legislative work that we do in terms of looking at code and you have a lot of these policies in place, they're going to, I think I will, uh, push on us all to kind of be aware of the different ramifications of some of the decisions that are being made. So, um, I think the policies have a place and they're important. The more that we can describe how we want to implement the goals, hopefully it's helpful. How it would end up that you can design a part of the city where part of it doesn't work, we should end up in a position, I think, where as the designers, as people are coming together there, thinking about all the different aspects of it. Something like the LTD transit doesn't slip by. I think the policies are useful. I understand the city doesn't mandate that they have to be followed, but I think that it's useful work and should help to inform people putting all this together. I think I'll just leave it there.

Other questions? Issues? All right. Thank you.

Thank you all. We appreciate your input. It's hard to... It's hard for us as well to create a chapter in a plan that's called a comprehensive plan that has a limited scope. We want it to solve everything, and it doesn't do that. And it's good to get your input, and we will incorporate what we can.

I guess I have one other red flag potential issue that has to do with annexation. I remember one of the meetings long ago, and I think again this is way up the River Road area, there are areas where it's pockmarked, where some are Annexed and some are not and then there was a neighbor who was up in arms because the rest of his street wanted to annex and he did not and That would all impact because he didn't want to pay for the city services, right so you can't very well bypass one home in the middle of a project and and there's a lot of potential and issues that we might see in the future when things like that come up. I mean, I don't know how you can make rules about annexation. I don't know how that patchwork happened in the first place, but it was, it's not easily easy to resolve and services will definitely be an issue in those cases. The other thing I remember about the River Road plan was when it came to us and the people from River Road came to talk, one of the things they were very upset about was having put five years into creating this plan and then have the city kind of negate or take away everything having to do with River Road because the city wanted to incorporate some kind of broader master planning for major thoroughfares. So that was a bit of a blow.

Yeah, there was a lot of blows in the River Road Santa Clara neighborhood planning process. One of them being HB 2001 middle housing. So they had originally wanted to sort of allow for middle housing off of the corridor as it sort of went into R1 and kind of And then middle housing was allowed in all of R1. And that sort of kind of threw their plan out the window a little bit. So that was a huge part of that process. The patchwork in River Road, Santa Clara, there was a lot of major health hazards related to sewage happening in the 80s. Because there was a health hazard, essentially, the city was able to provide sewer service to properties that were not annexed, which normally a city wouldn't be able to do under statewide planning goals because you know, land is either urbanized or not. But because there was a health hazard, the city provided sewer service to much of that area and allowed people to annex at the same time if they would like to, but they did not force people to. And that's sort of how that patchwork ended up happening. So hopefully, We're not anticipating another health hazard where something like that happens again.

And we are, all of Willamette Valley is a floodplain, is it not? Aren't we all on a floodplain here?

I mean, we are not all in a regulated 100-year floodplain. Okay. But that there is, that is delineated. There is a significant amount of, yeah.

However, geologically, when you look at where rivers flow. All right.

Thank you. I have one other question. When we did the other chapters in the phase two over the last year and a half, there was opportunity for the community and others to provide comments. If we wanted to provide some written comments to you, is there a window of time here? And if people in the community want to, I'm thinking back to how we had the work groups and we went through the process. Interested people had a chance to go through the material Is that possible here?

It's definitely possible here. We are planning to make this chapter available for everyone to take a look at. With previous chapters, we provided a survey so folks could give us their input that way. I think we decided as a team that it may not make sense to do a survey this round, but to provide the policies and goals for folks to take a look at, and then they can just email us directly with comments. I think if we were to get them in the next couple months, that would be a ample amount of time. I don't think we're expecting this to be formally wrapped up until early 2027. So we'll make sure that we have that up on our website so that people can see that and have an email address to email immediately to. So maybe roughly two months?

I would say longer than that. Okay.

Okay.

Well, I'll do, yeah, the... Yeah, I would say to the end of the year, yes. Yeah, we'll be working on the public facilities plan draft through the end of this year as well. So we'll bring that as well as an updated chapter to you next year.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you all for your work. As always, you do an outstanding job with an incredible workload, and we appreciate you. Next on our agenda is items from commission and staff. Are there any items or info to share from commissioners? Staff?

Thank you.

I am sitting in for Terry tonight because she couldn't make it. Just two quick things. Oh, three quick things. Commissioner Yang is featured in our newsletter. So if folks are not signed up for our Envision Eugene huge planning newsletter, that's a good reason to subscribe. Great. I forgot about that one. That was a bonus one. We also have a meeting poll out to you. We are... rescheduling a bunch of meetings out of necessity so we are pulling you and we're not going to meet with you all those dates we promise but we're pulling you on a lot of dates because we only want to meet when people are available so and we need to coordinate with Lane County also so Crystal sent that out to you, and I believe you have until the end of day Monday to get back to us. That would be much appreciated. And we also had a September 8th meeting with you that we are canceling because we are shifting meetings to October. So you will be getting that notice in the near future as well. So likely there are no September meetings unless a land use decision comes up that needs to be brought to you. We are, however, going to council on September 14th for the adoption package that you just made your recommendation on.

So that raises a question about the letter we wanted to see at the September 8th meeting prior to it being delivered to the council.

That's a good point. So we can circulate a draft. We can circulate a draft. I don't think we need a public meeting for that. We can circulate a draft before the September 14th meeting. And we can have an email response. And I think it was actually before the public hearing made sense for you to... Someone to present deliver that so it's not councils September 14th meeting.

It's their October hearing Because they're having a work session first and then a public hearing in October I thought well, I think they said we wanted to get our letter to them for their work sessions since they will be dealing with the same kinds of questions we were

It is totally up to you. At the work session, they will be getting information and asking questions. They won't yet be deliberating. The public record will be open for the general public before the public hearing. So you could do it either way.

I just want to ask the question. So would staff be conveying to them what the Planning Commission ended up doing as far as like in preparation for that work session? So that they at least know that the Planning Commission made a recommendation that may have been different from the staff recommendation. And then we would have the opportunity to have somebody from the Planning Commission read a statement at the public hearing.

We will put information. We will put the planning commission recommendation in the AIS for the council.

I might lobby to recommend that we do that. We can work towards having someone identified and route a letter that could be read. Okay. Well, I will be testifying on behalf of my employer, I'm sure, or one of the, or probably Better Housing Together. So maybe, one or both, or either. Yeah. So I may be able to do it. I may be able to find a surrogate on the other two, but I just, you know.

When I asked Terry about the letter and... whatever goes forward to the City Council. She said that the Planning Department document going to City Council would not state that the Planning Commission recommendation is different than what the Planning Department was recommending. but just that we had these deliberations and this and this and this was considered and this is the recommendation of the Planning Commission. If that's accurate, then you don't need to worry about it being separate from what the Planning Department was recommending. Is that correct? Or TBD?

I think it's TBD. Okay. I think we don't need, yeah. I haven't had that conversation with her, and she is out of the office, so we can talk about process more.

When she's back later in the month. All right. So we, the Planning Commission, can expect to see a draft letter circulated electronically at some point, hopefully prior to the end of the month.

Yes. If not, if we decide to bring it to the council before we have the next Planning Commission. All right. How's that? Okay. Did you have other items for us? That is all I had. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. This meeting of the Planning Commission is now adjourned. Thank you all.