City sets neighborhood summit, County offers meetings on proposed behavioral health center

HRNI tells NLC that Eugene will start to review, coordinate outreach

Lane County offers to meet with each neighborhood about a proposed behavioral health center. The City calls for a neighborhood summit in June. And after widespread criticism that the middle housing effort ignored neighborhoods, the City looks to review and coordinate community engagement. At the May Neighborhood Leaders Council, Lane County’s Jason Davis.

[00:00:20] Jason Davis, Lane County: Lane County is embarking on a community engagement effort around a behavioral health stabilization center that’s proposed, and we are just in the initial phase of the community engagement.

[00:00:33] June 16th we are having a general discussion about this that’ll be open to the entire public, it’ll be virtual. And the reason I’m here tonight is both to just get us on your radar as a project, but then also to ask if we could potentially get on any of your respective neighbor association calendars for the fall for a presentation. And if any neighborhoods are interested in that please do feel free to reach out. We will also be emailing all your contacts. But we’re looking to do more and more and more, so we just want to present to you all hopefully in the fall.

[00:01:06] John Q: One NLC member asked if the County had selected a location.

[00:01:11] Jason Davis, Lane County: There was a location on the table for a while, but that has now moved off the table. That was downtown. But that location is not on the table anymore. We do not have a location as of now.

[00:01:21] If we present to you in the fall, there will be a possibility that we’ll have some locations. Our plan though, is to come and do presentations while we still have multiple options available to talk through, so we’re not coming with a done deal. That’s the plan anyway. So hopefully that’s what we’ll be able to do in the fall.

[00:01:39] Robert Brack, Eugene Human Rights and Neighborhood Involvement: All neighborhood boards should have heard the invitation to the Neighborhood Summit that’s scheduled for June 22, 5:30 to 8:00 p.m. We’ll be hosting this at the Campbell Senior Center, which has been newly remodeled, and is a great meeting location. So I’m hoping that people can participate.

[00:01:58] There will be a way to join through a hybrid meeting as well, so people can be in-person or online to attend that Neighborhood Summit. If you are attending in-person, we sent out a link to RSVP, so that way we can order enough food, so there’ll be a 5:30 to 6:00 time for us to eat a meal together and be all together in the same room.

[00:02:20] And then there’ll be programming and panel discussions from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. So really looking forward to that time with you all. That invitation was out to all neighborhood board members so please share that invitation with others.

[00:02:31] I also sent out an email from the Community Safety Initiative (CSI) project manager. There’s a neighborhood-association-specific survey; what they’re looking for is three people selected to complete that survey. So this could be from your neighborhood boards, or if there’s committee members who are active and interested in that topic, then they can be selected to participate in that survey as well.

[00:02:58] John Q: After an internal whistleblower told City Council that the HB 2001 outreach ignored neighborhoods, the City is moving to review departments’ community engagement.

[00:03:11] Fabio Andrade, HRNI Manager: Right now we have HRNI in the City Manager’s Office, but we do not have any direct— any established process for coordinating and advising in checking on community engagement processes. And this new structure that we are developing right now will create that possibility that community engagement will be more uniform and more coordinated.

[00:03:32] One of the benefits is that we may reduce how many requests we send out, because we have different divisions and departments sometimes going out with requests for the same type of information, or using conflicting language in how they communicate to the community and to the associations and so on.

[00:03:47] So we hope that this change will improve how we do communications.

[00:03:52] John Q: With the City moving to program-based budgeting. Fabio described HRNI’s programs.

[00:03:58] Fabio Andrade, HRNI Manager: We will have three programs: the Neighborhood Association program, the Human Rights program, and the Language Access program. And in addition to those three programs that we will be responsible for, we will be coordinating with our Employee Resource Center— our HR Department— on training for staff, providing mostly equity trainings. And those trainings are also available to our community partners— the commissions we work with and the neighborhood associations.

[00:04:25] John Q: For more, follow up with Jason Davis at Lane County, or Robert and Fabio in HRNI.