How much is HB 2001 costing us? City doesn’t know

Presenter: Eugene passed its third try at a middle housing ordinance Monday night, although three councilors voted against it. Two had voted against the second ordinance, while the original HB 2001 code was adopted unanimously. On Nov. 25:

[00:00:17] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager) Following its original adoption, the middle housing code was appealed and ultimately remanded back to the city to address compliance with statewide Planning Goal 11, which concerns public facilities and services. The Council readopted the middle housing code earlier this year with additional findings, but that ordinance was also remanded.

[00:00:34] The proposed ordinance addresses the remand, the one that’s in front of you, by directly incorporating the sufficient infrastructure requirements from the model code to ensure that the higher density housing allowed by this ordinance will only be developed on lots with sufficient infrastructure.

[00:00:50] Councilor Randy Groves: City Manager, do we have an idea on how many staff hours we have wrapped into House Bill 2001, CFEC (Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities), appeals, remands, etc.?

[00:01:03] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager) A lot.

[00:01:05] Councilor Randy Groves: And cost.

[00:01:06] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager) Yeah, we don’t, we don’t track by, I don’t think we’re tracking that by, ‘You’re working on 2001,’ or, ‘You’re working on this.’ But essentially, you know, a lot of our Planning staff have been working on these state mandates for the last couple of years.

[00:01:21] Councilor Randy Groves: And if we had just adopted the model code, we would have been done a long time ago, is that correct?

[00:01:27] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager) I don’t know the answer to that.

[00:01:32] Presenter: The city manager just said she can’t tell City Council how much staff time has been spent on HB 2001. Later in the meeting:

[00:01:42] Councilor Randy Groves: My concern is that we are not getting to other important planning issues such as the health overlay zone, the Bethel area plan—the list goes on. Although it doesn’t involve planning staff, we’re still waiting to finish up the Fire governance model as well. So we have these important issues that are staring us in the face, and we are still dealing with remands and appeals and there’s probably going to be more.

[00:02:09] Presenter: Some of the important projects on hold because the city is still working on HB 2001: The fuel transloading station; its public health overlay zone; the Bethel area plan; a satellite police station; and the city manager’s response to a meeting request from folks in Trainsong.

[00:02:29] Lin Woodrich: My name is Lin Woodrich. I’m the Active Bethel Community co-chair. I’ve lived in the Bethel area over 30 years. I live in Ward 8. I’m speaking for the Active Bethel Community board.

[00:02:39] Thank you for hearing us and withdrawing the zoning verification decision for the USD Clean Fuels facility in the Trainsong neighborhood. We understand that you have 90 days to review it, but we ask Sarah Medary to withdraw permanently. The 90 days is up on Jan. 16. Trainsong residents sent a letter to Sarah asking her to meet and visit the area and they’re waiting for her to get back to them with the time and date.

[00:03:04] Please hurry to finalize the public health development standards for at least the Bethel and Trainsong neighborhoods so we won’t be saddled with another JH Baxter-type business in our area. Until the city manager provides you with the health overlay zone language to review, there’s nothing to act on. Why am I not seeing this on your work session agenda?

[00:03:23] We need to get ahead of heavy industrial permit requests for the Westgate Industrial Park on North Danebo Avenue and others are in the pipeline that we’re unaware of.

[00:03:32] A few more things for local business owners that you can do now to help with some of the unhoused problems are to enact a no-panhandling ordinance for Eugene and to require metal recyclers to have a contractor’s license to turn in scrap wire and copper. And why aren’t you enforcing legal camping codes on Highway 99 from Roosevelt to Beltline?

[00:03:50] Bethel needs a police substation on Highway 99 now. It doesn’t need to be fancy. The city hired a downtown incident commander in 2023 to focus on public safety and cleanliness, ensuring appropriate police presence and coordinating resources from across the organization in a rapid response team. Bethel needs this too.

[00:04:11] Presenter: That’s Lin Woodrich from Active Bethel Community, telling the council that needs in Bethel and Trainsong are not being met. And Councilor Groves said those important needs aren’t being met because staff is still working on HB 2001.

[00:04:25] Asked to explain how the city will meet Goal 11:

[00:04:31] Lauren Sommers (Eugene, assistant city attorney): How does the city ensure that sufficient infrastructure is in place for middle housing development that would be allowed under this ordinance?

[00:04:39] The council was provided with a memo by email at the end of last week that explains in a little bit more detail, but I can give you the highlights, um, again.

[00:04:48] So, sufficient infrastructure under the model code is defined as water service, wastewater service, stormwater service, and access roads.

[00:04:59] For water service, when someone submits a building permit application to build middle housing, building permit services staff sends a referral letter to EWEB to say, ‘Can this proposed development be served with water?’ EWEB sends a reply back. If EWEB says no, then the building permit wouldn’t be issued.

[00:05:20] For stormwater, Public Works Engineering staff has done a calculation based on the city’s adopted stormwater master plan, basin by basin, to see how many square feet of impervious surface can be created in the basin and the city’s system can still absorb that additional stormwater runoff. And if there’s no additional impervious surface area, then the development would need to retain all the stormwater on site, or would not be issued a building permit.

[00:05:49] For wastewater, the city has a wastewater modeling system. So again, Public Works staff can model how the proposed development will impact the wastewater system.

[00:05:59] And for access, the applicant needs to show that the development site has access to public or private streets that either comply with the city’s street design standards or the fire code so that there’s sufficient access.

[00:06:19] Councilor Mike Clark: On one hand, I want to put anything into code that’s legal and possible to see us build more housing, for the love of all get-out. We desperately need to build more housing. I’m going to be a lot louder about that this year and us incentivizing anything we can to do it…

[00:06:40] The challenge I have with that is having read the memo (and thank you very much for that), I found that the language of that memo didn’t answer the question for me. How do they define, in an environment where we expect objective standards and measures for things, when it talks about wastewater being essentially put into an algorithm to see if it will work.

There wasn’t as clear and objective enough language for me with how we measure and what the standard is for sufficiency, so someone could know in advance before they bought, for example, a piece of property: Would they have the capacity to do the plans they have for it? Because they can easily tell in a clear and objective manner, what’s the standard for whether or not it will meet code.

[00:07:33] I have voted in the past three instances, I think, of this coming before us, against it, because I had concerns with Goal 11 in the sense that we don’t have clear and objective measures for what is sufficient infrastructure. And I don’t have a way to tell whether or not we do.

[00:07:55] Presenter: The city employees said they’re doing their best to follow council direction, including: to preserve home rule.

[00:08:03] Councilor Greg Evans: My opposition to this in the first place five years ago when I was president of the League of Oregon Cities is we need to maintain as much home rule and control as we can. And, you know, while this code may work and fit for Portland Metro, it doesn’t necessarily fit for the rest of the state.

[00:08:29] This council voted 7 to 0 to 1 against the provisions in House Bill 2001. And then people were convinced to revisit their vote in opposition to it. That’s our prerogative. However, I’m like Councilor Clark, I have a real difficult time wrapping my head around and giving away our ability to zone and to manage our local housing codes, to the state. This is the state of Oregon, not the state of Portland.

[00:09:11] Lauren Sommers (Eugene, assistant city attorney): I think that what the city wanted to do was to create the possibility for local involvement, local input, citizen engagement in, you know, we have these middle housing directives from the state, we have to allow middle housing in the city of Eugene (Yeah, we don’t have a choice), but there is some opportunity to craft an ordinance that works for the city of Eugene, rather than just kind of adopting in whole the code that was drafted by the Department of Land Conservation and Development.

[00:09:47] So, city staff spent a lot of time and a lot of energy, and a lot of members of the community spent a lot of time and a lot of energy, kind of working on building a code that seemed like it would work best for the city of Eugene.

[00:10:03] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager) You have directed us every step of the way. You didn’t want to do the model code, that you did want to make— every decision that’s built into that code was a council decision. So what we’re continuing to do is bring you back, you know, what we think is the best fit for your decision.

[00:10:21] It’s been remanded twice, you know, we’ve been told if you want it to not be remanded again, not that it won’t be appealed, but that we need to adopt that model code language as an option. And that’s what we’ve done for that specific case.

[00:10:34] But I think when you ask, what is the benefit? I think that’s a conversation that you’ve been having together and making those choices.

[00:10:41] Presenter: The council passes its third try at a middle housing ordinance, and along the way hears that the city doesn’t track staff time by project.

[00:10:50] Councilor Randy Groves: City Manager, do we have an idea on how many staff hours we have wrapped into House Bill 2001, CFEC, appeals, remands, etc.?

[00:11:02] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager) A lot.

[00:11:04] Presenter: The city manager can’t tell council what staff has been working on, or how much it’s costing taxpayers.