Voters want to decide on $10M fee, council told

Presenter: Eugene residents are standing by, ready to gather signatures to let voters decide whether to adopt or reject a $10 million fee. On Jan. 22, City Councilor Mike Clark:

Councilor Mike Clark: I’m aware of people who are getting ready to be able to put this petition out if we choose to pass this. And so it’s a very real reality that we will face. And so I just want my colleagues to be aware of that.

[00:00:26] If hypothetically the council majority decided to impose this fee, if a signature drive were gathered to reverse the council’s decision, can you talk about the timelines that would necessarily follow with both this and next budgets?

[00:00:46] Presenter: City Attorney Kathryn Brotherton:

[00:00:48] Kathryn Brotherton (Eugene, city attorney): If you adopt an ordinance establishing the fee, then through the referral process signature collectors would have 30 days. And if within those 30 days they collect the required number of signatures to put it on the ballot… if they were able to do that, then the ordinance would not go into effect and then you would be waiting for the outcome of the election.

[00:01:14] Presenter: Councilor Mike Clark:

[00:01:15] Councilor Mike Clark: And how many signatures is that? Just as a side note.

[00:01:18] Presenter: City Recorder Katie LaSala:

[00:01:19] Katie LaSala (Eugene, city recorder): Right now, the referendum process is 5,817 valid signatures.

[00:01:27] Presenter: Councilor Clark:

[00:01:28] Councilor Mike Clark: I just wanted to ask City Manager: How does this affect your ability to throw a ‘25-‘27 budget together? If this council votes in a fee and it gets its 5,000 signatures to put it on a ballot, that’s a question we won’t be able to answer until somewhere in probably June. So how would that affect the process of your creation of a new budget?

[00:01:55] Presenter: City Manager Sarah Medary:

[00:01:57] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager): If you made the decision on Feb. 10, we would assume the revenue. If the signatures get collected and the ordinance doesn’t go into effect, we would have to come up with some other emergency measures to make reductions that were easy to restore. Because we wouldn’t be able to sustain that over—it depends on how long of a time we’re in, kind of, limbo land. If the fee goes down, then we’re making those reductions. And I think that’s kind of the simplicity of it.

[00:02:28] Presenter: Councilor Clark:

[00:02:29] Councilor Mike Clark: I’d be in favor of us moving forward to start talking about comparative ways and values as you suggested in this meeting so that we could start framing up: What does the long-term budget reality look like?

[00:02:45] Presenter: Councilor Greg Evans:

[00:02:46] Councilor Greg Evans: One of the things that we cannot do is look at this in terms of our budget in isolation of other things that are impacting our residents. We are going to see a significant increase in EWEB rates coming up.

[00:03:03] We are going to have to come back in 2027 and we’re going to be looking at the (Community Safety Payroll Tax) that’s going to go out to the voters and that is going to be up for renewal.

[00:03:17] We’re at a point where we’re hitting tax fatigue with a lot of our residents and the people that I’ve talked to about the fire fee and what is going on with the budget folks are saying, you know, ‘We really can’t handle this anymore. The cost of living is out of control.’ So we’re going to have to make some real hard decisions, I think, about what services we are delivering and also looking at how we deliver services and how we can move forward with a different service delivery model that is going to be cost-conscious as well as efficiency-conscious in terms of how we deliver those services.

[00:04:11] And I know we don’t have time to do this right now, but I’m really thinking that we need to take a longer, more comprehensive view of what we are doing as a city. What do we have to do as a city versus things that we would like to do that we’re currently doing; that maybe we can look at a different model for service delivery and being able to create efficiencies out of that.

[00:04:41] Because we’re not going to get anywhere where everybody’s got their own pet departments and projects and saying, ‘You can’t cut me, you can’t cut me,’ and we just need more money, that ultimately is not going to work.

[00:04:55] And Councilor Clark is right. We are going to get major pushback and the last thing we need is to have somebody take this to the ballot and say, ‘Okay, City Council, you passed the fire fee, we don’t like it, we can’t afford it, and you’re going to have to go back to the drawing board and figure out something else.’ I’d rather not be put in that position.

[00:05:19] Presenter: Later in the same meeting, Councilor Clark wondered out loud about the city’s involvement in emergency housing.

[00:05:26] Councilor Mike Clark: Our former mayor was fond of saying that homeless services and shelter issues, although the county’s responsibility, we end up as the ‘emergency room,’ she used to like to say, and so we have to do a larger share of that work than we are allocated in state responsibilities.

[00:05:46] I wonder why it is we will be asking for more and more and more of that work that should be the county’s job when in fact it seems we’re going to have to argue with the county and fight with them about money that would go to them from the state in order to try and get it for us.

[00:06:07] Don’t we end up with a zero-sum game there, that the county loses every time we win on that front?

[00:06:13] Presenter: Intergovernmental Relations Manager Ethan Nelson:

[00:06:16] Ethan Nelson (Intergovernmental Relations, manager): This was the focus of the sustainable shelter work group, was, there had not been a statewide programmatic framework that had been set on up in statute that would say: ‘This is how the state’s going to take on shelter.’

[00:06:28] And so what our advocacy (which had been directed by Council) was to expand eligibility for the types of programs that the state would fund. Because heretofore, the types of programs that the city was funding were [not] even eligible for state reimbursement, whether they came directly to us or to the county.

[00:06:47] So a new expansion of services and also the recognition that regional entities need to be the ones that are receiving funds and then being accountable for those funds and the outcomes that are tied to those funds. In this case, it would likely be Lane County and we would be working collaboratively with Lane County to accomplish those goals.

[00:07:07] So I think we’re shifting into a new framework, a program framework that will ideally change the discussion to get out of that zero-sum situation that you were alluding to.

[00:07:20] Presenter: City councilors warn that voters are gearing up to fight a $10 million fee. They ask that instead of slashing the budget in June, days before it would go into effect, the council start prioritizing services in January, and work on finding ‘new models for service delivery.’