NW Eugene residents ask county for help with local access roads, Navigation Center

Speaker Residents of Northwest Eugene ask Lane County commissioners for help with local access roads and the Navigation Center. Dec. 9, Linda Lovick:

Linda Lovick My name is Linda Lovick from Eugene. I know your meeting today does not include any discussion about the orphaned local access roads, which are mostly random subset of roads in the urban growth boundary that the county so far refuses to maintain. 

I am here to be on record that we citizens are still active on this matter, still very concerned about the unjust reality we have presented to you previously; that we citizens are still working on informing residents that they live on LARs and educating them (since Public Works told us that the county doesn’t do that); that we citizens will not rest until the wrong has been righted—until LARs are adopted into the Lane County road system, until we are no longer financially at risk for road maintenance and repairs that our county roads residing neighborhoods are not subject to. 

We’re grateful for the interest some of you have shown so far, and we’re before you today to keep that interest active. Today I will be making two new points. 

First, to clarify the support this issue receives in our canvassing, 95% of those we talk to sign our petitions. So residents resoundingly and unequivocally demand that you accept these roads into the county road system. I ask you: What other issue before government today has the support of 95% of residents polled? When our canvassing is complete, we will submit all those additional petitions to you to accompany those submitted already. 

Second, an issue we haven’t brought to you before is what I call the ‘Buy High, Sell Low Conundrum.’ By that I mean we bought our house before sellers were required to disclose LAR status, had any of them known it.

The price we paid was unaffected by the financial cloud of self-paying for public road maintenance and repairs, and the legal cloud of being liable—with no insurance backup—for injuries caused by lack of maintenance or repairs, since homeowners insurance cannot cover public assets. 

So we, in good faith, having found our aging-in-place home, bought high. I assure you, most everyone we have talked with did not know their LAR status either, for many decades. Now, with the LAR-disclosure-by-seller-to-potential-buyer rule in place, I see us taking quite a possible loss if or when we need to sell our beloved home to move into care facilities.

Again, many others on LARs will face the same debacle. What buyer in their right mind would want to take on public road maintenance and repair when they would already pay taxes for those services, and their friends and neighbors on ostensibly equal streets are properly covered. 

Please think about this situation—this bind—in terms of your own residence or your own family. I wish you all holidays that you’ll treasure and we’ll see you next year.

Speaker Charlie Rojas:

Charlie Rojas On Nov. 14, 2025, the National Association of Counties issued a report regarding new guidelines for Continuum of Care, otherwise known as CoC, and permanent supportive housing. 

The message is clear: The Trump administration is totally revamping CoC and permanent supportive housing. The amount of the budget spent on permanent supportive housing will be capped at 30%, meaning that it can be a whole lot less at times. 

Under previous administrations, it had been 90% of CoC budget. Now the bulk of the money will be redirected to forced drug rehab, job training, and getting people off the government dole. 

The Navigation Center is an essential element of the permanent supportive housing machine here in Lane County. Without a constant stream of federal magic money to house and maintain the folks at the NC, none of this works. 

I pass by there quite often and I will tell you this: The people who are living there are not going to be able to walk out of that place into a $70,000-a-year job in order to pay $1,500 a month for a studio the size of a broom closet. That’s not happening. 

The question is: Where have all five of you been the last 10 years? Do you not read a newspaper? Or in a couple of your cases, have someone read one to you? Donald Trump has for over a decade said he’s going to massively revamp CoC and permanent supportive housing.

When Trump was inaugurated in January, that should have been a signal to you that the fed funding was going to be greatly mitigated and it required you to be far more prudent. Instead, you just threw away approximately $4 million on the Navigation Center. The Lane County commissioners are a case study in bureaucratic buffoonery and straight incompetence. 

And by the way, (Commissioners) Pat (Farr) and Laurie (Trieger), did you at the last meeting, at any meetings, say to the people that came here from the Riviera Centre, ‘They needed to hire more security guards.’ Did you say that? 

Commissioner Pat Farr I did not, but I’m not responding to you. 

Charlie Rojas Okay, well, somebody said that. I’ll tell you this, that you’re going to start to hear from people at North Eugene High School, administrators and the principal, who are saying, ‘We’ve got serious problems here.’ I certainly hope nobody is going to tell them: ‘Go hire more security guards to make sure your place is safe.’

Speaker Janet Ayres:

Janet Ayres I spent the time researching numbers, hard numbers. For Lane County, Oregon, the percentage of Lane County citizens, Lane County, Oregon, according to my source, 390,000 to 400,000 Lane County citizens you are expected to serve. Of that population, five-tenths to seven-tenths of 1% are deemed homeless.

And I next asked, in my quick research of the Lane County budget: How much of our dollars— And they are not the state’s dollars, they are not even your dollars. You have been elected to represent the people in the spending of those dollars, and you are being held accountable for that. 

The Navigation Center is the biggest buffoonery, not only in terms of the end result, the expectation. And I did the math on that, albeit some quick math. I’m a numbers person, and I would urge all of you to get more into the numbers.

It amounts to that Navigation Center, David, Commissioner Loveall, Commissioner Farr, amounts to $5,000 per head per month. What? How could that five—? And the rest is going to some out-of-state entity which Mr. Ceniga wants to maintain a good relationship, Essential Solutions. The bulk of that money, I dare say, is floating right out of the state, not local.

So $5,000 per head per month for 75 individuals.  And if you do the math, $4 million per year, roughly $3 million to $4 million. And it’s going into the third year, as far as I can tell, $10 million on 75 beds. Shameful, shameful. 

I would urge all of you commissioners and Pat, you need to return my calls. I’ve sent emails you never respond to. Mr. Ceniga has. Commissioner Ceniga, and I do appreciate that time that you gave with me. (Janet, your time is up.) I would hope that you would listen more to your constituents. I hope all of you do that from here on. Thank you.

Speaker Carl Darwin:

Carl Darwin Hello, my name is Carl Darwin. I am a 47-year North Eugene resident. I went to North Eugene High School and have spent my life riding my bike, walking and working and going up and down River Road. Forty-seven years of it. 

I want you guys to understand that things were bad during COVID, but things out River Road have gotten worse. There is a nonstop flow of drug activity in and around the Navigation Center behind all of the Riviera Center shops. I’ve documented it. We’ve reported it. 

It’s kind of tiring to have to do the job of what would be law enforcement. They have put up cameras up there every once in a while to kind of try to curb the activity, and it seems to slow it down for a minute, only to pick up again. 

I’m requesting that you guys discontinue this low-barrier-type shelter in the neighborhood. I think that there’s better places for it to be put, one of which, a better place would be in an industrial neighborhood where you don’t have children trying to navigate their way to school every morning. 

People like me when I was 10 years old, riding my bike to school, eight years old, riding my bike to school. It’s not safe. The kids are inundated with drug use drug activity. The other day, I saw a guy taking a crap on the sidewalk. It’s disgusting. It’s constant.

So, you know, it’s easy to make policy that doesn’t affect you. But what I’m requesting is that you look at just the facts of putting a low-barrier center in a residential zone. I think that it’s ridiculous. Put it somewhere where there’s not so many people. 

I know that the commercial folks out in the industrial neighborhood would probably push back on that idea, but it’s definitely not appropriate within walking distance of North Eugene High School. 

There’s been a huge uptick in gang activity in and around the Navigation Center. I believe there’s probably some territorial disputes on drug dealing. There’s MS-13 tags all over the neighborhood now. This has all happened since 2022, since it went in, there’s been an increase in drug activity.

So I do believe there is a correlation between the low-barrier shelter where those folks are allowed to go in, get fed, be housed, and leave, whenever they want, to do whatever they want. There’s nobody stopping them. So they go to the closest place to hide and do drugs in our neighborhood. Please shut it down.

Speaker Residents of Northwest Eugene ask Lane County commissioners for help with local access roads and the Navigation Center.