NLC hosts Lane County Commissioner Heather Buch

Presenter: The Neighborhood Leaders Council is hosting local political officials. At the Feb. 24 meeting, Commissioner Heather Buch:

Heather Buch (Lane County, commissioner): I thought I’d just talk about some highlights of what’s going on at the county, but I’m totally open to questions too.

We are working on a budget coming up June 30. Like most governments, we need to have a balanced budget as of the end of the fiscal year, which is June 30. So, like most governmental agencies, we’re seeing resource reductions going on. So we are looking at a budget hole of about $2.9 million.

And we will be starting Budget Committee meetings next month, and trying to wrap up shoring up a hole in services. We have several structurally unsound different divisions that we need to figure out how we’re paying for and one of those, you know, is our sheriff’s patrol.

If you live outside the county or outside the cities, you will likely know that we have at any given point in time just three sheriffs and one sergeant on the clock transferring from all sides of the county responding to calls, which is creating some long wait times.

So we are trying to work off of a public safety task force report that was provided to us after a yearlong bit of work from the community on particular options on shoring that up and decreasing wait times for people who call in.

Another big project that we’re working on is a mental health stabilization center in Springfield. This is a gap in our health care continuum of care for folks who don’t know what to do if they have a mental health crisis.

And that mental health crisis needs a venue for folks to go to, both youth and adults. So this would provide a 30-day stay for both youth and adults to get medical care, should they need it. 

They don’t have to stay the whole time, but if they exit after 30 days, they’ll have a professional plan in which to go home and get extended treatment if they need to.

A lot of kids in school and parents are not necessarily sure what to do with their kiddos if they have a mental health crisis, so this would fill that gap.

And that is a really big capital construction project that we are partnering with PeaceHealth on right now. We are in the middle of getting the property annexed into the city of Springfield and it will service the whole region. So not only Lane County, but it might pull in some people from neighboring counties.

One of the other health care-related issues are the potential cuts in Medicare are really starting to hit the county. The Board of County Commissioners is also the Board of Public Health. So we operate eight federally-qualified health care clinics that serve over 30,000 people in our community, at our various clinics, including one in Cottage Grove.

They are largely our most vulnerable population and often come to us with Medicare as their only health care coverage. And as Medicare is being cut down by the federal administration, we’re seeing potential cuts to our health care clinics. And that means we have to respond with trying to continue those services the best we can with reduced resources.

A lot of people also are moving from PacificSource to Trillium. So we had two CCOs covering folks’ healthcare in the community, and so we are moving those to one, because one decided to move away from the county. And that is taking a lot of resources from us as well. 

We’re working with Trillium closely on ensuring that those people remain covered and can get the care that they need. But that is taking a lot of time and energy.

Presenter: From the Amazon neighborhood, Randy Prince:

Randy Prince: I’m Randy Prince from the Amazon neighborhood and there’s several of us neighborhoods that have been engaged in discussions with the Eugene Springfield Fire and the county’s emergency manager about the preparedness for a kind of a rare event, an urban conflagration where you get a few houses catch on fire. It’s so bad that the houses catch other houses on fire and within a few hours many are destroyed. We’ve seen this in California and in Medford area in Oregon. We have windy roads.

We’re kind of concerned that our highly-qualified county emergency manager—we don’t know what happened to her. Tiffany Brown is really about the best we could hope for—from the coast where they have to be concerned with tsunamis. And of course, the coast has these type of fast-moving fires like the Tillamook or the Bandon Fire the last century.

And she’s really very good. But what’s up? Are we getting a new director?

Heather Buch (Lane County, commissioner): You bet. We have an acting emergency manager right now, Jon Stueve. He was actually part of a small but mighty team of emergency managers at the county. And so he is our interim at the moment. 

We’re right now hiring for this position, and I’m not sure if he’ll get the job or somebody else will get the job, but rest assured we always have an emergency manager on staff and in fact, we have a couple people working under that person. So we are fully engaged at all times should something happen.

It’s my understanding that the city of Eugene has their own emergency manager as well, although that I have not met them personally. But we often interact with all the different cities and agencies through our emergency management team, and I’m confident that they have those relationships. So we’ll continue having those preparedness activities.

You know, I happen to serve on Oregon Emergency Management’s Advisory Council for Emergency Preparedness. It’s something actually, it’s really near and dear to my heart, and very engaged on what we’re doing there and ensuring that folks are prepared and what we can do at the state level to help residents be prepared and also give direction to the governor’s office as to what to concentrate on.

So I fully appreciate your question. It’s obviously a scenario that people have thought of. We’ve thought of it as well. But know that we have an emergency manager on staff and ready to go should something occur.

Presenter: In response to an email question from KEPW 97.3, Lane County said Emergency Manager Tiffany Brown resigned to pursue another prospect.

The next question for Commissioner Heather Buch came from Neighborhood Leaders Council co-Chair Jensina Hawkins of the Churchill neighborhood:

Jensina Hawkins (Churchill Area Neighbors, chair): Heather, can you talk a little bit about CleanLane, just a little bit? 

Heather Buch (Lane County, commissioner): You bet. So this is a public-private partnership that we are discussing to put in as a recycling facility at Short Mountain Landfill. This is in conjunction with Bulk Handling Systems.

We have noted through our Climate Action Plan that the largest greenhouse gas emitter from the county is our landfill. So this facility is meant to help reduce greenhouse gases, but it also will separate food waste from regular waste, capture that methane, use it as renewable natural gas, and then recyclable materials can be excluded from the landfill and sold on a third-party market.

It’s all done optically. So there’s not people like picking or sorting, it’s all done high-tech, optical separation at the facility. And so we are working through land use code at the moment in order to build the building. But it will also provide really great jobs, the equivalent of taking 25,000 cars off the road every year.

And it will extend the life of our landfill. Most people may not be aware, but we’re one of the few places that has a municipally-owned landfill. It’s not privately owned and for that reason we are able to provide the service at better rates.

It also helps generate revenue for the 15 different transit stations we have all over the county for folks to deliver their garbage there so that we don’t have dumping on county properties everywhere, which costs a lot of money to clean up. We already do a lot of cleanup work.

So we’re trying to ensure that we keep that service viable for those that live outside the cities, while also being able to extend the life of our landfill here.

Presenter: Commissioner Heather Buch meets with the Neighborhood Leaders Council Feb. 24 and takes questions about the resignation of the county’s emergency manager and CleanLane.