Parks and Open Space
During my terms as Mayor, I helped put together the first parks bond for the City of Eugene in approximately 25 years, and submitted it to the voters. The bond was designed to purchase parks in all regions of the city, and the city’s voters passed the bond with this goal in mind.
After passage of the bond, we were able to accomplish what the community asked us to do, and developed parks throughout the city.
After Kitty Piercy took over as Mayor, a second bond was put together for parks and open space. In the campaign to pass this bond (reference, City of Eugene Voters Pamphlet, November 7, 2006), Mayor Piercy promised to use the bond money for land purchase throughout the community, as had happened after the first bond was passed.
Instead, she voted to spend millions of dollars—the majority of money available at that time—on several adjoining parcels that would create benefit only in South Eugene—a purchase that her supporters had been lobbying for within the city for a number of years. As reported in the Register Guard on April 9, 2008, Percy voted to commit hundreds of thousands of dollars in option money to the purchase—at a price much higher than the land’s assessed value.
I feel that it is not right to “sell” the voters on spending money in a way that would benefit all the community, then use it to benefit only one area. This is especially true when so much of the bond money is committed to such a purchase—and at a price that many think is much too high.
I asked the Mayor to put this purchase to a public vote. As reported in the Register-Guard on April 16, 2008, the Mayor said in a neighbors’ meeting that she does not support letting the community vote on the purchase.
I do not understand how any local public official can refuse to let the public vote on how to spend precious public funds when the proposed use of those dollars is both controversial, and is also earmarked for land at a price that is apparently much higher than the real assessed value of the property.
Another action by the Mayor put the transaction under an even darker cloud. When the respected Planner and Environmentalist Steve Gordon, who had been appointed head of the committee to make recommendations about this purchase, said that the committee needed to be able to consider the real value of the land in making recommendations, the Mayor told him that setting a price was the “business” of the Mayor and City Council.
Gordon resigned from his chairmanship and from the committee (Register-Guard, May 10, 2008), saying that “convictions and personal credo” prevented him from having his name associated with any recommendation by a committee regarding funding of these properties when they could not consider value and price.
A long-time former planner with the Lane County Council of Governments, Gordon is considered responsible for raising $35 million in public and private funds to restore and preserve some 2500 acres of wetlands in West Eugene.