Development: Education key for officials, neighbors in accepting change
Continued from page 1
understanding, a working relation
ship can be maintained.
“The people who are open to
change want recognition and mitiga
tion of any impacts to the neighbor
hood,” Nelson said.
Retired University anthropology pro
fessor emeritus Don Dumond said he
and his wife bought their home on
Moss Street in 1962, several months
before the University began acquiring
property in the same neighborhood.
Dumond said some of the neigh
bors’ biggest concerns centered
around the amount of traffic generat
ed by the various activities being held
in nearby buildings, the lack of logic
that went into the placement of ac
tivities throughout the neighborhood,
and the condition of the houses the
University owned.
“The ones that they bought they
simply treated anyway they wanted
to," Dumond said. “This all got to be
kind of irritating.”
Neighborhood conditions im
proved with time, and the University
realized it was “going to be in the
real-estate business for quite a
while,” so it began paying closer at
tention to the conditions of both the
houses and of the neighborhood as a
whole, Dumond said.
Drafting a plan
The first working agreement be
tween the neighborhood and die Uni
versity came in 1982 in the form of the
Fairmount/University of Oregon Spe
cial Area Study, a result of what Du
mond said was more than 10 years of
unregulated University expansion and
nearly six years of conversations be
tween University officials and neigh
borhood representatives.
The University’s expansion into the
East Campus neighborhood correlated
with the city’s request that neighbor
hoods organize and produce a refine
ment plan, Dumond said, and the
neighbors embraced the request as a
way to solidify a working relationship
between them and a real-estate giant
in the area: the University.
The Faimiount Neighborhood Asso
ciation organized in 1972 and began
working on a refinement plan with the
University in 1976, Dumond said.
Within a few years Dumond was
chairman of the committee created to
form the plan.
Everyone involved in brainstorm
ing and drafting the plan had distinct
ideas as to what it should entail and
which issues it should address fore
most, Dumond said.
“It took a while to get everyone
sort of down to the point where they
dealt with what more than one per
son would see as a problem,” he
said. “There were all kinds of gripes
to get over.”
Ramey said the barrage of different
opinions can be one of the most diffi
cult aspects about public involvement
in the planning process.
“As a public agency, we’re really
charged by the public to be stewards of
the University and its mission, so that
doesn’t really give us the freedom to
meet every demand that the neighbors
might have,” Ramey said.
It took several years for the neigh
borhood and University to draft a
workable and beneficial plan, Du
mond said, but the 1982 plan they ulti
mately produced served as such, lim
iting University development in a way
that wasn’t inhibitive or intrusive.
“The main thing was the Univer
sity would stop leapfrogging activi
ties around the neighborhood,”
Dumond said.
The 1982 plan focused on keeping
University development on a logical
path of continuity and similarity — ex
pansion would start closest to campus
and expand outward as needed, allow
ing for growth but ensuring problems
could be mitigated if they arose.
Time for change
Dumond said the 1982 plan func
tioned the way it was intended for
nearly 20 years, until it came time
for the University to make use of the
property that had been preserved in
the form of student- and family
rented houses.
Using the land for necessary Univer
sity purposes became a pressing need
a few years ago, Williams said, and at
tention began to focus on how to de
velop that land in a way that was bene
ficial to both the University and the
surrounding community.
“We knew that if we could engage
them in the process, the likelihood of
an outcome that we all felt comfort
able with, both the University and the
neighbors, was going to increase sig
nificantly,” Williams said.
Williams said negotiating a benefi
cial settlement boils down to learning
how to navigate the relationship be
tween the University and the sur
rounding neighborhoods.
“Anytime you have a large organi
zation that has significant economic
impact on the community you’re go
ing to generate kind of a love-hate re
lationship with your neighbors,”
Williams said. “(Neighbors) appreci
ate the value that you bring to the
community, but with that comes
cars, a lot of commotion.”
Nelson said all neighbors do not
oppose change, but many are skep
tical of what the results of the
changes might be.
“Without change there’s stagnation,
so if you’ve got change going on it’s
not necessarily bad unless it’s bad
change,” Nelson said.
Ramey said fear of the unknown is
a driving force behind the conflict that
arises between the University and its
surrounding neighborhoods.
“This is an inherent difficulty in ur
ban planning, particularly with uni
versity relations — the need for
change and the fear of that change,”
Ramey said.
Williams said development in the
East Campus neighborhood a few
years back came after more than 40
years of using the East Campus prop
erty as a land bank for the future de
velopment of the University.
“I think most people recognize that
things are going to be different, but
what they have a right to expect in the
neighborhood is that when these
changes occur, that they’re thoughtful,
and we take into consideration the in
terest the neighbors have in preserving
their property and the value of their
property,” Williams said.
A two-way learning process
The current East Campus develop
ment plan is the result of more than 20
public meetings over the course of a
year and a half involving University
and neighborhood representatives.
Dumond said the process of updat
ing the campus plan involved educat
ing University officials, who were part
of the process, on the “bindingness” of
the 1982 plan and its implementations.
“Even the planning department
head (Ramey) was unaware of it and
was about to do things that were in op
position to the 1982 agreement until he
was called on them,” Dumond said.
“But it was all innocent. That is, it was
simply a lack of knowledge. ”
Dumond said this lack of knowl
edge resulted in the University original
ly citing the Moss Street Children’s
Center south of 17th Avenue, a viola
tion of the 1982 plan’s agreement to
limit development to the north side of
17th Avenue until they explored ex
pansion options and filled all available
property to the south.
This caused uproar with neighbor
hood residents who initially met it
with an attitude of “it was nobody’s
business, that the University ought to
be able to do it,” Dumond said.
“They had to get sort of sensitized to
the fact that there were people out
there who did have a certain, not just a
stake in it, but they had certain prerog
atives that came to them as a result of
previous agreements,” Dumond said.
But after University officials were
versed in the significance of the 1982
agreement and the need to coordi
nate development plans with neigh
borhood needs, they “bent over back
wards to try to keep those of us in the
neighborhood from being upset,”
Dumond said.
The center was relocated south of
17th Avenue, but it still generated a
large amount of vocal disapproval
from neighborhood residents.
Williams said the University went
into the updating process with a slight
ly different interpretation of certain ar
eas of the 1982 agreement than some
of the neighborhood residents, which
“got everyone off to the wrong foot. ”
Some residents felt the University
needed to share authority over its East
Campus properties with the neighbor
hood, “and we simply weren’t going to
do that,” Williams said.
“We’re not going to make decisions
that commit the University in the long
term to do things that are not reason
able,” Williams said.
Nelson was chairman of the Fair
mount Neighborhood Associatio com
mittee involved in the updating
process and agreed the neighborhood
had expected to play a greater role
than it did.
“Everyone kind of went in thinking
that we’d be able to map out the Uni
versity’s future when at the end of the
day we can only say these are the gen
eral guidelines and the University
needs to have the ability to do what it
needs to do,” Nelson said.
Neighbors have a big stake in the
University’s development plans be
cause of the sheer geographic loca
tion of their property, “so it’s really
not at all surprising that that would
come with a lot of emotional charge,”
Ramey said.
Ramey said many of the neighbors
were against change from the very be
ginning so the University had to edu
cate them in a way similar to how Du
mond described the neighborhood’s
education of the administration on the
specifics of the 1982 plan.
“They’re opening thought was ‘all
change is bad,’ so we had to kind of get
over that by educating them about,
well, what is the nature of the change
that we’re talking about and what are
your concerns, how can we address
those concerns,” Ramey said.
The Eugene City Council unani
mously approved the updated plan in
March 2004 and “if you were to study
University-neighbor relations over time
you would probably find that that’s al
most never the case,” Ramey said.
Dumond agreed the updated plan
was a good one and said it showed the
importance of neighbors speaking up
when University development may im
pact their lives.
“I think we all realized if we had
n’t yelled a few times it wouldn’t
have been as satisfactory to us,”
Dumond said.
Deciding to decide
Ramey said the current update to
the Long Range Campus Development
Plan will include added authority to
the Campus Planning Committee over
off-campus projects, though the level
of authority is at the University
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president’s discretion.
“The new plan does include every
thing,” Ramey said. “If the University
owns it, it comes to the planning com
mission at some level; we’re making a
decision to make a decision.”
Some worry the planning com
mission may encounter an already
concrete plan when it finally gets a
chance to add its input, such as the
administration’s current plans for a
basketball arena, but Ramey said
that’s when committee members
must trust that the “big picture”
was taken into consideration by
those involved with the plan.
“You have to look at all of these
things from a big picture point of
view: ‘Is there a way that this project
can proceed and have a way to win,
where the donors get what they want
and the University doesn’t get
harmed?”’ Ramey said. “And I think
that’s the President’s sense — I hope
— is that ‘yeah, we can do that. We
don’t need to inject all our processes
on this project.’”
The best way to solidify a work
ing relationship between the East
Campus neighborhood and the Uni
versity lies in “getting to the bottom
line of what people are really look
ing for in terms of a planning solu
tion,” Nelson said.
Nelson said it is becoming more im
portant for the city to intervene in the
dialogue between the University and
the neighborhoods and set ground
rules for future interaction.
Ramey agreed it would be helpful if
the city had played a larger role in the
East Campus plan update but said the
city has actually approached the Uni
versity about studying the plan, and
city officials have commended its over
all quality.
With the current update to the Long
Range Campus Development Plan un
derway and the success the East Cam
pus plan has seen thus far, Ramey said
the outlook for the future of Universi
ty development is positive.
Williams said the University is not
looking to acquire any homes outside
of its current property lines but a hand
ful of properties within the zoning
boundaries are still owned by other
parties with whom the University is in
consistent contact.
“We remind them on a regular
basis that if they’re interested in
selling, we’re interested in buying,”
Williams said.
As one of those property owners,
Dumond said although he is not
currently interested, the few times
he “thought about selling they
didn’t have the money to buy, so
nothing happened.”
meghanncuniff@ dailyemerald, com
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