“I’ll bet a kidney that [the McDougal land] is
all houses in 20 years,” he says. “At that point
we won’t get the open land at all. While we
have this offer on the table, we should take it.”
Open space in Laurel Hill Valley
If the land swap goes through, the city
plans to purchase the McDougals’ Laurel Hill
Valley property for incorporation into the
Ridgeline Trail. The Laurel Hill Valley
Citizens (LHVC), a neighborhood association,
is all for that. Last summer, the group’s execu-
tive committee voted unanimously in favor of
the deal, calling it “an exceptional opportunity
to acquire parkland for Eugene citizens.”
Laurel Hill Valley residents stand to gain
protected open space from the deal, at least
for a few years. But in comparison with the
land swap’s opponents, LHVC has been
very quiet. According to group member
Rich Hazel, the group communicated its
support for the deal only once, in an e-mail
to Mayor Jim Torrey and the City Council
last July. “It doesn’t seem to be a hot-button
issue” in the neighborhood, Hazel says.
A RGUMENTS AGAINST IT
Feeling disenfranchised
Ken Hamacher moved his family from
Boise in 2001 to take a job with Hynix in
Eugene. His house in Santa Clara is within
the city limits and abuts the McDougal
property. He is a member of Santa Clara
Citizens for Sensible Parks and Open Space
(SCCSPOS), and he started a petition
against the land swap. To date, more than
1,000 residents have signed it.
One of SCCSPOS’s major complaints is
that the city developed the land swap pro-
posal without seeking adequate feedback
from Santa Clara residents. According to
1000 Friends of Oregon Lane County
Planning Advocate Lauri Segel, the city was
pushing for the swap years before inviting
the public into the discussion.
The McDougals proposed the land swap
to the city in 2001. In 2002, pro-tem City
Manager Jim Carlson told Segel that the city
would seek a “legislative fix” to the UGB
laws to usher the land swap through. That
effort went nowhere, Segel says, because
the city was unable to legally justify locat-
ing the park on high-grade farm soils.
In the summer of 2003, the city created
the Santa Clara Community Park Advisory
Committee — comprising members from
local nonprofits, industries, neighborhood
groups and government agencies — to dis-
cuss the land swap proposal in a series of
workshops. But Segel, a member of the com-
mittee, says that the workshops were poorly
attended and didn’t include a broad enough
cross-section of citizens. “The city didn’t
have enough of the issues flushed out,” she
says. “I didn’t feel like they had made a
good-faith effort to look at alternatives.”
On July 12, 2004, the City Council
opened discussion of the land swap to the
public. Several citizens spoke in opposition
to the deal; none spoke in support. But after
Mayor Torrey broke the tie against
Councilor Bonny Bettman’s motion to buy
the McDougal property outright using emi-
nent domain, the council voted in favor of
allowing Parks to begin the application to
shift the UGB for the land swap.
Parks wrote up a sample sales agreement
and laid out several possible configurations
for the Santa Clara community park before
hosting a series of public workshops.
Hamacher, who attended the workshops, was
surprised that Parks had already gone so far.
“We were led to believe that these workshops
were an opportunity for us to say yes or no to
this project,” he says. “Instead it was more
like, ‘How do you want to configure?’”
Riner says that Parks has solicited more
public input regarding the land swap
than for any other parks acquisi-
tion proposal. In response to
the Santa Clara citizens’
complaints, the city
pledged to administer a
city-wide telephone
survey about the pro-
posed land swap.
Hamacher is glad
that the city is
making a gesture
to gauge public
opinion, but he is
suspicious of the
method. “I think
the survey may be
designed to get
approval for the
park, not to find out
what the citizens truly
would like to have,” he
says. “The city wants this
park and they’re going to
work to get a yes vote.”
McDougal representative Mike
Evans of Land Planning Consultants failed
to return EW’s repeated phone calls, but he
replied to two of eight questions via e-mail,
stating that the McDougals are unwilling to
sell their properties without the land swap.
Although Evans said at a public workshop
that the McDougals are not interested in pur-
suing the deal if the public doesn’t support it,
he declined to confirm that by e-mail.
A big inconvenience
Hamacher objects to the scale and
the location of the park. “What
they’re proposing here is a
giant complex that few
people will be able to
walk to. The majority
who will be using it
will be driving to it,”
he says. And that
could turn his street
— now in a quiet
residential neigh-
borhood — into a
major throughway.
SCCSPOS
members worry
that the land swap
Swap supporter
could feed Santa
Jerry Finigan
Clara’s
problems
rather than solving
them. With the addition
of 1,000 houses and a
commercial district will
come more residents, putting a
larger burden on already-strained
resources. Irving Elementary School is
overcrowded today, Hamacher says, so how
will the city make room for the children
who move into the new housing develop-
ment? And traffic on the Northwest
Expressway is routinely backed up during
rush hour; the development could make that
worse. “That’s just bad planning,”
Hamacher says.
Riner says that Parks will address those
issues upon completion of the phone survey
if the city decides to continue pursuing the
land swap proposal.
Class 1 soil
For local farmer Kate Perle, an employ-
ee of Full Circle Community Farm, an
unfortunate and possibly illegal result of the
land swap would be the loss of prime farm
soil. The McDougals’ Santa Clara property
is beside a river, and it contains Class 1 agri-
cultural soil — the most fertile kind. “It’s a
very finite resource,” Perle says. “There’s a
perpetual benefit from agricultural activity
that you don’t get from urban sprawl.”
A state statute dictates that the better the
farmland, the lower its priority for develop-
ment. State Planning Goal 14 states that
Class 1 soils are not to be developed when
less desirable soils are available. Even if the
City Council and County Commission
approve the land swap, the high quality of
the soil on the Santa Clara property may
stymie the deal when the application for the
UGB shift reaches state agencies. “If some-
one is able to demonstrate that the city has
violated a statute, they may argue that the
[state] commission should deny it,” DLCD
Legislative Liaison Bob Rindy says.
Riner isn’t especially concerned about
that. “The Class 1 soils are one of maybe a
dozen factors that are important to weigh
with and against each other,” she says. “It’s
a loss of farmland, but it’s a gain overall for
the community.” And historically, the city
has had no trouble paving over prime farm-
land. According to Perle, Class 1 soil sits
beneath the Valley River Center, Gateway
Mall and the Sony plant.
Even if the land swap falls through, agri-
culture advocates like Perle will probably
face an uphill battle to preserve the farmland
in perpetuity. Still, she’s dedicated to that
struggle. “If we can’t protect our Class 1
soils, we’re fouling our own nest,” Perle says.
Shady deals and ghost funding
A conceptual design of the
McDougals’ Santa Clara
property after the land
swap.The light areas are
the commercial and hous-
ing developments, the gray
areas are the park, and the
dark stripes are the
streets.The map is bor-
dered by Irvington Road
to the south (bottom).
An ECONorthwest analysis estimates
that McDougals would profit $2.6 million
to $2.9 million from the land swap while
saving the city a similar amount in park
acquisition costs. The city would receive
property taxes from the new development
in Santa Clara, but taxpayers would
shoulder the costs of services and infra-
structure such as streets, sewer lines and
stormwater drainage. “If this goes
through, the McDougals have won the
sweepstakes at the expense of the taxpay-
ers,” Bettman says.
Perle agrees that the land swap would be
a bad deal for the city. “For every dollar that
a household pays in taxes, they use closer to
$1.35 worth of services that are paid for in
taxes,” she says. “Farmland uses only about
$0.25 per dollar in services per dollar paid
in taxes.”
To date, the city has spent about 10 per-
cent of the funds earmarked for the Santa
Clara park, which Riner says is normal for
park acquisition planning. But she admits
that the city currently lacks the funds for
promised park facilities like the community
and aquatics centers. “Any park in Eugene
is developed over time and not done in one
fell swoop,” she says.
For Hamacher, the plan doesn’t make
sense if residents have to wait decades for the
fully developed park. “There’s no guarantee
JANUARY 6, 2005 13