ALLEN HANCOCK
Some of the spaces in the newly constructed
parking lot on Riverfront Parkway could be
used for 1700 Millrace, according to
Connecting Eugene
VA SPRAWL
A VIOLATION?
ORI PARKING
ISSUE LINGERS
The battle over the Oregon Research Institute (ORI) building plans for
Riverfront Research Park is still more of a fight over parking than over a
building, but the possibility exists that a new site at 1700 Millrace Drive will
satisfy all sides on the issue of the new building’s location.
The proposed new research park building and parking lot has been slated to
be built right on the Willamette River, an arrangement that stems from a 20-year-
old master plan for development that opponents Connecting Eugene call
outdated.
ORI is a behavioral research center doing research on public health and
human wellbeing, and it has argued the planned building is sustainable
development and incorporates green building techniques such as bioswales and
recycled materials.
Connecting Eugene calls for more ecological as well as people-oriented uses
of the riverfront than an office building and parking lot. In early May, UO
President Richard Lariviere issued a statement saying the UO is considering an
alternative location at 1700 Millrace Drive and ordered a feasibility study be
conducted.
Kathryn Madden, ORI’s media contact says, “We were pleased and surprised
when the 1700 Millrace parcel became available as a possible location for the
ORI/EPIC building. We look forward to a positive outcome as the UO and
Trammel Crow explore the feasibility of the site.”
According to Allen Hancock of Connecting Eugene, parking may still be one
of the UO’s hang-ups. The new building must meet Eugene city code for number
of parking spaces for an office building. The current ORI plan for the riverfront
location calls for 200 parking spots. “That’s the reason for the insistence on the
number of parking spaces on the originally proposed riverfront development,”
says Hancock.
But he says, “We have spent time on the ground and looking at maps looking
for a solution for what has been called the ‘parking problem’” for the new
location. Last week Connecting Eugene sent the UO, ORI and developer
Trammel Crow a letter offering 10 ways to address the parking issues at 1700
Millrace Drive. Hancock says, “There’s really no reason not to build at this
alternate location, and we hope this letter will drive that point home.”
He also says that ORI could approach the Eugene City Council for a variance
on the parking compliance and that the Millrace location is “from a transit
perspective, a great location” as it’s very close to the EmX bus rapid transit. The
controversial riverfront location, he says, would require walking two-thirds of a
mile and crossing railroad tracks and multiple lanes of traffic to catch a bus.
The riverfront site also faces a legal challenge. Connecting Eugene filed a
brief with the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) seeking a public hearing for
a determination of whether the proposed ORI building complies with the terms
and conditions of the research park’s conditional use permit that was approved
through a public process in 1989.
Hancock says Connecting Eugene is also excited about the possibility of 1700
Millrace Drive as a new location for ORI and Lariviere’s feasibility study “is
good news, but until they withdraw their building permit for the riverfront site
we’re pursuing our legal challenge.” He says the UO’s own brief is due June 8.
— Camilla Mortensen
follow us on twitter:
twitter.com/eugeneweekly
8
JUNE 2, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
The Veteran’s Administration may be
violating federal law in giving apparent
preference for a new clinic site that
promotes urban sprawl rather than
downtown redevelopment.
The VA this month issued a request for
proposals requiring a sprawling 13-acre
site with 685 parking spaces for its planned
new 200-employee clinic. Those criteria
appear to favor greenfield sites on the edge
of town and rule out the old medical clinic
site at 13th and Willamette in downtown
Eugene that city officials had hoped the
VA would choose.
But federal Executive Order 12072
requires that “the process for meeting
federal space needs in urban areas shall
give first consideration to a centralized
community business area.” The order says
“federal facilities and federal use of space
in urban areas shall serve to strengthen the
nation’s cities and to make them attractive
places to live and work.” The order
requires “serious consideration” of social
and environmental impacts of siting
decisions.
Numerous federal studies have
documented the impact of urban sprawl on
exhaust pollution, natural areas, livability
and expensive traffic congestion. Ironically
for a hospital, studies have also shown that
urban sprawl has a big impact on public
health by increasing obesity and respiratory
diseases such as asthma. Eugene data
shows that driving multiplies with distance
from the city core, which is served by the
region’s main transit terminal and walkable
and bikeable from housing for a large part
of the region’s population.
But whether federal officials will
comply with the federal order from 1978 is
uncertain. The IRS balked at the order and
moved its offices out of central Fresno,
Calif., and the BLM and Forest Service
have moved to offices on the edge of
Springfield. But in 2004 Albuquerque won
an appeals court decision in a case calling
for the Interior Department to follow the
anti-sprawl order. — Alan Pittman
SAVE TRAPPER?
TRAPPER
SAVED!
After years of protests and court battles,
the Trapper timber sale has been stopped
— for now — by a U.S. District Court
decision on May 24. Seneca timber has
been fighting to log the 155 acres of
pristine old-growth trees in the McKenzie
River watershed, and groups including
Cascadia Wildlands, Cascadia Forest
Defenders and Oregon Wild have been
fighting back. The sale was first proposed
in 1998 and sold to Seneca in 2003.
Trapper's trees provide habitat for red
tree voles, the food of choice for
endangered species listed northern spotted
owls, and the sale is located in the
watershed that provides Eugene with its
drinking water.
The campaign to halt Trapper was “a
broad coalition of groups and it included
direct action and fighting in the courts,”
says Jason Gonzales of Cascadia Forest
Defenders.
Gonzales says he’d like to encourage
the public to call and thank the Forest
Service in advance for not appealing the
decision and for not restarting an
environmental impact statement to attempt
to again log the trees.
“I’d like to say thank you to Seneca for
backing off this timber sale, but Seneca
has been nothing but ruthless,” he says.
If the Forest Service makes a new
decision that meets the requirements of the
law, then there is the possibility it could
move forward again with the sale. Meeting
those requirements has proven difficult for
the agency in the past.
“We are taking some time over the next
couple of weeks to review the court
decision carefully and look at our legal,
contractual and management options. We
understand that there is public interest in
this project and will get back to you as
soon as we can with further information
about how we intend to proceed,” says
Meg Mitchell, forest supervisor for the
Willamette National Forest.
The battles over Trapper have ranged
over the years from a Cascadia Forest
Defender-led protest at Seneca founder
Aaron Jones’ home to treesits in the woods
and in town. On the legal front, Cascadia
Wildlands and Oregon Wild have twice
successfully challenged the species
impacts opinion issued by the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service. They argued USFW
had illegally issued opinions that would
have allowed the Trapper timber sale to
proceed despite negative effects to
threatened wildlife.
Dan Kruse of Cascadia Wildlands and
Susan Jane Brown of the Western
Environmental Law Center filed the suit in
district court that has put the brakes on
Trapper. Kruse says that the Forest Service
failed to address significant new
information that has arisen since the
agency issued a decision on the project in
2003.
When the groups filed suit in October
2010, The Register-Guard weighed in on
the sale in an editorial, arguing the sale
should go through despite the presence of
a spotted owl nesting area, and
that “loggers, forests and owls alike”
would benefit from the science the logging
would yield — Trapper is an area where
logging is studied to see how it can make
forest structures similar to those created by
fire — but the scientists themselves wrote
in a letter that logging Trapper would “not
yield stand-level lessons of high value for
contemporary logging practices.”
Federal Judge Thomas Coffin wrote in
his ruling: “Central decisions affecting the
analysis and approval of the Trapper
timber sale were based on a factual
inaccuracy and the public has yet to be
informed of the actual findings.” He wrote
that the public is entitled to be accurately
WWW.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM • BLOGS.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM