B Y K E L LY K E N O Y E R
COMMISSIONER PAT FARR: We now know where it’s
going to go, and that’s really all we know. But what’s most
significant is that the public square will be a public square
for the first time in many years.
LAND SWAP
COUNTY ADMINISTRATOR STEVE MOKROHISKY:
A meeting of minds
on the future of downtown Eugene
meeting at the Eugene Weekly office on July 12
brought together city and county politicians and
bureaucrats to discuss the future of downtown
Eugene. A land swap approved by both the Lane
County Board of Commissioners and Eugene
City Council may soon transform the park blocks down-
town. Lane County will buy the property of the previous
city hall for $4 million, and Eugene will buy the butterfly
lot for $1.88 million — finally creating a home for a new
city hall.
The following conversation has been condensed and
lightly edited.
MAYOR LUCY VINIS: We’re very excited about this
agreement — we’re very excited about being able to move
forward. I think it’s a win-win. The county will get a piece
of property where they can build on a scale they need to
build and the city, I think, gets to set the reset button on
city hall planning.
A
We are excited to see the vision for the butterfly lot come
to fruition, which is a city hall on the north side and a res-
toration of a full public square and a year-round farmer’s
market on the south side of that block.
EW: How are you planning to fund this?
MOKROHISKY: If we can get in the ’19 or ’21 bien-
nium our ask from the state approved, that would put us in
the position, if we can pull together a funding package, to
really be breaking ground in 2020 or 2021. We’re going to
identify all federal, state and existing resources for fund-
ing before we have to have a conversation with the voters
about funding.
CITY MANAGER JON RUIZ: The road we’ve been on
for the last many years has been a phase one city hall in
which we don’t ask the voters for dollars.
We don’t have the actual design yet as far as what it
looks like or doesn’t look like. The city council acting in
their role as the development agency has said ‘spend up to
four and a half million in support of the farmer’s market,
you don’t have to but you can go up that high. The county
for its part in this has agreed to put in some $800,000.
PAT FA R R
After the judge signs off, we can get on with creating
this sense of place that we’ve all said we want. That’s one
of the benefits of this, that it really allows us to create a
more holistic sense of place and the pieces are really com-
ing together.
MOKROHISKY: I think the city deserves a lot of credit
for taking, at really a critical time in their project, [a mo-
ment] to say let’s reflect on what’s in the best interest for
the community as a whole and capture the opportunity to
really create that sense of place and destination.
VINIS: The historical picture of those park blocks is
they were originally one consolidated square and then it
was bifurcated and then the parking lot was built so there
were all these different things happening to it. So the core
vision is that we’re restoring that sense of a town center.
EW: If you’re planning to eventually include private-
ly owned properties in the city planning process, is
there a set design standard?
ASSISTANT CITY MANAGER SARAH MEDARY:
There’s been no start on the design standards but we’ve
begun thinking about what a great [corridor] Willamette to
Willamette would look like.
MOKROHISKY: The city will work with us as they’re de-
signing and constructing their city hall. We’ll work with them
on our courthouse. Whether or not it’s feasible for us to have
the same architects, I don’t know if that’s going to work. ■
STEVE MOKROHISKY
LUCY VINIS
JON RUIZ
SARAH MEDARY
HAPPENING
PEOPLE
BY PAUL NEEVEL
SHAWN DONNILLE
“My parents were apolitical,” says Shawn Donnille, who grew up in Orange County,
California, a Republican stronghold. “Every summer we spent two weeks in Nevada City,
an old mining community, and connected with plants and wildlife.” At age 15, Donnille
started an environmental club at Villa Park High School. “We planted trees on campus,”
he notes, “and organized monthly debates.” After high school, he moved to Nevada City
and took part in Earth First! campaigns to save redwood forests and to ban sport hunt-
ing of cougars. In 1991, at age 24, he took a job at Mountain Rose Herbs, a home-based
mail-order business in nearby North San Juan. “There were two employees and me,”
says Donnille, who was asked to run the business while the owner, herbalist Julie Bai-
ley, was navigating a divorce. He moved it towards organic certification and built a web-
site at a time when no one else in the industry was selling online. “It was an enormous
success,” he says. In 2001, Bailey and Donnille moved the business to a small house in
Pleasant Hill, Oregon, to be near farms and recreational opportunities. Today they are
domestic partners and co-owners of a company with 200 employees in six separate
Eugene facilities, including a newly opened retail store. They set their own wages at not
more than 3.5 times those of their lowest-paid employee. An executive team of three
now runs the company. “I devote my time to environmental causes and groups,” Don-
nille says. “That’s my job these days. I was chief petitioner for a ballot initiative to ban
aerial spraying that almost made the ballot. We’ll revisit it next year.”
eugeneweekly.com • July 20, 2017
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