2050 is coming.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The year 2050 will arrive right on schedule, despite decrees by Lane County's three biggest cities that the calendar stop. City officials in Cottage Grove, Springfield and now Eugene have declined to continue their participation in the Region 2050 planning effort. Yet all three cities will need to provide housing, transportation, utilities, parks and other essentials to new residents during the next half-century, and each would be better off working with its neighbors.

The Region 2050 process started seven years ago as an effort by the 10 cities of the southern Willamette Valley - the big three plus Coburg, Creswell, Junction City, Lowell, Oakridge, Veneta and Westfir - to devise a regional growth management strategy. The Lane Council of Governments, which conducted the process, now has the draft of a strategy ready for the cities' endorsement. But Cottage Grove and Springfield balked last March, and last week the Eugene City Council also withheld approval.

The strategy would not be binding on any city or enforceable by state land-use agencies, but it is intended to guide cities' decisions about such things as expansions of their urban growth boundaries. The southern Willamette Valley's population is expected to grow by about 50 percent, to 463,500, in the next half-century. According to the strategy, this growth will be distributed unevenly. Eugene's population is projected to grow by 35 percent, and Springfield's by 86 percent. Smaller cities should brace for explosive growth - 395 percent in Creswell, 437 percent in Lowell, 600 percent in Veneta.

These figures weren't plucked from the air. They are extrapolations of what will occur based on each city's plans and civic objectives, leavened with public comments gathered during the Region 2050 planning process. Growth will occur where there is space for it, or where there is support for public policies that accommodate growth.

The big cities' problem with Region 2050 is that it seemed to entail a surrender of control. Springfield, which has grown steadily less supportive of intergovernmental undertakings, was the first to back away from the Region 2050 strategy. City councilors and planning commissioners complained that the strategy isn't realistic, that growth is likely to be affected by unanticipated trends and events, and that each city should chart its own future.

Yet the Region 2050 process used the best available information to project what will happen if Springfield continues on the course it has already charted, and to show how growth patterns will affect neighboring communities. Turning away from the regional growth strategy changes nothing about the direction Springfield is headed.

Eugene's City Council followed Springfield and Cottage Grove out the door last Monday. Some councilors appear unwilling to accept the strategy's projection that growth will occur elsewhere unless Eugene makes room for more people. Yet as with Springfield, the strategy is based on current Eugene policies and objectives, and it projects a growth slowdown despite a marked increase in the city's population density. It's as though the council peered toward 2050 and rejected what it saw, without recognizing that the strategy is as much a mirror as a roadmap.

The smaller cities can and should move forward with the 2050 process. None of the larger cities has done anything to alter the trajectories that will present smaller communities with the greatest challenges in managing growth. The larger cities should eventually rejoin the process, recognizing that it represents the best available effort to anticipate where billions of dollars' worth of roads, sewers, schools and other investments will be needed in the decades to come. The strategy reveals the consequences of today's policies, neither of which can be changed by turning away.