Citizens' State of the City: Livability key.

Byline: TIM CHRISTIE The Register-Guard

Two of Eugene's leading citizen groups offered a counterpoint Friday to Mayor Jim Torrey's business-themed State of the City address.

Torrey said Wednesday the city needs to be friendlier to business to regain its economic vitality.

In the first Citizens' State of the City, Friends of Eugene and Citizens for Public Accountability said the city needs to focus on revitalizing downtown instead of sprawling to its outskirts. It needs to support small, local businesses, not chase after national chain stores and multinational industries. It needs to preserve its natural areas. And perhaps most important, it needs to do a better job of listening to its citizens.

"Clearly, Eugene citizens recognize that continuing to finance infrastructure developments at the edge of the urban growth boundary, while abandoning existing developments in the urban core, is fiscally irresponsible, destructive of our sense of community, and unsustainable," said Friends of Eugene board member Jan Wilson, an environmental attorney who delivered the speech on behalf of the citizen groups.

More than 100 people showed up at Harris Hall at the Lane County Courthouse to hear the noontime speech, which was accompanied by a slide show of photos of Eugene neighborhoods, businesses and natural areas.

"We wanted to give a different vision from what the mayor was conveying on Wednesday," Wilson said after her speech. The groups hope to make the speech an annual event.

Audience members interrupted her speech several times with applause and gave Wilson a standing ovation when it ended.

While Torrey called for an "open for business" attitude in the city, Wilson said the city needs to find more ways to help existing businesses, especially small businesses, rather than competing with other cities to see who can give the biggest tax break to attract out-of-state and multinational corporations.

"We need to recognize that our city's long-term economic viability depends on the cumulative effects of numerous and diverse small employers," she said, "not on the minimum-wage, low-skilled, part-time jobs preferred by the big box national chain stores at the edge of Eugene's urban growth boundary."

She said Torrey's "so-called 'plan' to give sprawl developers free rein and taxpayer subsidies to abandon the the urban core and pave over our precious natural areas is more of the same old failures. We've tried that, every other city across America has tried it, and it hasn't worked anywhere yet."

The natural areas in and around the city, as well as parks, bike paths and rural areas, help make Eugene a desirable place to live and visit, she said.

She credited the city for undertaking a natural resource inventory with help from citizens to protect natural areas and open space.

Wilson called on the city to reconfirm its commitment to listening to its citizens. The community's "battles" over public policy issues, she said, are part of "what makes Eugene vibrant, part of what makes Eugene Eugene."

"Our elected leaders need to recognize the value of citizen input and to look for ways to ensure consideration of the innovative, out-of-the-box ideas generated by public advisory committees," she said.

Finally, the city must provide the community's young people with tools to realize their potential, she said. And that is directly tied to how the city develops, she said.

"If we keep wasting money on roads to subsidize sprawling development we'll have that much less to spend on schools," she said.

"If we continue to value cars over neighborhoods, we'll destroy our children's connection to their community. If we continue to value consumer goods and shopping malls over open space and park lands, we'll destroy our children's connection to the natural world."