Design takes shape for courthouse area.

Byline: BILL BISHOP The Register-Guard

More than 100 people gathered Wednesday night to help redesign an isolated industrial area into a new downtown Eugene neighborhood that will grow up over the next few decades around the new $70 million federal courthouse.

The effort will culminate in the spring with City Council action on a plan for new streets and infrastructure for the 8.7-acre site - half to be occupied by the courthouse and the other half by a mixture of private housing, offices, retail shops and public open spaces along the Willamette River.

Planners have three goals: to reconnect the federal courthouse site to downtown, to reconnect the downtown to the river and to create a vital neighborhood.

While new traffic patterns are fairly well fixed for the neighborhood, other aspects of the plan will remain flexible to allow for a range of development in response to economic forces, said Nan Laurence, one of the city planners involved in the design.

For example, some sites in the area may be developed as offices or as housing, depending on demand.

The most significant unresolved design question is whether to unearth the old millrace, reroute it and landscape it as natural habitat, with pedestrians and bicyclists able to stroll or ride alongside.

The estimated cost of bringing the millrace back for two blocks between Eighth Avenue and the river is $4.5 million. A second proposal would open up and landscape only the mouth of the millrace.

The city's first entrepreneurs built the millrace in the early 1850s, routing water from a diversion dam east of where the Interstate 5 bridge is now to make power for grain and sawmills, electric generators and other industries in the area.

Money for many of the new infrastructure costs, such as reviving the millrace, will come from an urban renewal district taxing system that would use property taxes from the area to repay improvement bonds, officials said. City officials may also use other funding sources.

No cost estimates are available yet for the total project.

The new neighborhood stretches through the old Agripac cannery site, across the Union Pacific Railroad tracks to the river. It includes riverfront land owned by the Eugene Water & Electric Board and several blocks along East Broadway just south of the cannery site.

The first item for designers was to unravel the tangled traffic that converges at East Broadway and the Ferry Street Bridge viaduct and would be a barrier for pedestrians, bicyclists and cars traveling between the new neighborhood and downtown.

The new plan splits north-south Ferry Street Bridge traffic from east-west traffic on Sixth and Seventh avenues. Both flows now reach Franklin Boulevard via East Broadway.

City planners looked for ways to reroute traffic to flow around the courthouse site instead of between it and downtown so the neighborhood would function as part of downtown instead of as an island cut off by major thoroughfares.

To take the overload of east-west traffic off East Broadway, the plan will extend Patterson and Hilyard streets north to meet new extensions of Sixth and Seventh avenues that will be built parallel to the railroad tracks along the north edge of the new neighborhood.

The extensions of Sixth and Seventh avenues will join Franklin Boulevard east of the new neighborhood, reducing traffic on East Broadway and making it a more suitable entry to downtown.

Planners envision East Broadway looking like Broadway now is between Pearl and Oak streets, where trees grow in a median between a street lined with shops, restaurants, offices and housing.

East Eighth Avenue will serve as the major pedestrian route from downtown into the new neighborhood. It will feature wide sidewalks and trees leading across the new streets and the railroad tracks to a small park at the river's edge.

The courthouse design isn't expected to be released until February, when officials in Washington, D.C., approve the plan.