Politician's ratings are carefully compiled.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Sally Nunn For The Register-Guard

An article in the Feb. 12 Register-Guard questions some of the votes chosen for the Oregon League of Conservation Voters' scorecard for members of the Eugene City Council. The league's process has been developed carefully, refined and honed through years of cataloging votes of local and state elected officials.

The process is designed to filter out any bias, to keep any one issue from dominating or skewing the scores, and to select key votes that can really identify public officials who support healthy and sustainable communities.

The league is a nonpartisan organization the mission of which is to educate voters about how their legislators, county commissioners and city councilors vote on the environment and to hold those officials accountable. Widely considered an effective force in Oregon politics, the league combines thousands of volunteer hours with financial support for pro-environment candidates. The league sponsors eight county chapters, including one in Lane County.

The Lane County OLCV Steering Committee is composed of a little more than a dozen volunteers from three political parties, spanning 45 years in age, and from backgrounds as diverse as law and organic farming. We want our elected officials to vote to protect our air, water, farms and forestland and to promote solutions to transportation and sprawl. We scrutinize their votes and publish our results in environmental scorecards just before election season.

Our scorecard for Lane County commissioners came out in December, followed recently by our scorecard highlighting the voting records of Eugene city councilors during 2004 and 2005.

In 2005, the City Council showed significant improvement, passing pro-environment measures 62 percent of the time; similar issues had been narrowly defeated in 2004. Four of our eight councilors earned a score of 100 percent - Bonny Bettman, David Kelly, Betty Taylor and freshman Andrea Ortiz. Scoring well below 50 percent were Gary Pape, George Poling, Jennifer Solomon and freshman Chris Pryor.

With a divided council, the mayor wound up breaking ties on five of the votes included on the scorecard. Former Mayor Jim Torrey, faced with three tie-breaking opportunities, cast an anti-environment vote each time. Current Mayor Kitty Piercy cast pro-environment votes both times she broke ties.

"The replacement of Jim Torrey with Kitty Piercy represents a giant step forward in the city's protection and stewardship of our environment," says Mardel Chinburg, head of the Lane County chapter.

The 2005 council passed several pro-environment measures: funding a program to track toxics usage, countering sprawl by opposing Measure 37, halting city support of the proposed West Eugene Parkway, overturning a land swap that would have increased sprawl outside the urban growth boundary, protecting open spaces threatened with excessive development and increasing protection of Eugene's drinking water.

By contrast, the 2004 council, controlled by an anti-environment majority allied with Torrey, allowed several pro-environment measures to fail. The council declined valuable opportunities to protect clean water by expanding protection for downstream water quality when planning for urbanization, recreation and other uses, refused to limit "big box" stores that threaten neighborhoods with excessive traffic, failed to protect prime parkland and failed to close a loophole in enterprise zones that encourages sprawl.

After a nearly four-month process involving countless hours of research and interviews, a small subcommittee came up with about 14 votes to consider for our scorecard. Our entire Steering Committee selected the best, most representative votes after we intentionally removed all councilors' names from the list, eliminating potential bias by association.

Our rules dictate that only non-unanimous votes will be discussed. This stipulation sets aside the easy votes, the no-brainers, from votes that reward true stewards of environmental values. We also try to present a wide selection of issues, and select the "most environmental" of multiple votes on the same issue.

"We stand by our decision on the enterprise zones; the later vote absolutely was not as environmentally clear as the one we used," says Jan Wilson, who chairs the Scorecard Committee.

We believe in the effectiveness of our process for selecting votes and rating officials. We hope the voters find our scorecards useful in separating pro-environment candidates from those who demonstrably are not.

Sally Nunn chairs the Endorsements Committee of the Oregon League of Conservation Voters' Lane County chapter and has worked on the past three scorecards. The scorecards can be seen at www.olcv.org.