Rotary springs rose garden gazebo notion.

Byline: City Beat / Eugene by Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

SPRING HAS SPRUNG. Hear it in the hungry hum of the awakening bumblebee. See it in the million white Tartarian cherry blossoms that snapped open last week on the heritage tree at the Owen Rose Garden. Know it when a man's mind turns to fanciful notions.

Paul Peschiera, a Eugene business broker, has been thinking a lot lately about a gazebo - a big gazebo, 28 feet in diameter with a cupola and ornamental railings, where people can spend an evening and hear an orchestra play.

Peschiera envisions this gazebo clear as a bell in the heritage rose section at the Owen garden, along the Willamette River just west of the Washington-Jefferson Street Bridge.

Further, he imagines the grounds of the 8-acre garden transformed into a natural wonder festooned with gurgling fountains and rambling roses, where area residents would feel compelled to tow their out-of-town visitors for a post-repast stroll.

And Peschiera, chairman of the Eugene Delta Rotary Club's rose garden committee, has done a lot more than dream.

During the past three years, he and 30 to 50 other Rotary volunteers have logged more than 2,000 hours doing beautification projects in the garden. On each of 20 Saturday mornings, they came with gloves and wheelbarrows, installing rose-bed borders, stringing trellis wire, spreading gravel or leveling brick.

Last year, they built a seven-arch pergola, which is an Italian-style walkway that will eventually appear as an airy tunnel of climbing roses.

"They get more ambitious each year," city parks planner John Weber said.

Now Peschiera and his Rotarian crew are seeking the money they need to buy the iron gazebo, which is estimated at $62,000, including the foundation and rose patterned flooring. They hope they'll soon collect the first $12,000 needed to order the gazebo from the ironworks. (Call 682-4908, if you want to donate.)

The Rotarians hope to install the base footing and walkways this summer, Weber said. On that time line, they could place the gazebo by November.

Peschiera, whose enthusiasm for the garden seems borderless, said the Owen gazebo will be a thing of beauty that will last, if not forever, "longer than you or I will."

Karma?

Developers and builders who love to complain that the city is holding up their projects based on environmental concerns may be amused to know the city is facing precisely the same problem.

The Eugene Public Works staff is ready to let a contract and get the East Bank Bike Path built - after a tricky seven-year delay - but the city must first get a green light from the National Marine Fisheries Service through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Apparently, there's habitat of the endangered spring chinook salmon in the path of the long-awaited bike path, the final link in the grand eight-mile river bank loop.

And the federal agencies aren't telling the city staff what kind of review they'll conduct or even how long that might take.

"It certainly takes time," city spokesman Eric Jones said. "We don't control the time."

The city, meantime, has published project specifications that will require that the chosen contractor finish the segment near Valley River Center by Oct. 18; that 66 trees be removed along the course; that trees damaged during construction be replaced threefold; and that the contractor plant a continuous border of blue-foliaged pfitzer juniper shrubs where the path borders the Willamette Oaks Retirement Living Community.

Jones said the project funding is secure, the designs are complete, the property owners agree with the plan, potential contractors even attended a "pre-bidding conference" - and all awaits word from the federal government.

"We've gone as far as we can without the permit," Jones said.

Reporter Diane Dietz can be reached at 338-2376 or by e-mail at [e-mail]

CAPTION(S):

Paul Peschiera and other Eugene Delta Rotarians are raising money to put an iron gazebo like this one in the Owen Memorial Garden.