<br /> River Road Community Organization <br />The River and Garden District <br /> <br />Date: November 28, 2023 <br />From: River Road Community Organization Executive Board <br />To: Eugene Planning Commission <br /> <br />Re: Testimony for Land Use Amendments MA 23- 005 & CA 23- 003 <br /> <br />Dear Commissioners, <br /> <br />The following testimony is submitted for your consideration after a unanimous vote of the River Road <br />Community Organizations Executive Board on November 17, 2023. <br /> <br />We appreciate and would like to respond to recent deliberations about the River Road/Santa <br />Clara Neighborhood Plan. Several questions have been raised about specific details, their <br />source and function. We, the community advisory committee (CAC), have been deeply <br />connected to the iterative development of this plan since 2017, and would like to clarify some <br />of these points. <br /> <br />During many conversations, workshops, and community meetings, our neighbors repeatedly <br />mentioned the need for our neighborhoods to achieve a more vibrant pedestrian centered <br />pattern of development and reduce the need for residents to travel to other parts of the city to <br />meet basic needs and to create local connections. The code changes are rooted in the work <br />done for the River Road Corridor Plan, a delve into transit-oriented design for River Road from <br />the Chambers Connector to the Santa Clara transit station funded by a Federal Transit <br />Authority grant. This was added to our neighborhood planning process in 2019 to help us <br />achieve a level of detail around land use adjacent to River Road that would move us toward <br />the goals stated above. <br /> <br />The outcome of this work created two new zoning designations within the proposed transit <br />zone with lot specific changes that would allow taller buildings along the corridor and provide <br />transitions to the adjacent R-1 lots further into the neighborhood. The intent was to <br />accommodate increased housing density while simultaneously creating more commercial <br />opportunities of a scale desired by residents to provide walkable, connected neighborhoods <br />with valuable commercial services. House Bill 2001 and the pandemic effectively derailed this <br />direction. Near the culmination of this project, the City of Eugene informed the CAC that there <br />would be no new neighborhood specific zoning or overlay zones available within the project <br />scope and timeline. Instead, the City would focus on city-wide zoning code changes for all the <br />corridors simultaneously at a later date. The Corridor Study highlighted neighborhood -specific <br />challenges to densification that make it unreasonable to expect a single set of criteria to fit <br />corridor diversity for such areas as Franklin Boulevard with high development potential, <br />Highway 99 which is primarily commercial, and River Road which is primarily residential. In <br />any case, the lessons learned will prove valuable as the corridor densification pr ocess is <br />initiated in the future. <br />32