23_11_28_2100 Batch4 Testimony - Laserfiche WebLink

To the Eugene Planning Commission, We appreciate and would like to respond to recent deliberations about the River Road/Santa Clara Neighborhood Plan. Several questions have been raised about specific details, their source and function. We, the community advisory committee (CAC), have been deeply connected to the iterative development of this plan since 2017, and would like to clarify some of these points. During many conversations, workshops, and community meetings, our neighbors repeatedly mentioned the need for our neighborhoods to achieve a more vibrant pedestrian centered pattern of development and reduce the need for residents to travel to other parts of the city to meet basic needs and to create local connections. The code changes are rooted in the work done for the River Road Corridor Plan, a delve into transit-oriented design for River Road from the Chambers Connector to the Santa Clara transit station funded by a Federal Transit Authority grant. This was added to our neighborhood planning process in 2019 to help us achieve a level of detail around land use adjacent to River Road that would move us toward the goals stated above. The outcome of this work created two new zoning designations within the proposed transit zone with lot specific changes that would allow taller buildings along the corridor and provide transitions to the adjacent R-1 lots further into the neighborhood. The intent was to accommodate increased housing density while simultaneously creating more commercial opportunities of a scale desired by residents to provide walkable, connected neighborhoods with valuable commercial services. House Bill 2001 and the pandemic effectively derailed this direction. Near the culmination of this project, the City of Eugene informed the CAC that there would be no new neighborhood specific zoning or overlay zones available within the project scope and timeline. Instead, the City would focus on city-wide zoning code changes for all the corridors simultaneously at a later date. The Corridor Study highlighted neighborhood-specific challenges to densification that make it unreasonable to expect a single set of criteria to fit corridor diversity for such areas as Franklin Boulevard with high development potential, Highway 99 which is primarily commercial, and River Road which is primarily residential. In any case, the lessons learned will prove valuable as the corridor densification process is initiated in the future. City planning staff determined that our plan would not result in rezoning existing land, which had been an understanding during more than three years of work. Without the two new zoning designations that would have created a “string of pearls” to elegantly improve commercial areas while retaining the residential character of River Road, the CAC were offered the blunt instrument of neighborhood specific tweaks to existing code to achieve specific, important goals for the RR corridor. There are hundreds of resident comments in the record that support limiting uses on the C-2 land along the corridor to businesses that increase pedestrian traffic, retain our neighborhood character, and provide basic goods and services to residents. 60’ height limit: Most of the commercially zoned area along the corridor is only one lot deep, and abuts R-1 zoned land built out with single family detached houses. The existing code provides little to no transition between C-2 and R-1 and the possibility that 120’ buildings would be built adjacent to already developed R-1 was untenable. Without the new zoning or an overlay we would have no ability to ameliorate these problematic adjacencies. That is how we arrived at the 60’ height limit along the corridor; this compromise represents an acceptance of a great increase in the existing density of development, but guides it towards more compatibility with the adjacent already-built 48