I am Kate Perle, I have volunteered with the Santa Clara Community Organization for over 20 <br />years watching our neighborhood changing, our needs evolving and our community <br />organization stepping up to meet those needs. <br />The RRSC neighborhood plan was an opportunity for codifiable changes to move our two <br />neighborhoods closer to the future they envisioned for themselves and we jumped at the <br />chance to do that. <br />We were all in and we brought our networks with us. We stood in front of grocery stores, held <br />listening sessions in our houses, met with neighbors in restaurants and pubs, went to our <br />affordable housing complexes to host informational sessions, attended local high school classes <br />to engage our youth, held meetings in Spanish for our non-native English speakers, went door <br />to door to every business along our corridor, and staffed forums in our high school attended by <br />hundreds. At every juncture we came back to you with reports of our engagement and plan <br />progress and at each of those you praised our work. <br />This plan's process would have to be supported by an unprecedented level of collaboration <br />between the residents, the city, the county and the special districts. We were encouraged to <br />dream big and ask for what we wanted, then work to make it so. Over the last 6.5 years we <br />have done just that and continued to foster that sense of collaboration and trust with our <br />neighbors -kind of like goodwill ambassadors bridging the municipal/resident distrust divide. <br />We put ourselves in that uncomfortable position knowing that we had commitments from the <br />city of Eugene to turn the work into real change. <br />Hundreds of residents spent thousands of hours working to build trust and craft a future they <br />could live in. Our dreams have been downsized through the process yet what remains of our <br />code amendments carries the essence of what our neighbors want. Without these our work <br />has been in vain and you will have not only undermined the work of your staff, you will have <br />diminished the respectability of the volunteers with their neighbors. After all, we assured them <br />this time it would be different, there would be an enforceable plan that reflected their vision. <br />Only you can make it so and I encourage you to do that. We don't need another slick document <br />with no teeth, instead give us the plan that has the coffee cup stains, the jelly smears, dog <br />eared pages and post it note tags that never makes it to the bookshelf because we are always <br />using it. Our bookshelves are already full. <br />Thank you for your consideration <br />im <br />