www.SustainEugene.org Greenwash is Sustain-A-Bull by Mark Robinowitz

ODOT and Federal Highway deregulated, unpublicized approval of widening Beltline to 10 to 16 lanes at Willamette River for a third of a billion dollars

update: as expected, the City of Eugene and Lane County rubberstamped approval of these expansions on April 10 and April 11, 2023. One City councilor, Matt Keating, was the only politician to vote no. Lane County Commissioners (2 liberals, 3 conservatives) voted unanimously for expansions.

note: Eugene Weakly has run a couple letters about this expansion but they did not (as far as I know) ever run a news story about it. They did not bother to inform readers that the City and County approved the expansion.

I hope some day there will be a group in Eugene that opposes paving of farmland and forests. The main "purpose and need" of environmental plans from governments is to be a soporific, not to protect ecology. The recent approval of farmland paving by the City and County fits this pattern.

The climate rhetoric of local government is just a soporific to tranquilize public opinion, not a serious effort to reduce pollution and prepare for living with less concentrated finite fossil carbon.

Letter to the editor, Eugene Weakly, sent December 22, 2022

In a 12/22 letter, Debra McGee of 350Eugene claimed the city of Eugene works to protect us from climate change.

On December 20, the City announced their "urban reserves" plan to urbanize farmland was unanimously approved by the city and county planning commissions, with the politicians following suit in the new year. "Urban reserves" would extend Eugene to Junction City and toward Veneta — and I haven't found a single environmental group raising concerns. www.sustaineugene.org has details.

No climate activists spoke at the public hearing in October, but there were three farmers and rural residents who don't want to be forced into the city. An attorney objected on behalf of Wildish that wants to strip mine their land before it's urbanized. I spoke about recognizing limits to growth on an abundant, finite planet. We need to protect farmland so people can eat as fossils deplete. Heresy, I know.

Eugene once had an environmental movement watchdogging local government, now these groups are lapdogs. Local government promotes "climate" not to mitigate the sixth mass extinction we are co-creating, but as a marketing campaign to prop up local real estate. "Move to Eugene to be sustainable!"

The "electrification" campaign implies electricity means no fossil fuels. In reality, natural gas is the largest energy source for electric generation, not dams or wind farms. Unnatural gas combustion for electricity has increased substantially in recent decades. Peak electricity in Oregon and nationally was 2018. Prepare to use less. www.peakchoice.org has details.

Don't Urbanize More Farmland

Comments following up on the October 18, 2022 public hearing of the City and County Planning Commissions.

It's nice that there is a "Kalapuya land acknowledgement" in the City documents about expanding Eugene. But if you really want to honor the Kalapuya, let this land come back into camas fields. Maybe we could give back some lands to them.

Five citizens spoke at your public hearing, all of whom expressed opposition. (100%). Even land use attorney Bill Kloos expressed opposition about incorporating land owned by his client (Wildish) into the UGB, although not for ecological concerns - his clients want to strip mine this area and want to profit from that destruction before it would be urbanized, not afterwards. (I support "sustainable mining" - just mine the ore at the rate it is formed, which could create jobs for eons.)

This minimal participation indicates minimal (at best) public outreach. It's usually a sign of inadequate "public engagement" when a public hearing has more staff participating or observing than citizens / taxpayers / impacted residents.

At a minimum, the process needs to be revised to provide substantial public discussion about how Urban Reserves would result in a merger of the Eugene and Junction City urban growth boundaries plus an extension of the City of Eugene toward the City of Veneta. Urban Reserves also needs to have public discussions of the plans to widen Beltline highway to 10 to 16 lanes at the Willamette River crossing plus widening of Route 126 across Fern Ridge reservoir to Veneta. These two highway expansions would cost over a half billion dollars and are indispensable for urbanizing farmland and forest currently outside the UGB. Token input from five citizens at a poorly publicized zoom meeting is not a substitute for democratic discussion.

It would be easy for Urban Reserves to have a referendum by the County's citizens. This decision is too important to leave to unelected planning commissioners or even a handful of elected officials (especially those whose election campaigns include donations from real estate speculators). The hearing on October 18 was in front of the unelected planning commissions who have no formal approval of these expansions. Even discussion by the elected City councilors and County commissioners would be a poor substitute for asking the taxpayers / voters / citizens what they think about these expansions.

The areas west of Greenhill Road are those that were a primary "purpose and need" West Eugene Porkway plan. This would facilitate that sprawl without having to get that illegal project approved.

All societies more complex than hunter gatherers are based on agriculture, even if the division of labor becomes more elaborate and some in the society pretend they are no longer agricultural. If you like to eat food, you are dependent on farming. Zoning that keeps farmland in agricultural production is essential for our society, but this is being chipped away by Urban Reserves and other pressures.

At the January 2020 meetings your literature claimed that the Royal Blue Organics farm was supposedly vacant land. Well, it is being used - to feed people. The idea that food can be grown somewhere else instead and shipped over long distances is a huge part of the climate and energy crises. I'm not surprised that the real estate industry has more power over governments than those who keep us fed.

This excellent op-ed was only in the online version, which has fewer readers than the print version. Perhaps EW is hoping the expansion of the city onto more farmland and forest will enable more readers to move to Eugene.

Rural Land in Urban Reserves

ACT NOW TO PROTECT ENDANGERED OAK WOODLANDS

BY SHARON BLICK

The Eugene City Council will be voting April 10 on a proposal that will decide which rural land will next be covered with urban sprawl. This proposal is about the urban reserves.

The city is attempting to put rural land into the urban reserves that is more than two miles beyond the current urban growth boundary (UGB) at the southwest corner of the city. This land contains the last best stands of oak woodlands in our area, including trees that are hundreds of years old. Oak woodlands have already been 97 percent destroyed in the Willamette Valley.

The urban reserves proposal does not comply with Oregon's Statewide Land Use Planning Goal 5 regarding wildlife habitat. Specifically, at least eight wildlife species that have been designated as Sensitive Species by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife have been found in the area of the proposed urban reserves, and at least three of these breed there. Most of these species are associated with or dependent on oak woodland habitat, but neither the species nor their habitats have been inventoried as required for compliance with Goal 5.

In the early 1990s, when Eugene was growing west into another endangered ecosystem, the wet prairie wetland habitat, Eugene took a bold, innovative and comprehensive approach to wetland conservation and development with the West Eugene Wetland Plan. The City Council could uphold Eugene's reputation for foresight and conservation by completing a detailed inventory of all the oak woodlands in the path of development and determining their value by type, size, connectivity, biodiversity, presence of rare species and land-use history.

Unlike wetlands, oak woodlands take a long time to grow and don't produce acorns until they are at least 20 years old. If existing, mature oak woodlands are destroyed and new ones are planted elsewhere at the same time, acorn woodpeckers and other wildlife species that are dependent on oak woodlands cannot just wait around for decades while the new oak trees grow.

Actually, the city of Eugene did fund a multi-year study of oak woodlands and was a signatory partner in the resulting 30-year conservation plan published in March 2020. The Willamette Valley Oak and Prairie Cooperative Strategic Action Plan directly contradicts the Urban Reserves 27-year proposal by mapping a Core Conservation Area in what is also the biggest area for development in the urban reserves plan. The city can't have it both ways. This oak conservation plan was never discussed on the urban reserves website, at any of the public meetings, or at the work sessions.

Oak woodland protection cannot be postponed until the city is actually trying to extend the UGB. At a recent work session, the councilors were told by staff that the urban reserves proposal already contains enough information about the land to bring it into the UGB quickly without doing any more inventory or analysis.

Those who supported the middle housing plan to increase density in order to protect nearby farms and natural areas should speak up now, because the Eugene City Council is trying to have it both ways: increased density and urban sprawl. Please contact the council before April 10 at mayorcouncilandcitymanager@eugene-or.gov

Sharon Blick has lived in the Eugene area for 37 years. She holds a masters degree in ecology and served as education coordinator for the Mount Pisgah Arboretum, founder of Nearby Nature and executive director for the School Garden Project. She was a leader in the initiative campaign which created the Whilamut Natural Area in East Alton Baker Park in 1992 and served on the Citizens Planning Committee to create the plan for this area. For the past 15 years, she has operated the Living Earth Farm just west of Eugene which includes valuable oak woodland habitat.

First, there is the problem: Oak and prairie are some of the most imperiled habitats in Oregon. Prior to European colonization, there were approximately 2 million acres of oak and prairie habitat in the Willamette Valley. The last 170 years resulted in conversion of most of the valley to urban and agricultural land use. In addition, as Native American tribes were decimated and controlled, the regular burning they used to do was halted, allowing conifers to move into oak habitats, overgrowing and killing off the oaks. For both of these reasons, oak woodlands have been reduced by over 90% and prairies reduced by over 98%. Much of what remains is fragmented, isolated, and heavily impacted by conifers and invasive species. Many species of wildlife are dependent on oak woodlands and prairies; at least 10 of these species are now listed as Sensitive Species by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Some people had good intentions to solve this problem: In 2017, the City of Eugene joined the Willamette Valley Oak and Prairie Cooperative along with federal and state agencies, Lane County, tribes, and non-profit groups. Three staff ecologists from the City of Eugene Parks and Open Space Department worked with 48 other like-minded professionals for two years to formulate a plan for saving the oak woodlands and prairies called the Willamette Valley Oak and Prairie Strategic Action Plan (WVOPSAP). This effort was funded by the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, the Land Trust Alliance, Pacific Birds Habitat Joint Venture, and the City of Eugene.

The WVOPSAP, published online in March 2020, is a 70 page document which contains a 30 year plan, with maps, which shows the Core Conservation Areas to be protected and restored, adjacent to Opportunity-Based Conservation Areas and connected with Potential Future Habitat Corridors. The members of the partnership, including the City of Eugene, signed a Memorandum of Understanding pledging to uphold and implement this strategic action plan.

If you had found this plan online and read it, you might have thought, great work, problem solved! But good intentions are never enough. The plan makes it clear that the Memorandum of Understanding is not legally binding.

At the same time that these City of Eugene ecologists were creating a 30 year plan to save the oak woodlands, City of Eugene planners were creating a 30 year plan of where the city would grow next. This plan is called the Urban Reserves. Did these city staff members from different departments talk to each other or even know about each other's plans? There is no evidence that they did.

I became aware of the Urban Reserves plan in late 2019 when my farm was included in the land that was being evaluated for inclusion in the Urban Reserves. By the time I was informed and invited to a meeting to give my input, they had already planned to put 200 homes on my 15 acres. I did not know about the WVOPSAP at that time, but I knew that my land contained large old oak trees and at least 8 Sensitive Species. I knew that Oregon Statewide Land Use Planning Goal 5 required the inventory of habitat for Sensitive Species and I knew that no one had inventoried the habitat on my land or any of my neighbors. I pointed this our in my testimony at the planning commission public hearing.

How naïve I was, to think that Goal 5 was anything more than good intentions. I came to find out that Lane County had completed and adopted inventories for Goal 5 twenty years ago and that there is no legal requirement for them to complete additional inventories, ever, no matter how many more species are added to the Sensitive Species list. No, we would have to wait until one of more of those species was so depleted that it got onto the federal Endangered Species List before there would be any legal requirement to protect its habitat.

When I happened to find the WVOPSAP online, I compared the map to the Urban Reserves map and realized that there was a direct contradiction. The largest area of the Urban Reserves was in the exact same place that the WVOPSAP had a Core Conservation Area! So I wrote to all 51 members of the WVOPC Steering Committee and Working Group that the City of Eugene might be about to reneg on their agreement to uphold this plan. I also notified the other funders of this work that the City of Eugene might be wasting their funds by voting to contradict this plan. I notified the local media of this mismanagement of public funds. And then I wrote to the Eugene City Council about what I had discovered and who I had notified. I thought they would be embarrassed, that they might apologize to the public, to the other members of the partnership, and to the other funders of this work. I asked them to postpone their vote on the Urban Reserves (especially since they had just been on break for almost a month) and take the time to hold a work session where members of the WVOPC could come and present their findings. Sounds reasonable, right?

On April 10, the Eugene City Council held a work session (where no public comment is allowed) on the Urban Reserves where they did not even mention the WVOPSAP and barely mentioned oaks at all, except to be assured that there was no legal requirement for oak protection. They then voted 7 to 1 to pass the Urban Reserves. Matt Keating was the no vote, and apparently that was about big game habitat, not oaks.

My emails to local media were ignored (do we really even have local media anymore?) I heard back from only 3 of the 51 people who worked on the WVOPSAP. None of them submitted testimony to the City Council. I heard back from only one of the other funders of this work, the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board (OWEB). Here is what they said: "It is important to note that OWEB is a grant-making state agency, and the strategic action plan is a product of the collaborative that received the grant award, not OWEB. The plan is intended to be used for voluntary conservation oak and prairie habitat efforts, and OWEB cannot apply any pressure to land managers or landowners to implement any part of the plan."

Just more good intentions, right? What's wrong with good intentions? What's wrong is that they make people think the problem is solved, they stop people from objecting, they obscure the reality of the situation. To create this WVOPSAP and then refuse to apply any pressure to ensure its implementation is the same as greenwashing, but with public money. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I am not in this fight for the future of our land. The City of Eugene says it will not do forced annexations or imminent domain. Jim and I will never sell our land to developers and we are planning to get a conservation easement so no one can ever develop our land. We have sold all our livestock and are planning to restore habitat on the bulk of our land. But our 15 acres is not nearly enough to maintain viable populations of any of these Sensitive Species. Humans just keep taking and taking and taking and taking from the natural world. Enough. We have already taken way more than our fair share. For the rest of my life: "I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues…."

urban reserves vs. farmland:

City of Eugene plan to connect to Junction City and Veneta

Letter to the editor, Eugene Weakly, sent December 22, 2022

Don't Urbanize More Farmland

Comments following up on the October 18, 2022 public hearing of the City and County Planning Commissions.

Rural Land in Urban Reserves

ACT NOW TO PROTECT ENDANGERED OAK WOODLANDS