Eugene’s City Council voted Monday to pull its fire services fee from the November ballot.
The councilors passed the fee in February, in order to help fill a budget shortfall and prevent deep cuts to city services. It was projected to raise around $10 million per year.
However, some of Eugene’s business leaders opposed the idea, and bankrolled a successful effort to gather enough signatures to trigger a city-wide referendum vote. This blocked the city from collecting the fee in the meantime.
Brittany Quick-Warner, president of the Eugene Chamber of Commerce, had said she was concerned over the lack of an end-date for the fee. She also said business leaders weren’t properly included in the process.
Facing this pressure and a fiscal deadline, City Council voted in May to approve an alternative source of funding—a smaller, temporary increase to its stormwater fees, projected to raise $4.7 million annually.
Then, on Monday, councilors voted 7-1 to officially give up on the fire fee, although some said they felt reluctant to do so.
Councilor Alan Zelenka said while he was unhappy with the compromise, he thought pursuing two fees at once would be confusing to the public.
Councilor Mike Clark said while he wanted to give voters a chance to weigh in, he believed Monday’s decision might prevent more conflict in the community.
“One of the reasons we came to a compromise as a group was because of the level of dissension and division that would be created in the community to play that all the way to the end of the page,” said Clark. “I suspect the campaign would produce that.”
The sole vote against the repeal was from Councilor Eliza Kashinsky. She warned that without this permanent increase in revenue, Eugene would wind up back in a similar budget crisis within a few years.
“The fire fee went through a lengthy process, lengthy discussion, lots of community discussion prior to being passed by this council, all because we had a problem that we were trying to solve,” said Kashinsky. “This was a long-term, permanent solution to that problem.”
Quick-Warner was in attendance at Monday’s meeting at City Hall. She said she was grateful to the Mayor and the City Councilors for listening to the business community’s perspective, and hopes to have deeper conversations about the city’s financial sustainability moving forward.
“The takeaway for me is the business community is aligned with a lot of things that I think the broader community agrees with,” said Quick-Warner. “We just have to figure out how to work together and make that voice heard.”
