A shrinking city budget, housing and alternative response for mental health were top issues for candidates in the race to represent northeast Eugene on the city council at a recent Eugene City Club forum.
Incumbent Jennifer Yeh told the audience that every budget she has passed since she was first appointed to her seat in 2017 on the council has required cuts to balance it.
“As we've been making cuts over and over again, it becomes increasingly difficult to find places that aren't negatively affecting people's day to day lives,” she said.
Despite that, she is hesitant to raise taxes, and is most concerned with finding efficiencies in the budget.
“Like are there things that we’re duplicating from one department to another that we can have departments do cooperatively,” she said.
Her challenger, veteran Tom Stedman, calls passing such budgets an unenviable task, but said he would push for at least one new tax.
“There's a lot of AirBNBs in the area, a lot of them are sitting vacant right now,” said Stedman. “Some communities are actually using a vacancy tax. A lot of the other apartment buildings that have been built, there's opportunities to capture a vacancy tax there.”
He said installing a levy for vacant properties would also incentivize owners to rent to residents rather than maximize rent.
Yeh said Ward 4 has a disproportionately higher number of renters.
“So when rents are high or housing costs are high, it's really difficult for folks who are renting to afford their rents, or to be able to buy that first home,” she said.
Stedman said he thinks rents are high because the area is lacking well-paying jobs, and he does not see many in the pipeline.
“The jobs that are being created that we have right now, people can't afford to buy a house,” he said. “We have Amazon coming in, but I'm not sure what else we could be looking at.”
He also pointed to the city’s process for approving construction work, saying that inspections often stop when an issue is found.
“It's difficult to get a building permit in a timely fashion [because of] different things or roadblocks they’re throwing up,” he said.
She added that the city has a handful of tools to help increase housing stock, and it is making use of those to incentivize a variety of housing types.
“The city has continuously made adjustments to our land use code, trying to make more diverse types of housing easier to build,” she said. “I think one of the things we need to remember is we can't stop.”
Stedman said that while he initially did not approve of one of those tools in particular, its results are opening his mind up on it.
“I'm not a really big fan of [Mult-Unit Property Tax Exemptions], but I have to tell you, I I think it's given traction to actually putting us in the right direction to build some affordable housing. It's taken us, I think, 10 years to get our first return on it.
Another issue Stedman, a former CAHOOTS medic, mentioned was the city’s need for alternative response help.
He worries about the city’s pilot program with Ideal Options, which only partially fill that need, could have ramifications.
“What I personally believe is that Ideal Options will be setting us up for a liability lawsuit. And I talked to some people in the fire department, and it's entirely possible that it could happen based upon abandonment issues.”
Yeh said she too is concerned about losing alternative response services and wants to continue to work on the problem incrementally.
“I am concerned that we're making a change into what we were offering before,” she said. “But I also believe our fire chief is highly skilled, knows the community very well, [and] has done his research. Let's look what the data says. Let's track what we're able to do and where are the gaps. And then come back and fill those gaps.”
She said it is hard to make a verdict without allowing the current services time to see results.
