It was a quiet week for Council which doesn’t meet the first week of
the month. Councilors, staff and I used this first week of the month to
touch base on issues and catch up.
There was a lot of catching up. Our email was filled with demands
related to homelessness and the franchise renewal for Northwest Natural
Gas. The week also hosted two meetings related to police reform – the
full Ad Hoc Committee followed by the subcommittee on Hiring and Training.
The impact of homelessness is reflected in urgent calls for new, different and
more solutions to the suffering in our midst. I have spent the week
connecting both to advocates for the unhoused and distressed residents and
businesses whose neighborhoods are impacted by the number of unsheltered
people.
The City has implemented guidelines related to campers to clarify
expectations around campsite safety and cleanliness in order to allow people to
shelter in place in response to COVID. This has meant that Washington
Jefferson Park, for example, is now almost filled with tent sites. We
continue to struggle to develop alternatives to allow smaller numbers of
unsheltered people to camp in smaller groups and many advocates are looking for
sites.
Council has a joint meeting with the County Board of Commissioners on
Wednesday to review our progress in implementing the ten recommendations from
the Shelter Feasibility and Homeless System Assessment of 2018. The
emergency strategies that the City is now employing to provide outreach to
unsheltered campers will increasingly strengthen the pathway from tent sites to
shelter and services. We’re learning as we go, and I’m anxious to continue to
connect with advocates about how we might improve and direct our work to make
more progress at a faster pace.
Monday’s work session will discuss the franchise negotiations with NW
Natural. Those negotiations are at fevered pitch today, and we’ll know
the status on Monday. I reiterate my priorities: that we protect our
control of our publicly owned Right of Way and that we move forward on our
Climate Recovery goals. I expect a full public forum that night after
we’ve heard an update on these negotiations.
The Ad Hoc Committee on Police Policy continues to work through a huge body
of information and voted to move forward on 10 motions related to Use of Force.
Council President Jennifer Yeh opened the meeting by encouraging the committee
to identify specific areas of policy change without trying to produce final,
polished policy language. Council will review these recommendations
before any of them are adopted as policy. She also reinforced hope that
dissenting opinions would be reflected in the final report to ensure that Council
gets a full understanding of the range of perspectives. The full
committee has four more meetings, including one on February 17 that will
include public testimony about experiences interacting with the Eugene
Police.
The next night, the subcommittee on Hiring and Training took a deeper dive
into the ways in which bias, particularly white supremacist opinions, are
identified in prospective police candidates; and the effectiveness of cultural
competency in police trainings. This is long, hard work; the committee is
breaking new ground and we are learning not only about possible improvements to
our public safety, but also how to effectively orchestrate this kind of
discussion.