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HomeMy WebLinkAbout05/18/2009 Work Session City of Springfield Work Session Meeting MINUTES OF THE WORK SESSION MEETING OF THE SPRINGFIELD CITY COUNCIL HELD MONDAY, MAY l8, 2009 The City of Springfield Council met in a work session in the Jesse Maine Meeting Room, 225 Fifth Street, Springfield, Oregon, on Monday, May l8, 2009 at 6:03 p.m., with Mayor Leiken presiding. ATTENDANCE Present were Mayor Leiken and Councilors Lundberg, Wylie, Leezer, Ralston, and Pishioneri. Also present were City Manager Gino Grimaldi, Assistant City Manager Jeff Towery, City Attorney Joe Leahy, City Recorder Amy Sowa and members ofthe staff. l. Presentation from Eugene Airport Manager. Tim Doll. Mayor Leiken thanked Mr. Doll and Ms. Stephens for attending tonight's Council meeting. Tim Doll was the Airport Manager for the Eugene Airport and Cathryn Stephens was the Public Information Officer for the Airport. City Manager Gino Grimaldi said having an airport nearby was an asset for our community and for our economy. It was timely to have this discussion and an overview of what was happening at the airport. Mr. Doll thanked the Council for having them here and said he would be showing a power point presentation followed by questions from the Council. The airport was the economic engine for the community, which included the whole central Willamette Valley area. The State Department of Aviation did an economic analysis study on what the airport brought to the central Willamette Region relating to direct effects and a multiplier effect. He discussed the direct effects and said there was a total of about $183M a year in having the airport in the community. He discussed the multiplier effect, which totaled about $l49M. The total economic impact was about $332M a year. That didn't include Eugene's share of$4.4B that was a total contribution of all airports in Oregon. Ms. Stephens said things were always changing at the airport. She said the customer base was a catchment area with a population of about 686,000 people within 83 zip codes, making it a very regional airport. They had four commercial air carriers: Allegiant Air; Delta Connection; Horizon Air; and United Express, with nine non-stop destinations. 2008 was a good year with about 717,000 total passengers traveling, over 2M pounds of cargo going through the airport, and a total of about 78,000 aircraft operations. Ms. Stephens discussed the airport facilities. They. had Wings Bar and Grille on the not-secure side and A volare Deli Bar & Lounge on the secure side. Emerald City News and Gifts had two locations. For ground transportation, they had six rental car agencies and also hotel shuttles, Omni Shuttle and taxicabs. On the general aviation side of things, they had over 200 based aircraft, corporate or private hangars, and self-serve gas. She also discussed Flightcraft, the fixed base operator, which offered services such as fueling, charter services, aircraft sales and maintenance. City of Springfield Council Work Session Minutes May 18,2009 Page 2 Ms. Stephens said terminal improvements had been made in the upper story of the terminal. The improvements had quadrupled the size of the gift shop upstairs and added a lot of seating, which was very much needed. Ms. Stephens said when Mr. Doll arrived a couple of years ago, he wanted to make the appeal of flying Eugene a priority. One of the ftrst things he did was add the airport volunteer program, called the Airport Navigators. They had about 26 volunteers that staffed the information booth and also roamed the airport to assist guests. They were cross trained with Travel Lane County, so they had information on City and region amenities. They also created a more passenger focused website, in addition to the City website. This web site was at www.flvEUG.com. From that website, passengers could check flight status information, search for special deals, find airline and destination promotions, and use the "How much is your time worth" calculator. The question of the day was "Do you really save money by driving for hours to fly out ofthat airport to the north?" She gave cost estimates for mileage, time spent travelling, parking and hotel stays. She also noted that the average cost difference for round trip airfare between EUG and PDX was about $64. Ms. Stephens said the airport was always building something, improving something or maintaining something on the airfield. The Air Cargo Building was one ofthe latest projects they had built and was the ftrst LEEDS certified building built by the City of Eugene. It was an ll,OOO square foot facility and was part of a Connect Oregon grant. This building housed FedEx, UPS, Lawrence Air Service and Horizon Air. It allowed them to load into the building and load out onto the airplane. The Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting Station was built to replace the current station on the airfield. This new building would house male and female ftrefighters appropriately and allowed for 3 minute response times to each runway as was required. Mr. Doll said John Tamulonis, a City of Springfield employee, was on the Airport Advisory Committee, and they were pleased to have him participate. 2008 started out strong for the airport the fn;st two months of the year. They were able to get United Airlines to bring back 737 service to San Francisco. Then the price of oil went up and the airlines suffered. When the oil prices started going up, United Airlines took away their 737 service in an effort to cut costs, and went back to regional jets. Within a four week period starting on March 30, Aloha Airline filed for bankruptcy, ATA ceased operations, Skybus ceased operations, Frontier entered bankruptcy (but were still flying), and EOS ceased operation. The housing and banking crisis hit as well and the airline industry didn't know if they would have airports or airlines at the end of the year. Airlines serving Eugene decided to cut capacity, but the passenger count also dropped the same amount, resulting in no savings. 2008 was a barrel roll year, starting out very strong, and then dropping significantly. Overall, Eugene was only down 5.14%, which was not bad. When the recession hit, oil prices went down, which was the only thing that saved the airline industry. Mr. Doll said low cost carriers found a way to improve their service. Allegiant Air agreed to take the PhoenixlMesa route and was able to offer great fares. They added frequency to Las Vegas in June and July and were adding a new non-stop service to Oakland starting June 8. The Air Service Development Team at Eugene (he and Ms. Stephens) was working on retaining current air service. They were hoping to get additional routes in the future, but were happy with maintaining the services currently in place at this time. They were pleased that some of the airline partners were starting to add back some seasonal capacity. They hoped the airlines planned to increase more flight frequency and add new non-stop services as the economy improved. Mr. City of Springfield Council Work Session Minutes May 18, 2009 Page 3 Doll said airport staff personally visited the airlines each year and were waiting for the right conditions to ask for more market. They were talking to Delta Airlines about a possible Minneapolis/St. Paul service to provide another connecting hub to the east coast. Councilor Pishioneri asked about the hours the volunteers worked. Mr. Doll said they were scheduled for four hour shifts: 7:00-l1:00am, ll:00am-3:00pm, and 3:00-7:00pm, seven days a week. Councilor Pishioneri asked which sites were searched through the search engines. Ms. Stephens said it searched all but a few, such as Southwest, Jet Blu, or Allegiant Air. Mr. Doll said Kayak was the search engine. Councilor Pishioneri asked which non-stop services were being contemplated. Mr. Doll said Minneapolis/St. Paul (talking with Delta Northwest), Los Angeles (priority- talking with United Airlines), Memphis (talking with Delta Northwest), and Detroit (talking with Delta Northwest). Councilor Leezer asked if the fire department serviced only the airport. Yes. She asked how many firefighters were on staff. Mr. Doll said currently they were required to have two fIrefighters per shift to handle the airport, with two vehicles and three minute response times. The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) . Reauthorization Act might change that. There was a proposal to require them to go from two firefighters per shift to nine fIrefighters per shift. That would require two more fIre stations, because the proposal would also change the response time to two minutes. It would cost the airport about $3M a year in personnel expenses and about $27M in capital expenses. Councilor Pishioneri said in the past there were business guarantees for businesses looking to locate in the area. Mr. Doll said those were very popular in the past, but they were starting to go by the wayside. They were great to start a service, but it .was hard to keep it up. If a service was not going to make it on its own after a year without subsidy, the service probably shouldn't be in the market. The airport worked with Travel Lane County, Eugene Chamber of Commerce, Lane Metro Partnership and the Springfield Chamber of Commerce to get community partnerships and the businesses involved. It helped when they talked with airlines to show business support. Instead of subsidies, most airlines were looking for marketing money to make them successful. Mayor Leiken said Allegiant Air looked like they were going to be here a while. Oakland was a nice airport. Mr. Doll said Delta merged with Northwest Airlines. One of the advantages of that merger was that it opened up some additional hubs. Eugene needed an east bound hub and this would be a perfect flight for those travelers. City of Springfield Council Work Session Minutes May 18, 2009 Page 4 Mayor Leiken thanked Mr. Doll and Ms. Stephens for their presentation to Council. 2. Stormwater Systems Development Charge Methodology and Systems Development Charge Administrative Fee. Assistant Public Works Director Len Goodwin presented the staff report on this item. Staff has completed the process, begun in November 2007, to prepare an update of the City's Stormwater Systems Development Charges (SDC). Following extensive work with a Citizen Advisory Committee including representatives of the business and development community, and residents and property owners, a draft of an updated SDC Methodology is ready for review with Council. This update, taken in combination with an extensive review of the capital project list used to determine stormwater SDCs, will result in a substantial increase in charges if Council elects to impose the fees indicated by applying the methodology to the draft project list. With Council's concurrence, staff will provide public notice of the draft methodology and provide opportunities for public input in advance of formal action on the methodology and an increase in fees, tentatively in July. In addition to the Storm water SDC Methodology recommendations, the Committee also prepared recommendations for the City Council regarding the City's Systems Development Charge Administration Fee. This Fee is independent of the various SDC Methodologies. Mr. Goodwin thanked the members of staff who had helped work on this item: Civil Engineer Matt Stouder, Civil Engineer Jeff Paschall, Senior Management Analyst Lou Allocco, Environmental Services Supervisor George Walker, and Budget Officer Bob Brew. He especially wanted to thank the members of the Citizen Advisory Committee (CAC). Councilor Lundberg was the Council liaison for most of the work. He acknowledged Fred Simmons, Laura Potter and Lisa Emerson from the CAC, who were present in the audience and said they may want to make comments if time allowed. The CAC worked very hard with complicated information to come up with a recommendation. Mr. Goodwin summarized the recommendation as noted in Attachment 4 of the agenda packet. He summarized information. One of the ftrst things taken to the CAC was the question of whether or not to have a reimbursement component as well as the improvement fee. The CAC reached consensus that the City should have such a fee. They did not reach consensus of the basis for evaluating the system, but ultimately concluded by the majority to use the same basis as was used for the storm water. The CAC determined that growth should be allocated on a general basis among the available capacity for the reimbursement side across the entire City. The CAC looked at the improvement fee and made some creative recommendations, such as inclusion of fmancing costs on a case by case basis. The CAC made a recommendation that different approaches were taken for projects that were related to water quality and projects that were related to flood control. He explained. He complimented the CAC for trying to make this more equitable. Mr. Goodwin said in summary, the CAC came up with an increase using the methodology, but recommended a decrease in the storm water improvement fee. A new improvement fee would be added. The total SDC, if the existing project list was applied to the recommended methodology, would go up 51 % compared to the existing SDC. This was significant, but smaller than some of the other increases for wastewater SDC and the updated project list for the transportation SDC. City of Springfield Council Work Session Minutes May 18, 2009 Page 5 Mr. V ogeney said the CAC also considered a geographic consideration and whether or not to apply a different stormwater SDC rate based on location within the City. This could become very complex and not more scientifically based than citywide averaging. The CAC also focused on the topic of water quality credits or a separate SDC for water quality projects. There was not a good objective or clearly defmed method to identify the capacity of water quality that any given development may use as part of building on their site. That was compounded by our current Development Code requirement regarding impervious surfaces. They found in the industry and in doing research that there wasn't an objective, clearly defmed measure for going above and beyond the required amount of water quality treatment already required in the Code. Typically, with SDC credits, the City looked at what more the property owner had done than the minimum required. He explained further. The goal of the committee was to find a way to incentivizee more water quality. The research done by the consultant, Deb Galardi (present in the audience) was more focused on communities that tied those types of incentives to storm water user rates rather than SDCs. Mr. Vogeney said one ofthe CAC members asked staff to look at a direct discharge exemption. That was an exemption to storm water SDCs if a site discharged directly into the river, rather than into a City system. In essence that already existed because if a site was not connected to the City operated stormwater system, SDCs were not being paid. The existing stormwater credits currently offered to developers included a fifty percent credit for taking residential roof runoff and discharging it into a dry well. Consensus was to keep that credit the same. If the amount of runoff could be reduced from a site, they could get credit for that, too. The CAC saw no need to change those types of credits. Mr. Vogeney said one of the other items not directly related to stormwater SDCs that the CAC addressed was the current Administration Fee, a 5% surcharge the City charged on all SDCs which funded in part costs for administering the program. Staff did some analysis for the CAC and found that under the last three years of expenditures, the amount they needed to generate to cover the full costs was about 8 Y2 %. The committee recommended keeping the rate at 5%. One of the justifications for that was that Transportation SDCs were going up as well as wastewater and stormwater fees. They would look at the revenue generated by those increases before making a change in this charge. Mr. V ogeney said throughout discussions with the CAC, there was an underlying theme that it had been too long since the City updated their stormwater master plan and that it needed to be done more often. They also suggested the City keep their project list more cwrent. He referred to Attachment 9 in the agenda packet which showed sample calculations for SDCs. The samples highlighted the new rates that had been or would possibly be adopted for the sanitary sewer and transportation rates and the proposed rates for stormwater. Mr. Goodwin acknowledged the consultant, Deb Galardi, and staff member Rhonda Rice, both of whom had done a great deal of work on this. If the Council was satisfied with the methodology and wished to publish it for the public, staff would plan on bringing it back to Council on July 20 for action. He did note that the City was in the midst of a Public Facilities and Services Plan (PFSP) amendment which was necessary to do the land use actions to impose these fees. The City of Eugene did not respond to requests to decide whether they would opt in or out of that process, so had determined they were opting out. The joint elected officials (JEO) and joint Planning Commission meetings needed to be scheduled in time to get back to Council by July 20. There was a risk that if we ran into scheduling difficulties, staff could not be able to bring this to City of Springfield Council Work Session Minutes May 18, 2009 Page 6 Council on July 20, but would have to bring it back after recess or for a special meeting during the summer recess. Councilor Lundberg said this CAC was extremely knowledgeable and interested, and they had many opinions. They worked hard and it was very complicated. She gave them credit for their hard work. They did emphasize that this needed to be done more often. Councilor Pishioneri said he was impressed with how much information the CAC worked through. His particular interest was pretreatment projects to mitigate storm water runoffs, and he was pleased that had been addressed. He discussed swales and mitigating what came out of the swales. He agreed with the CAC recommendation that addressing that through user fees rather than SDCs was appropriate. Economically speaking, he wondered if they could highly encourage treatment of storm water runoff fmancially so it didn't adversely affect developers. He suggested using high school student who were currently testing water to test waters coming off of swales and to see if it was worth some extra credits. He would also like to see some small swales in residential areas. Mr. Goodwin said the issue was not the ability to measure, but the ability to say that some specific action had created a specific and quantifiable improvement in water quality. He provided an example. Many ofthe things that improved water quality were the reduction of heavy metals and the science was not there to document a quantifiable savings associated with a specific action. It all did good things, but proving which thing made which improvement was a challenge. Councilor Wylie said she appreciated the good work of the CAC and staff. She said it was very complicated, but she had learned some things that she was able to explain to a friend. Councilor Leezer asked when this was last increased. Mr. Goodwin said other than the annual three percent adjustments, there had been no increase since 2000. Councilor Wylie asked how often this should be reviewed. Mr. Goodwin said the recommendation would be to look at the facilities plan every five years and the SDCs once in between those facilities plans. If an inflationary environment came about, they could, without changing the plan, make an amendment to the project list which would result in a change in fees. Reviewing it more frequently than every couple of years made it too difficult for developers to plan their activities. Councilor Pishioneri said the reimbursement fee indicated a charge per square foot of impervious area. He asked if that was a new fee. Mr. Goodwin said yes. The reimbursement fee could be used for capital preservation of the existing system and was much more flexible than the improvement fee. Mayor Leiken said it was difficult to quantify and qualify the water quality as it could be up for interpretation. City of Springfield Council Work Session Minutes May 18,2009 Page 7 Public Works Director Susie Smith said there had been a lot of studies on water quality facilities for all kinds of constituents (metal, hydrocarbons, bacteria, etc.). There was an extensive nationally maintained database that advised the City relative to bacteria, mercury, other metals and temperature. The difficulty was determining how to attribute an SDC when it was not a residential swale or one business's facility, but a big one that had off the road drainage and drainage from multiple locations. It was very difficult to determine the source of the issues. Mayor Leiken said he was concerned that the development team would be mostly attorneys, some planners, and one engineer. It was good to look at this more often than in the past, but there could be new rules from the Army Corps of Engineers. Several years ago, he had to work with the Corps of Engineers on a project and it was very challenging. There was also legislation coming out of Salem that was not based on good public policy, but based on a philosophy. He appreciated staff looking at this, but he feared that we would adopt this and then new mandates would come from the State and Federal government that we were not expecting. He had concerns about how those mandates could affect the State's economy and our costs. He appreciated the work ofthe committee and agreed it was important to do this more often. If this was brought to policy makers every five years, staff would be looking at it every two years. He was fine with this for 2009, but said it would be interesting to see what happened two to three years out. Mr. Goodwin said staff didn't try to get too far out beyond the middle of the bell curve because they could run the risk of creating a problem down the road. Mayor Leiken said he appreciated that staff tried to anticipate upcoming changes. Lisa Emerson, CAC member, asked if she could speak. Mayor Leiken noted that there was no time during this meeting because they needed to go into regular session at 7:00pm, but she was welcome to speak under Business from the Audience during the regular session. ADJOURNMENT The meeting was adjourned at 6:58 p.m. Minutes Recorder - Amy Sowa Attest: ~<fvurfl- Amy So~ City Recorder