Our View: On Eugene’s budget, councilors and business leaders must answer uncomfortable questions

Reading through the 400-page report on “fiscal stability” that an advisory group shared with the Eugene City Council this week, two things are clear about the mindset of business and economic development leaders:

• They desperately want to avoid a repeat of last year’s fire fee debacle.

• They’ve spent too much time making too many mistakes when trying to recruit new companies or help existing ones expand.

The second point is directly related to the first. Businesses pay taxes, and the lack of new activity explains why Eugene councilors are trapped in a multiyear cycle of teasing major cuts to services like pools, parks and libraries, only to pull back when public anger mounts.

It’s hard to read the fiscal advisory group’s report as anything other than a rebuke of the entire process surrounding last year’s ill-fated fire service fee. The City Council’s plan to plug an $11.5 million structural budget deficit put it at odds with the Eugene Chamber of Commerce, which worked hard to successfully repeal it.

Now the city faces a looming $2 million annual gap between revenues and expenses next year, a deficit projected to grow to $10 million in less than a decade. The main driver of this ticking fiscal time bomb is ballooning pension costs for retired employees — costs the city has no control over.

So the question for city councilors, the chamber, economic development supporters and the community as a whole is: What to do with the financial levers they can control?

We certainly don’t claim to have all the answers. But as we wrote previously, the whole region needs fresh economic ideas as it stares down headwinds like slower population growth and a shortage of well-paying jobs.

So here’s one question each for the City Council and Eugene business leaders as they begin a multi-year effort to stabilize the city’s budget.

City councilors, are you willing to make some uncomfortable decisions about popular services? The report repeatedly stresses the need to protect what it calls “core services.” And it is littered with vague references to coordination with nonprofits and community organizations. Reading between the lines, we can see it as a preview of reductions to public pool hours, with the hope that private facilities can fill some of the gaps. Or replacing some of Greenhill Humane Society’s services with community alternatives.

These are just two of the many hypothetical “efficiencies” councilors may have to embrace. While we would take no joy in these cuts, and hope for any service reductions to be temporary, the growing budget deficit suggests councilors’ Band-Aid strategies of new fees and modest reductions isn’t sustainable.

Economic development supporters, what will it take to get you on the same page? At its best, the collection of agencies and organizations focusing on growing Eugene’s economy is a testament to the passion local business leaders have for their community. At its worst, it is plagued with overlaps and inefficiencies.

The Chamber of Commerce. Onward Eugene. Collaborative Economic Development Oregon. The University of Oregon. Lane Community College. City of Eugene planning and economic development staff. Who’s responsible for helping local businesses expand? Who leads the effort to promote Eugene to outside firms? Are some of these groups doing the same things?

The leaders of these organizations — many of whom have served in their current roles for years, and know each other well — need to honestly evaluate why they aren’t working as closely together as economic development officials in cities like Salem, Bend, Spokane and Boise that the fiscal report compared Eugene to.

With budget cuts, it’s easy to fall into a trap of apocalyptic thinking. Any loss of services would be painful, but wouldn’t be the end of Eugene as we know it.

Better economic development strategies won’t come easily. But our region has plenty going for it to help: A major university and community college, world-class recreation opportunities, a lower cost of living than major metro areas up and down the West Coast. While growth has slowed, families are still moving here.

The fiscal report calls on city and business leaders to develop these plans over years, not months. But there is an urgency to get started. A reasonable first step is for these leaders to answer some difficult questions about how we got here.