After the May 16 failure of Eugene Ballot Measure 20-31, which would have funded the construction of new downtown police and fire stations, Eugene police and fire departments have been left wondering how they will function in the cramped quarters of City Hall.
The measure was defeated in the election, with 53.5 percent of voters opposed to assuming the $36.6 million responsibility for building the new stations.
The measure was put on the ballot not only because the police and fire departments don’t have enough space but also because recent examinations of the City Hall building revealed that it would not hold up during a major earthquake and could cripple those vital services when they are most needed.
Mayor Jim Torrey said he thought the measure failed in part because of voters in the Bethel area, which was one of the last communities to be annexed to Eugene.
“Typically, the Bethel area is not supportive of citywide measures because of their pride in their area,” he said. “If you look at the returns, I bet you that will be an area where we lost heavily.”
Torrey also said that the firefighters’ union told him that they would not support the measure, but were unclear about their reasons.
Options open to supporters of the plan to provide the departments with new quarters include putting only the fire or police department funding on the ballot or simply using existing funds to renovate the downtown fire department.
“There were some city councilors who wanted to only put the fire department on the ballot, but I’m not willing to support a fire-only measure,” Torrey said.
The measure’s slim margin of failure has spurred the City Council into commissioning a survey to discover why the measure failed and to help revamp the measure and present it again in the November general election.
City Councilor David Kelly said that the survey, done by an independent polling firm, is only the first step in determining why the measure was spurned by Eugene voters.
“We want to get a sense of why supporters were supportive and why opponents opposed it,” he said.
Kelly said that he thought people were opposed to the measure for a number of different reasons, ranging from lack of specificity in the proposal to outright dislike of the police department.
He called the idea of abandoning the measure “highly unlikely,” and said that as part of the committee that drafted the measure, it was well researched and planned out.
Space is at a premium at both downtown stations. The police department currently occupies much of the basement of City Hall, and more and more important operations are being placed in a space not designed for them.
Rick Siel, a lieutenant at the downtown police station, said that when he first arrived on the force, the only thing in the basement was a shooting range.
“It’s not designed for people,” he said. “But now we have our entire patrol force housed there, along with archives and things like uniform storage — a lot of critical operations in a space that’s not big enough.”
When asked about possible plans for retrofitting the building up to earthquake-ready standards, Siel said that while retrofitting is less expensive, it takes up space that is already at a premium.
“Retrofitting wouldn’t answer the space issue, it would only make it worse,” he said.
The downtown fire station suffers from similar space problems. When it was built in 1964, the station was not equipped to handle both sexes of firefighters.
Glen Potter, communications director for the Eugene fire department, said that while that problem has been corrected, fixing it has taken up valuable space.
“There are also problems moving important equipment in and out of the equipment bay,” he said. “There’s just not enough room.”
Phil Weiler, Eugene communications director, said that the city government will have a challenge in balancing the need for new structures while presenting the funding measure in a way that will be palatable to voters.
“We need to find something that meets the needs of voters, and this measure contained lots of little pieces that we may need to rearrange or move,” Weiler said.
He stressed the need for new buildings for what he called “essential services” like police and fire units, and said that City Hall would crumble in a major earthquake. Weiler compared the City Hall building, which is built over a parking garage and supported by concrete pillars, to a pizza box suspended by columns of pennies.
“The pennies hold up the pizza box fine, but if you start to wiggle the box, the pennies collapse,” Weiler said.
The same thing would happen to City Hall in a major earthquake, he said, and it would fall directly on the police and fire stations.
“The structure would likely suffer complete failure,” he said. “We need to build structures that would last the next 20 years.”