Jerry Rust deserves much of the credit for Lane County still possessing 20 covered bridges.

In fact, Lane has the most covered bridges (all built between the 1920s and 1980s) of any county west of the Mississippi River. The main reason so many were built in the county, according to Rust, a former Lane County commissioner, is geography. The county has several headwaters that converge into the Willamette River, and these smaller rivers are ideal for covered bridges.

Rust is fond of these bridges. He compares them to the temples of ancient India, a country he visited with the Peace Corps.

“In India, there’s a lake that has a temple with arches,” he said. “It spans across, and that temple looks like it’s floating on the water. I came home and I was struck by how that Lowell Covered Bridge out there on Dexter looked so special.”

In retirement Rust wrote a novel about the bridges. “The Covered Bridge Murders” is a historical fiction mystery where the modern-day protagonists solve a pioneer-era murder connected to a covered bridge. Early in the book, there’s a passage where a character explains his fascination with covered bridges; it mirrors Rust’s.

“People who live in a plastic, steel, concrete, and electronics world, trapped in traffic jams and pollution, are looking for fresh air and authenticity,” the character said. “That’s what covered bridges are, authentic. Every beam, every board, every plank, and every truss.”

Today, Lane County’s covered bridges are recognized as tourist attractions. But when Rust joined the Lane County Board of Commissioners in 1977, not everyone shared his enthusiasm for the bridges. He often butted heads with county road staff who preferred the comparatively low maintenance of more typical cement and steel bridges and wanted to replace them.

Both today and back then, Lane County maintained most of the covered bridges with gas-tax funds. But if a bridge is “off-system,” it’s not eligible for those dollars. This is somewhat of a catch-22, because the county will take a bridge off-system because it’s in poor condition.

Rust shared several anecdotes for how he circumvented that challenge to save most of Lane County’s covered bridges.

One example was the Dorena Covered Bridge, approximately 12 miles east of Cottage Grove. Rust said he was visiting the bridge when a group of seniors approached him looking for a public bathroom, and there was none nearby. After that encounter, Rust got the county to add a restroom at Dorena, making it a rest stop eligible to receive road funds.

Another example was the Goodpasture Bridge 25 miles east of Springfield. According to Rust, staff told the commissioners the bridge was in danger, but he didn’t believe them.

“I went up there and went underneath the bridge and looked (as a) log truck (passed),” Rust said. “That bridge didn’t twitch, didn’t move an inch.”

Rust drove another county commissioner up to the bridge and showed him the same thing. He was ultimately able to convince the rest of the board to preserve the covered bridge rather than replace it.

Rust successfully convinced the state legislature to set aside a share of lottery funds for covered bridge preservation. That bill also established the Oregon State Covered Bridge Committee, which Rust was the first chair of for “about 15 minutes” before stepping aside for famous former state Sen. Mae Yih, who was late to the meeting.

Today, Rust continues to serve as a covered bridge expert. He’s visited Qingyuan Covered Bridge Museum in China, and spoken in Indiana at the annual National Conference on Covered Bridges, which typically draws around 300,000 attendees.

In February, Lane County commissioners voted 3-2 to spend $500,000 in tourism funds to stabilize two off-system covered bridges. Rust actually disagreed with the decision. He said the county should convert the bridges into rest stops, like it did with Dorena in the past, and then spend road funds to restore the bridges and save tourism dollars to market the bridges.

However, according to Lane County spokesperson Devon Ashbridge, for the county to establish a rest stop, formally called a wayside, it must be “on a road with a lot of through traffic,” and the rural roads adjacent to the two bridges don’t meet that threshold.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in The Register-Guard and then was distributed on the USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.

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By Alan Torres
Eugene Register-Guard

Springfield City Council has voted against pursuing an expedited process for city hall renovations, forgoing a staff recommendation, after urging from local construction industry leaders.

“I don’t know that this is the right process for Springfield,” said City Councilor Kori Rodley, joining the unanimous vote.

The process she referred to was Construction Manager/General Contractor.

Oregon law states government agencies in “shall make every effort to construct public improvements at the least cost” through a competitive bid process, but carves out an exception for CM/GC contracts.

Local governments choose CM/GCs because they’re faster than regular government contracts and because they can prevent cost overruns by capping the cost of a contract.

But leaders of local construction firms told Springfield City Council and the Register-Guard that recently, governments have been overusing the practice, which they believe favors larger, out-of-state firms.

Local contractors push back on expedited contracting

Jerry Valencia, owner of Lowell-based Bridgeway Contracting, was one of the local construction leaders who urged councilors to reconsider. Valencia told the Register-Guard he’s seen local governments in Lane County gradually increase their use of CM/GC since 2009, and the change has harmed local businesses.

“These large contractors keep getting a little bit bigger, and bigger and bigger,” he said, while fewer projects are awarded “to the general contractors that actually provide livable wages, family health care, and actually pay the taxes for that bond.”

At a June 22 Springfield City Council meeting, councilors were scheduled to approve a CM/GC process for the city hall maintenance project. The vote would have narrowed the city’s search from the seven contractors that applied to two finalists staff had scored highest (both of which were large multi-state) firms, before the parties submitted cost estimates.

At the City Council meeting, City Manager Nancy Newton said the CM/GC process is warranted because the city hall upgrades are urgent.

“The city has really tried to take this building as far as it can in the least expensive way for a very long time,” she said. “We have two portable air conditioning units that aren’t really working that well … the building itself is conveying some urgency to this decision and I’m really reluctant to postpone it any further.”

Staff also said they believe the CM/GC process saves money. Assistant City Attorney Kristina Kraaz told councilors she doesn’t think the city would find a cheaper contract if it opens up the competitive process.

Valencia disagreed. He said in his experience, CM/GC drives up the cost of contracting, because it’s less competitive and firms awarded a CM/GC contract will always charge the maximum allowed in the contract.

City council opts to give local contractors chance to bid

Councilors unanimously voted to pursue the longer process. They said it was important to give local employers an opportunity to bid for the city work.

“The construction industry right now is really slow, and they have crews and people sitting at home and families that they’d like to be supporting,” Councilor Michelle Webber said.

Valencia called City Council’s decision “a great victory for the Lane County construction community.” Valencia said he would bid for the contract, and he expects other local construction firms will, as well.

Most cases don’t get this outcome

In this case, local contractors successfully pushed back on the plan to award a CM/GC contract, but that’s not the typical result.

On June 26, Lane County notified the firms who had applied to build the Lane County Stabilization Center, that they had narrowed their search from the 10 firms who had applied, to three finalists in another CM/GC process.

In this case, the county didn’t rely on urgency to justify the CM/GC process. Instead in Lane County’s “Notice of Pending Exemption from Competitive Bidding,” the county said it pursued CM/GC because it wanted to consider “qualitative factors” in addition to cost.

“Variables such as unique attributes being required in the design/construction of such a stabilization facility, challenges inherent in new construction on undeveloped land, and the overall magnitude of the project helped inform this decision,” the notice said.

According to Lane County’s scores of these proposals, shared with the Register-Guard by Valencia and John Hyland Construction, two of the 10 firms that applied are based in Lane County. One of those: Eugene-based Essex, advanced, while Springfield-based John Hyland Construction did not. Instead, Lane County named Lake Oswego-based Pence Contractors and Skanska to the final round.

According to the scoring document, Skanska outscored Hyland on “firm history,” “qualifications and experience,” “project staffing” and “project approach.” They tied on “fee proposal.”

In an email forwarded to the Register-Guard, John Hyland Construction President Shaun Hyland objected to the scoring.

“Our local government should be picking on lowest price on a competitive basis, not based on how well our marketing department does,” he wrote.

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By Alan Torres
Eugene Register-Guard / Register-Guard

The city of Eugene has issued permits for the planned Amazon distribution center on Highway 99.

According to city of Eugene permit data, the city issued permits June 18, authorizing construction, after Amazon’s contractors paid the $1.2 million in outstanding fees.

The project is an Amazon shipping and storage hub on a former grass seed farm at the corner of Highway 99 and Awbrey Lane in Eugene, just north of the Blachly-Lane Electric Co-Op building. There will be one large building for the warehouse and two parking lots: one for employees and one for delivery vans.

The permits greenlight Amazon’s plan to build the warehouse, parking lot, private roadway and loading dock.

It’s not obvious based on public documents when construction will start or how long it will last.

According to the city permit database, an inspection is scheduled for June 13, 2027. According to one of many documents obtained by the Register-Guard, Amazon’s developer, Trammel Crow, has a permit to close a lane on Highway 99 to construct the entrance to the site. That permit will expire Feb. 1, 2027.

Alisa Carroll, from Amazon’s policy communications and economic impact division, told Bethel neighborhood leader Lin Woodrich over email the 317,640-square-foot warehouse near the airport would enable same-day and next-day delivery for Amazon customers in “Eugene and the surrounding Lane County region,” create “several hundred jobs” paying an average hourly base wage of $23 per hour plus benefits.

The grass field on the corner of Highway 99 and Awbrey Lane is the site of seasonal wetlands, but regulators deemed them low quality and determined stormwater runoff would not harm Amazon Creek where it drains.

The Amazon development is the first of several the city wants to attract for the industrial-zoned area near Eugene’s airport.

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Ninety-two public roads in Eugene, lined with hundreds of homes, are not owned or maintained by any government. The people who live along those roads are trying to change that.

Local Access Roads are defined in a 1981 Oregon law. They are public in the sense that anyone can travel on them, and the right-of-way must be kept open, but they aren’t owned by a city, county or state government.

LARs exist statewide, but Lane County is unique for having so many in an urban area. Of the 514 LARs in Lane County, 167 are inside urban growth boundaries, 92 of which are in Eugene’s UGB and total 12 miles of roadway.

The people living along these roads have long urged the county government to take them into its road system, saying their LAR status is fundamentally unfair to the residents.

Liz Porter, one LAR resident, said when she tried to explain the status of the road to her neighbors, most didn’t believe her. The ones who did agreed: The concept is “completely unfair.”

LARs “have been here 45 and 50 years and are no different than the county roads a block away,” yet unlike those roads, they place the burden of responsibility (including potential liability) upon homeowners, said Joel Korin, another LAR resident.

Most LARs in the Eugene Urban Growth Boundary are in River Road and Santa Clara and form a patchwork in those neighborhoods. There are also a few in the Industrial Corridor and in Northeast Eugene off Coburg Road.

There are even roads that have multiple jurisdictions. Sunny Drive, where River Road neighborhood leader Laura Shoe lives, is a city street on its northern third and an LAR on its southern two-thirds.

It’s usually not clear why a road is an LAR. They were developed when the River Road area transitioned from agricultural to suburban. Sometimes the county took on roads from the developers and added them to the county road system; other times it did not.

The people living on LARs in the Eugene Urban Growth Boundary feel the county government has a responsibility to take on maintenance of the roads, and have made the case to commissioners before. Last year, commissioners directed staff to evaluate what adding the LARs in Eugene and Blue River to the county system would look like, including the timing and cost.

The LARs are in a variety of conditions. Joshua Kielas, a River Road neighborhood leader who lives on Fairway Drive, said Fairway is “falling apart,” but others are indistinguishable from county roads.

River Road residents said they remember the county historically maintaining the LARs, last repaving them in the 1990s when the sewer system was installed.

County staff said current Oregon law prevents the county from using its funds for LARs unless there’s an emergency. However, county commissioners have the authority to redesignate the LARs as county roads.

There is a process to apply for the county to incorporate an LAR into the county road system: 60 percent of the homeowners along the road must sign a petition and the road must meet certain standards. LAR residents believe documenting those standards would require hiring a surveyor, an engineer and a right-of-way attorney.

County staff disagree with River Road residents’ position that the county should take on the roads outside that process.

In a presentation to county commissioners on June 9, staff said LARs aren’t up to the standards they need to be for the county to take them into its system, and bringing them up to urban standards — with curbs, gutters, storm drains and a minimum width — would be prohibitively expensive.

County staff said taking on the LARs in the Eugene Urban Growth Boundary would cost millions of dollars, including between $60,496 and $120,993 in staff time to evaluate the roads and $88.6 million to reconstruct the LARs to city urban standards between 2028 and 2040.

Reconstructing the 10 LARs in Blue River to rural standards, which commissioners also told staff to look at, would cost $3.3 million.

Instead, staff presented two recommendations for commissioners and LAR residents: 1, commissioners could direct staff to streamline the application process for taking on an LAR, but without lowering the standards, and establish a new fee for these applications; and 2, LAR residents could form a road improvement district to maintain the roads.

LAR residents were frustrated by the report. They disagree with the report’s underlying assumption that the county must improve LARs to urban standards. Residents say the county could take in the roads and put them on the same maintenance schedule as other county roads in the River Road neighborhood.

“There are roads in the city system that don’t meet those standards,” said Polly Habliston, another LAR resident. “Why should these roads be brought up to some unreasonable standard in order to be brought into the system?”

Lane County spokesperson Devon Ashbridge said the report assumed those costs because the long-term plan is to transfer these roads to the city of Eugene, which sets those standards for roads in its system.

LAR residents also said staff didn’t address the fundamental unfairness to the people living on LARs.

LAR residents said they didn’t know the government didn’t maintain the road when they bought their homes, many of these roads are driven on by people going between county roads, and homeowners bear the legal liability if someone is injured because of a faulty LAR.

LAR residents found the special district suggestion “insulting.”

“Why would homeowners vote in a super majority vote to tax themselves more to pay for the roads when they’re already paying transportation taxes?” Shoe said.

The county primarily uses its share of state gas tax for road maintenance, a tax LAR residents pointed out they already pay at the same rate as their neighbors on county roads.

What about annexation? Merely annexing LAR residents’ homes into city limits wouldn’t solve the problem, they said. Some of the homes on LARs are annexed. Additionally, both annexed and unannexed residents don’t want the city to take on the LARs because of the city’s street maintenance policies.

According to a city fact sheet, the city will only work on unimproved roads (the ones that don’t meet the urban standards county staff described) to patch potholes at least 3 inches deep.

That fact sheet said the city’s urban standards include “curbs, gutters, storm drains, sidewalks, and an asphalt or concrete surface built to handle the traffic load.”

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in The Register-Guard and then was distributed on the USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.

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The Oregon Court of Appeals has affirmed the Land Use Board of Appeals‘ decision to block development of the CleanLane resource recovery facility in the unincorporated community of Goshen.

The Court of Appeals on April 8 issued an “order without opinion” upholding the denial and ordering the county to pay attorney fees to Sanipac and the Lane County Garbage and Recycling Association.

Both sides engaged in oral argument before the court on March 19.

The proposed development would receive waste collected in Lane County and use machinery to separate garbage, recyclables and organics. Garbage would be taken to a landfill, recyclables would be sold and organics would be converted on-site into renewable natural gas.

The county purchased vacant land in Goshen where it sought to put the CleanLane facility.

Waste hauling businesses and Goshen residents who opposed the project argued CleanLane would be a waste-related facility, which is not allowed by the site’s zoning. The county argued it would be a recycling facility and a government facility, which are allowed.

LUBA previously sided with the project opponents based on the facts the facility would receive hundreds of thousands of tons of solid waste, transfer 64 percent of that waste for disposal, and decompose methane gas, all of which are waste-related uses. The Court of Appeals upheld that decision in a one-page order.

The county has a backup plan to locate CleanLane at the Short Mountain Landfill instead of Goshen. Before LUBA issued its denial, county commissioners voted to authorize $1.3 million to study the feasibility of building there.

In a statement, the Lane County Garbage and Recycling Association, which represents waste haulers operating in Lane County, celebrated the order as “a major victory for Lane County ratepayers and the Goshen community,” and urged commissioners to use the ruling as an opportunity to reconsider the project.

“We call on the Board of Commissioners to abandon this high-risk project that has put our entire waste management division in jeopardy,” LCGRA spokesperson Katy Pelroy said. “Trust needs to be restored with taxpayers and all stakeholders.”

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in The Register-Guard and then was distributed on the USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.

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Lane County is looking to increase tourism-related tax rates to help pay for construction of a proposed multipurpose outdoor facility at the Lane 91��Ƶ Center. The Lane County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday approved a proposal to increase both the transient room tax rate and the car rental tax rate by 2 percent. Staff will prepare an ordinance for approval.

The Eugene Emeralds minor league baseball team has been in operation in Lane County since 1955. The team currently plays at the University of Oregon‘s PK Park. After being promoted to a higher level and gaining an extended season, and Major League Baseball introducing new facility requirements in 2020, the Emeralds will not be able to continue to use PK Park after 2024.

In fall 2021, the Emeralds approached Lane County about the possibility of building a stadium at the Lane 91��Ƶ Center. The county board asked staff to evaluate the request as part of the Lane 91��Ƶ Center master plan process. ECONorthwest conducted an economic impact report on what a new stadium would mean for the county.

“Commissioners have asked staff to assess the feasibility of locating the facility at the events center, recognizing that it could also serve as a home to an anchor tenant for the Eugene Emeralds, but also serve as a venue for concerts, for school events, for tournaments, and as an emergency shelter,” Lane County Administrator Steve Mokrohisky stated during the board meeting on Tuesday.

Staff has looked at construction and preliminary agreements with the Emeralds, Mokrohisky added.

Turner Construction investigated what the project might cost, Lane County Facilities and Capital Planning Manager Shawn Waite said. The firm’s cost estimate was $78 million, including soft costs and adjustments, for a construction start in 2023.

“There is some variability there,” Mokrohisky said. “We have confidence we can build a project, in terms of construction costs, in that range.”

A total of $17.5 million ($10 million from the Emeralds and $7.5 million from the state) in up-front funding has been identified for the project. The board asked the project team in May to identify additional funding options.

The unknown factors are the costs of materials and labor. Also, Turner Construction’s estimate does not include immediate occupancy requirements. When the project comes back before commissioners next month, there should be two cost estimates for review: one with immediate occupancy and one without.

In June, the county board passed an order approving an exemption to the competitive bidding process and authorizing procurement by Request for Qualifications of a design-build contractor. The RFQ closed on Aug. 10. A request for proposals was to be posted by Aug. 25. Responses are due by Sept. 1.

“Staff will return to the board in October with options if additional funding is identified,” Waite said.

The remaining funding gap is estimated at $80 million, according to Christine Moody, Lane County’s budget and financial planning manager. The project team’s goal is to not use local taxpayer resources but rather tourism-related revenues. A 1 percent increase in the transient room tax rate would generate an estimated $1.8 million annually and a 1 percent increase in the car rental tax rate would generate an estimated $325,000 annually. In addition to those revenues, the project team could seek more money from the state.

The county is identifying the funding available first and then will work with a design-build firm. The facility’s design would be based on that budget.

As the project moves forward, the amount of community outreach will continue to expand.

“The neighbors and residents directly in that area will need to be a significant part of the design process if and when we pursue that,” Mokrohisky said.

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