The thing about slow cooking is that it is, well, slow. But the payoff - as anyone knows who has ever savored an elaborate, all-day meal - is worth the wait.
The West Eugene Collaborative is an exercise in slow cooking, one that is drawing criticism from some who want fast-food answers to a complex and controversial transportation problem that has defied solution for more than 25 years.
The frustration is understandable for those who want answers sooner rather than later on how to unsnarl traffic problems in west Eugene. But their best hope for a workable, long-term solution is patience, as the collaborative keeps moving slowly, methodically toward its goal of making its recommendations by year's end to the public and Eugene City Council and Lane County Board of Commissioners.
Those critics include mayoral candidate Jim Torrey, who has asked incumbent Mayor Kitty Piercy to present the collaborative's recommendations before the Nov. 4 election. Torrey is off-base on two counts - first in assuming that Piercy, as just one of 26 participants in the collaborative, has the ability to change the group's schedule, and second in attempting to rush a process that is just beginning its most challenging phase.
As The Register-Guard's Edward Russo reported in a Sunday story, the collaborative effort grew out of the decades-long fight over the West Eugene Parkway, a proposed four-lane highway connecting Highway 126 and Highway 99 in west Eugene.
From the beginning, the parkway project faced formidable design, environmental, financial and bureaucratic obstacles. Eugene residents voted twice to support the parkway, in 1986 and again in 2000. In 2005, Piercy, who had run for mayor as a parkway opponent, cast the deciding vote on a split City Council to withdraw the city's backing for the project. Shortly afterward, the Oregon Department of Transportation killed the project on which it had spent more than $12 million in acquiring right of way and planning.
The debate over the parkway did not go away, and neither did worsening traffic congestion in west Eugene. In 2007, a group of Eugene residents that included some of the business people and environmentalists who had spent years fighting over the parkway formed the collaborative. Their ambitious goal was to forge a "land use and transportation solution" that would solve west Eugene's transportation problems while, at the same time, "enhancing community, business and the environment."
It should surprise no one that progress has not come easily or quickly to the collaborative. But it has come. After 17 months of intensive work, the group has narrowed its ideas to several broad concepts, including the conversion of West 11th Avenue between Garfield Street and Bailey Hill Road to a multilane boulevard, and changing part of West 11th Avenue to westbound traffic only and using West Seventh Place for eastbound motorists. Other ideas include keeping two-way traffic on West 11th Avenue while improving West Seventh Place to handle more through traffic, and funneling more through traffic to the north onto Roosevelt Boulevard using Belt Line Road.
The collaborative's toughest challenges still loom ahead. The group must reach agreement on its final recommendations, and it must win the support of city and county officials, without which the collaborative's efforts will have hit an absolute dead end. Then there is also the formidable challenge of re-engaging skeptical state transportation officials who made no secret of their displeasure over Eugene's earlier abandonment of the parkway project.
So far, the collaborative's effort has cost $105,000, the bulk of it coming from local governments, with the remainder from business and environmental groups. Given the significant progress that has been made - and the appreciation and insights former parkway foes say they have gotten for each other's perspectives - the project already has exceeded early expectations.
With more time in the kitchen, and some patience from outsiders, the collaborative may eventually produce a meal that everyone agrees was worth the wait.
