A request from the Sweet Home High School Booster Club for a fee waiver prompted the City Council Tuesday, April 28, to instruct staff to come up with a mechanism to deal with nonprofit organizations that ask for waivers.
Booster Club representatives want the city to waive permit fees for a concession stand the club plans to build at Husky Stadium this summer.
Fees for the project are estimated at $772.97, but city officials said that figure may be reduced once they receive final plans for the project.
Karla Burcham, speaking on behalf of the club, said the club is asking the city to waive the building and plumbing permit fees. She said plans at this point do not include connection to the city sewer.
Council members were generally sympathetic to the idea, but they said they wanted to set up a system that would not set precedent they didn’t want to meet later.
“I feel we should partner up on this,” Council member Greg Mahler said.
Mayor Craig Fentiman agreed, adding that he thought an actual fee waiver would be the wrong way to go.
Councilman Jim Gourley suggested that the city could donate some of the fees if money could be found in the budget.
City Manager Craig Martin said he would have to find a line item to make such a donation, noting that he “would not” recommend taking money from the parks budget because it has been depleted by repair of vandalism.
Martin said that these types of requests have come before the city before, one being the Habitat for Humanity houses that were built several years ago, which the city “comped” as a grant.
He suggested the council approve criteria that could be applied to such requests, including requirements that the request be from a nonprofit organization “versus John Q. Citizen, who doesn’t want to pay $2,500 to have a house built.”
Martin said he recalled another instance in which an Eagle Scout asked for a waiver for fees to do his Scout project at a local church. Martin said he paid the fee himself, which came to “$30 or $40,” for the permit out of his own pocket.
“No, I won’t pay $770,” he said.
In another action Tuesday, the council heard from consultant Ken Goettel, a nationally recognized expert on benefit-cost analysis of mitigation projects for seismic and other natural hazards, who is updating the city’s Multi-Hazard Mitigation Plan.
Goettel said the plan, which must be updated every five years, is required to keep the city eligible for FEMA grants to mitigate such hazards as flooding, seismic risk and unstable slopes.
He said Sweet Home could get FEMA grants to fix problems relating to such hazards if it can make a case that the risk is high enough to warrant such funding.
“You don’t have to be the city of Eugene or Portland to get these grants,” he said, noting that his “most successful” client in getting such grants was a community in Alaska about he size of Sweet Home.
Goettel said the major potential hazards he sees in Sweet Home are: flooding, particularly on 24th Avenue at the railway crossing and in the area of 13th and Poplar; winter storms; landslides, such at Mountain View Road and Long Street; and earthquakes.
“Earthquakes don’t happen very often but when they do, they have very big impacts,” he said.
He said that Sweet Home’s isolation tends to be a problem because disruptions to utilities and transportation take longer to fix than in Portland or other metropolitan areas.
Goettel said people tend to fall into “two extremes” when responding to the threat of natural hazards.
“The most common is to ignore the risk €“ if it hasn’t happened in the last week, don’t worry about it,” he said. “The other is to overreact, to think the sky is falling. If it’s an earthquake, Oregon is going to be destroyed. If it’s a flood, the town is going to be washed away and it’s an act of God and there’s nothing we can do.
“Both of these extremes are ridiculous,” he said. “If you determine that the risk is high enough, you can fix it. You evaluate the risk and find the best way to solve the problem.”
He said the plan is for the community as a whole and, although entities such as the school district or the power company are separate, they can be included.
“You can interpret your mission as broad or as narrow as you want,” he said.
Because some wording needed changes, council members did not take action on the plan on Tuesday, instructing staff to make the necessary changes and bring it back.
In another action, council members approved a resolution to declare the city’s support to purchase only products and services made or performed in the United States with monies from American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds.
Council members and city officials said they supported the spirit of the resolution but two voiced concern about a requirement in the statement that a public notice be published in the newspaper to alert readers in cases where a product or service might be purchased from a foreign supplier because no domestic source could be found.
“I have a problem putting it into hard print like that,” Councilmember Jim Bean said.
Police Chief Bob Burford said he was concerned about the cost of researching the origin of products his department might want to purchase and the cost of a public notice, which he said could be as much as $100.
“It seems like an awful waste of taxpayer money to spend $100,” he said.
City staff said the resolution was limited to funds from the federal stimulus package, not from the regular city budget and that the stipulation was there to allow citizens to speak up if they knew where goods or services could be procured domestically.
Bean said he still didn’t like it.
“Is somebody going to come back and haunt us on this thing?” he asked. “It’s going beyond my commitment to support this.”
After some discussion, staff and the council agreed that the stipulation could be satisfied by a posting on the Internet or on the wall at City Hall.
“I don’t think it would be onerous if it were just a posting to a Web site,” Burford said.
Council members Bean, Fentiman, Gourley, Mahler and Eric Markell voted in favor of the resolution. Councilors Laure Fowler and Scott McKee were absent.