Eugene, OR

From dKosopedia

The city of Eugene is the county seat of Lane County, Oregon, United States. It is located at the south end of the Willamette Valley, at the confluence of the McKenzie and Willamette rivers, about 60 miles (100 km) east of the Oregon Coast. Eugene is the third largest city [1] (estimated population 146,160 as of 2005) and has the third largest metropolitan population [2] in the state of Oregon. (Eugene has long been the state's second largest city after Portland, but was overtaken by Salem in terms of population around 2004.) [3]

Eugene is home to the University of Oregon. The city is also noted for its natural beauty, activist political leanings, alternative lifestyles, recreation opportunities (especially bicycling, rafting, and kayaking), and arts focus. Eugene's motto is "The World's Greatest City for the Arts and Outdoors." It is also referred to as "The Emerald Empire," "The Emerald City," and "The Track Capital of the World." The Nike corporation had its beginnings in Eugene.

Government

In 1944, Eugene adopted a council-manager form of government, replacing the day-to-day management of city affairs by the part-time mayor and volunteer city council with a full-time professional city manager. The subsequent history of Eugene city government has largely been one of the dynamics--often contentious--between the city manager, the mayor and city council.

Nine people have held the city manager position. These include Deane Seeger (1945-49), Oren King (1949-53), Robert Finlayson (1953-59), Hugh McKinley (1959-75), Charles Henry (1975-80), Mike Gleason (1981-96), Vicki Elmer (1996-98), Jim Johnson (1998-2002), and Dennis Taylor (2002-present).

Recent mayors include Gus Keller (1977-84), Brian Obie (1985-88), Jeff Miller (1989-92), Ruth Bascom (1993-96), Jim Torrey (1997-2004), and Kitty Piercy (2005-present).

Eugene City Council:

Mayor: Kitty Piercy

• Ward 1 - Bonny Bettman
• Ward 2 - Betty Taylor
• Ward 3 - David Kelly
• Ward 4 - George Poling
• Ward 5 - Gary Papé
• Ward 6 - Jennifer Solomon
• Ward 7 - Andrea Ortiz
• Ward 8 - Chris Pryor

City Manager: Dennis M. Taylor

Community

Eugene is perhaps most noted for its "community inventiveness." This usually leads to community projects; many U.S. trends in community development originated here. The University of Oregon's participatory planning process, known as The Oregon Experiment, was the result of student protests in the early 1970s. The book of the same name is a major document in modern enlightenment thinking in planning and architectural circles, even though the process is no longer used at the University. The process was created by Christopher Alexander, whose works also directly inspired the creation of the Wiki. Much of the research for the book A Pattern Language, which inspired the Design Patterns movement and Extreme Programming, was done by Alexander in Eugene. Not coincidentally, those engineering movements also had origins here. A Pattern Language is the best-selling book on architecture and planning of all time.

In the 1970s, Eugene was packed with co-operative and community projects. It still has small natural food stores in almost every neighborhood, some of the oldest student cooperatives in the country, and alternative schools have been part of the school district for years. The Eugene Waldorf School was founded in 1980 and serves grades K-8. The old Grower's Market, downtown near the train depot, is the only food co-operative in the U.S. with no employees. It is possible to see Eugene's trend-setting nonprofit tendencies in much newer projects, such as the Tango Center and the Center for Appropriate Transport.

Much of this is from Wikipedia's "Eugene, Oregon" entry.