River Road/Santa Clara Urban Services Committees Final Report and Recommendations

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SPECIFIC SERVICE RECOMNLENDATIONS POLICE AND PUBLIC SAFETY SERVICES By Charles Kittleson How the service is provided: Police services are delivered to River Road/Santa Clara by a combination of City of Eugene Police, the Lane County Sheriff's Office and the Oregon State Patrol (which usually services only state roads and ' ' highways). Officially, there is one patrol officer from the City assigned to River Road/Santa Clara and the Sheriff's Office uses the County Shops in the Delta Highway area from which patrols are dispatched ' . as available. There are only a couple of Sheriff's patrols for the whole of Lane County. Accordingly, the City of Eugene police tend to take up the slack. The City's Department has been reorganized from zone patrols to citywide dispatch to make this possible. In practice, this means that any number of Eugene - patrols might be dispatched to River Road/Santa Clara under certain circumstances. All of the policing agencies noted participate in a mutual aid agreement to provide service without regard to jurisdiction in ; emergency situations. What We Have Learned: "Spread thin" is the understatement of the century with respect to River Road/Santa Clara police services. There are some thirty thousand residents who make seven to eight thousand requests for service each year. The intent of the mutual aid agreement has clearly been stretched to the limit as the City of Eugene patrols pick up way more than their rightful share of service delivery in River Road and Santa Clara. The Committee thinks the City Police deserve commendation for doing a good job considering that they are working within what the Sheriff calls a dysfunctional system. In a sense, this has come to haunt them. On a satisfaction with service scale of 1-very satisfied to 5-very dissatisfied, the Committee gave police service a rating of 3.2; and on the rating of the importance of change, an average of 2. 6. Still, it should be remembered that River Road/Santa Clara has never had an urban level of police service, so expecta- tions are low. Importantly, the Committee recognized a tax inequity `double whammy': County residents are reaping a windfall, and City residents are becoming reactive when they cannot get the urban level of service they pay for, e.g., good luck with help on anything like speeding, vandalism, or petty theft in a neighborhood. So we find a mixed blessing in the Eugene Police Department's sense of duty and good work. What Works/What Doesn't Work What works is that the Eugene Police Department has had the latitude to deal with the hodgepodge of mosaic annexation. Within the possibilities of citywide triage, they manage to `show up' in a more or less timely fashion-resulting in moderate satisfaction with police services. 40