The Eugene City Council wants to hear from community members about community safety needs as they finalize funding priorities for the Community Safety Payroll Tax. Eugeneans can take the survey online and learn more on the City’s Community Safety Initiative Engagement Sessions website. The City is doing culturally specific outreach with a Spanish language version of the survey to our mono-lingual Spanish speaking community. The anonymous survey takes about 10 minutes to complete.
Eugene’s Community Safety System includes a wide array of services to keep the community safe – from fire to emergency medical services, police to courts to homelessness and prevention services. As Eugene has grown, unmet service needs have been identified, as well as the urgency for more funding to meet those needs.
“The Community Safety Initiative was developed to enhance or add services to address the identified unmet needs in our Community Safety System,” said Kevin Alltucker, Community Safety Initiative Project Manager. “Eugene has experienced some significant changes since we last surveyed people in 2018. We want to hear from as many people as possible and bring that information back to the City Council for an updated look at what the community’s safety priorities are.”
In July of 2020, the City Council directed the City Manager to convene engagement sessions with organizations representing communities of color to specify changes or additions to the Community Safety Initiative (CSI) that would best respond to the needs of their communities. They also asked staff to gauge if broader community perspectives or priorities had changed.
In early December, staff from the City’s Human Rights and Neighborhood Involvement Office conducted focus groups that included Black, indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC) and other community representatives to actively listen to their perspective on public safety. The City will also host virtual meetings open to the general public to gather current perspectives on the CSI. These sessions will be scheduled and announced later this month. More information is available on our website.
Results of the survey, along with input from focus groups, meetings and public comment, will help inform the Council as it considers any adjustments to CSI funding. A summary report of the information collected will be submitted to Council for review and discussion at a work session currently scheduled for May 2021.