July 18: Implementing Oregon’s Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities Rules for Climate-Friendly Areas

Join Springfield City Club on Thursday, July 18 to learn about how Springfield planning staff are working to implement the State’s Climate Friendly and Equitable Communities administrative rules. These rules were passed in July 2022 by Oregon’s Land Conservation and Development Commission in response to Governor Brown’s Executive Order 20-04.

A Bit About Climate-Friendly Areas

Oregon’s Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities rules include wide-ranging requirements for metropolitan areas, and the City of Springfield must comply with rules that influence how Springfield approaches community engagement, land use policy and development standards, and transportation policy. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, one component of the rules requires Springfield to adopt one or more Climate-Friendly Areas (CFAs), which will allow for dense, urban mixed-use centers where people have opportunities to meet most of their travel needs without relying on a car.

Progress toward identifying potential CFAs (to eventually adopt one or more) so far includes:

• Initial technical analysis to identify potential CFA locations in Springfield, which are currently Downtown, Glenwood Riverfront, Mohawk, and Gateway/RiverBend
• A “toolkit” for community engagement that provides a foundation for the project’s Community Engagement Plan, which guides the City to meaningfully seek input as it continues its process of selecting one or more CFAs
• Early community engagement to build awareness of the project and to solicit early feedback on the CFAs being considered
• Demographic analysis to better understand whether, and to what degree, any of the CFA options pose the risk of displacing community members due to higher housing costs that may come as a result of property owner-initiated development or redevelopment under the State’s new requirements
• Assessments of infrastructure availability,, major landowner willingness, and market economics to better understand what types of development could realistically occur with CFAs in place

 

Several CFA location scenarios could meet State requirements for CFAs. This June, the project team presented the potential benefits and tradeoffs for a few scenarios that aim to respond to community input and sought guidance from the Springfield Planning Commission and City Council on the next steps. The conversation at the City Club will share the outcome of the discussions with the Planning Commission and City Council.

More information is available on the project webpage at bit.ly/SpringfieldCFAs

Chelsea Hartman

Chelsea is a Senior Planner for the City of Springfield and is the project manager for Springfield’s Climate-Friendly Areas project. Her work focuses on long-range land use planning projects that influence how Springfield will grow and change in the future, which includes implementing State requirements. Her efforts have involved various planning aspects, such as supporting Development Code updates and recently completing Springfield’s Comprehensive Plan Map Clarification Project, which resulted in a map clearly showing how land in Springfield is intended to be used in the future.

Before becoming a City of Springfield employee, Chelsea worked for the City of Eugene on land use planning and housing efforts for nearly 5 years. Before moving to Oregon in 2017, Chelsea worked as a land use planner in Chesterfield County, Virginia where she analyzed demographics and housing trends to inform the County’s planning efforts. She earned a master’s degree in Urban & Regional Planning from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2014. Since moving to Oregon, she has learned about the uniqueness of Oregon’s land use planning system and how that shapes Oregon communities.

Her favorite aspects of working for Springfield include having opportunities to collaborate with community members and identifying ways to support more housing choices. A home is a foundational aspect of life and influences how people experience the community they live in.

Monica Sather

Monica worked her way back to working for Springfield over many years and has felt lucky to be back since. Her time with the City of Springfield’s Development & Public Works Operations Division doing field-based work for three summers in the mid-2000s sparked her interest in why cities look and function the way they do and how to prioritize solutions for real and lasting change. She sought to help answer these questions by earning master’s degrees in Community & Regional Planning and in Public Administration from the University of Oregon in 2014.

Before returning as a City of Springfield employee in 2019, Monica sought to gain insight into what it was like working with (instead of for) city government in hopes this approach could better serve the city she hoped to work for again. She dedicated several years to Lane County’s Land Management and Transportation Engineering Divisions and to the private sector at Cameron McCarthy Landscape Architecture & Planning where she helped deliver regionally significant projects for public, non-profit, and private clients.

As a comprehensive planner, Monica’s efforts touch on varied aspects of community development, including securing grants for land use and transportation projects, updating Springfield’s natural resource studies, working with Willamalane Park & Recreation District, advancing mapping projects, and more. Monica’s current focus is to apply policy in ways that make technical information interesting and easy to access.

Serving a local community and connecting with residents to understand their lived experiences and interests brings her joy. She is fascinated with what makes people feel comfortable in our developed environment through site design and transportation lenses while simultaneously learning how to care for our natural one.