When will they ever listen? Is proper City Council staff oversight and accountability too much to expect?

Measure 20-283, for an elected city auditor, offers Eugeneans our loudest message to City Hall. Oops … Well, we used to have a city hall, before it was replaced by an empty, crushed concrete pit, fanning city offices throughout town at $1.3-million taxpayer-funded rents per year.

A desolate square block now exists where once stood a magnificent, 100,000-square-foot imaginative and welcoming governmental complex and council chambers. World-renowned Turner Construction estimated that it could have been affordably rehabilitated; but other agendas were at work.

More than 13,000 Eugenians, playing fairly and by the rules, signed Measure 20-283 petitions which were circulated by volunteers in fog and rain. They honored Oregon’s hallowed initiative process and deserved a clean vote.

Measure 20-287, by contrast, was a last minute effort by political insiders to muddy the waters and put forth malodorous and disingenuous red herrings about “affordability.”

We should look no further than that empty gravel pit to resolve any question over which measure to support. Measure 20-283 sends a message that will be heard.

Scott Bartlett

Eugene