The Eugene Chamber of Commerce has begun gathering signatures to file a referendum in opposition to the Eugene City Council’s vote to adopt a “fire service fee” saying it wants to turn the issue over to voters by placing it on a ballot for a citywide election.
On Feb. 10, Eugene City Council voted 5-3 to enact the fee on Eugene home and business property owners. The fire fee would fund and expand on Eugene Springfield Fire services, helping to remedy the city budget’s current $11.5 million gap.
Without the fee, the city would instead impose widespread cuts throughout Eugene’s programs this summer, when the fee would go into effect.
The city of Eugene offered unofficial scenarios on its website of what the cuts would look like. Items on the list include shutting down Amazon Park Pool, reducing the animal welfare unit and closing the Eugene Public Library for multiple days per week starting in July 2025.
“We were really concerned about the lack of a public process for people to actually learn about and know about this fee,” says Brittany Quick-Warner, president and CEO of the Eugene Chamber of Commerce. She says that the Chamber has supported every tax and levy that has come before it, but, “There is a need for the community to understand and know what’s going on, especially when we’re talking about asking people to pay money for services. If the city is going to impose a tax that has no sunset clause, the voters should have a say.”
The fire fee is based on building square footage. According to the city’s website, the average single-family home size in Eugene would garner a $10 per month fee, while the fee for the average commercial building would be about $38 per month.
Eugene Springfield Fire is currently supported entirely through the city’s General Fund. The General Fund is money set aside in the city’s budget to fund programs such as police, fire, CAHOOTS and other recreational activities such as the library, Amazon Park Pool, and many of the animal support services. Property taxes make up 71 percent of the General Fund.
The fee is projected to amass $8 million annually to remove Eugene Springfield Fire from the General Fund and into its own specific section of the city budget. It is also assumed to generate $2 million to expand Eugene Springfield Fire services and an additional $350,000 to assist low-income households with the fee.
According to the city of Eugene, Eugene’s General Fund gap will shrink to $3.5 million with the fire fee. Without it, the $11.5 million gap will either be remedied through large cuts that work around the fire department or proportional cuts to all departments.
The library budget has recently been cut by $2 million. Linda Ague, the president of Friends of Eugene Public Library, says that any more cuts to the library would be devastating. “The only thing that is supplying the library currently with materials and programs is the money from the library levy, the money from the Eugene Public Library Foundation, and the money from the Friends. The budget for that is gone from the city. Nobody knows how much the cut will be, but if the fire fee is defeated, we’ll see impacts immediately.”
Ague says that aside from losing hours, the library would also probably reduce staffing and book budgets.
Ward 1 Councilor Eliza Kashinsky, who was on the budget committee from 2017-2024, says the General Fund has been in a deficit for some time, due to factors such as expenditure pressures and inflation. “Over the past decade, there’s been over $67 million worth of stabilization strategies for the general fund, including cuts,” Kashinsky says. “We’ve gotten to the point where, without new revenue, the types of cuts that we would have to make are going to seriously impact our community in a negative way.”
However, Quick-Warner says that this fee is not a long-term solution to the city’s budget issues, and the Chamber of Commerce has been urging the city to turn this to voters since talks of the fire fee began. “One of the challenges that we have with it is that it doesn’t actually address underlying challenges, where we have programs that have increasing costs at a greater rate than the revenue that is coming in,” she says. “We need to be making decisions that are not band aids, and so that means we’re going to have to have hard conversations regardless.”
The referendum has already missed the deadline to appear in the May 20 special election, so it would potentially appear on the ballot for the November election. Kashinsky says that if the referendum moves forward, the city would have to immediately start making cuts. “We are going to have to pass a budget that includes a lot of these cuts, and I don’t want to see these services cut,” she says. “We want to take a deeper dive into longer term stability. That’s a thing that I agree that we need to do,” Kashinsky says. “And the referendum delays those conversations.”
She says that the council believes that the fire fee “is a decision that we need to make as council. It’s looking at how we save these services and provide support for fire, which is something the voters have asked us to do.”
“If you want your city to be the kind of city that makes everybody feel like there’s a place for them, that there’s things to do, the things that make a city vibrant and interesting, not to mention culturally intelligent, it requires this kind of funding,” Ague says.
The Eugene Chamber of Commerce announced Feb. 21 that it would start to garner 5,817 signatures and has until March 13.