Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis delivered her State of the City address on Thursday, and it reminded us of grandma’s whipped cream and fruit dessert. There were a few substantive nuggets, but they were buried in too many sweet platitudes and airy talking points.

First, however, credit where it’s due. We applaud Vinis for holding her address at an event free and open to the public. The same goes for Springfield Mayor Christine Lundberg who will give her state of the city this week. Some Oregon mayors — in Portland, Corvallis and Bend, for example — opt to give their addresses before private clubs with paid admission. All residents deserve an opportunity to hear the annual update from the top elected official, so kudos to Eugene and Springfield for being better.

Credit also to the council and mayor for approving an additional $8.6 million for more police, a day center for the homeless and outreach to at-risk youth, which Vinis highlighted. Those investments will lead to real improvements for public safety and some of Eugene’s most vulnerable residents.

But that was last year. What about 2019?

Vinis identified four priorities for the year ahead: homelessness and housing, climate resiliency, public engagement and government accountability, and inclusiveness.

Housing and homelessness

Vinis was disappointingly vague on what she would do about homelessness, the community’s most pressing issue. She pointed to a soon-to-be-released report that "will help us build a shelter that integrates and strengthens our complete system of services for the unhoused." But how specifically she plans to pull that off went unsaid.

The consultants who wrote the preliminary report recommended building more low-barrier shelter beds. The report didn’t explain where the money should come from, how to choose a location, who will run it nor any other details that make the act of building a shelter much harder than just talking about building a shelter. The report also acknowledged that a shelter alone won’t fix the homelessness crisis.

The mayor did give a nod to economic reality by encouraging a range of housing options will help not just some homeless residents but also working-class families.

"I pledged last year to champion missing middle housing as a pathway toward creating more housing that people can afford," she said. Yet she did not point to any real success on that front in 2018. The city held a few workshops and is talking about increased density, but actual action remains elusive.

"The continued suffering in our midst is unconscionable. Failure to act is not a choice," the mayor said, but that is the choice the city repeatedly has made, and there was no clear sign that Vinis is ready to choose something else.

Climate resiliency

As with housing, the mayor has goals but not substantive plans. "The premise of our climate work is that the city and large institutions lead the way in orchestrating major shifts in energy sources and us," she said. Great. How? Talking approvingly about bikes, density and lower carbon emissions is all well and good, but words alone won’t change things.

At least the mayor does not appear to harbor delusions that Eugene can solve climate change alone. Rather, she frames preparation and resiliency as a means to keep people safe and healthy, especially if a climate-related or other disaster strikes.

Vinis did promise to host a Mayor’s Emergency Preparedness Summit in March. "The goal is to bring key partners together to publicly share their plans to coordinate their responses to an earthquake and to raise public awareness of this work." More talking and not a lot of doing.

An earthquake arguably is the wrong disaster about which to worry. A major earthquake could indeed be catastrophic, and the community does need to prepare, but the more immediate existential threats in a warming climate are drought and wildfires. They need to appear on the agenda at the March Summit, too.

Public engagement and government accountability

If there’s anything that elected officials enjoy talking nearly as much as themselves, it’s how they will engage with and be responsive to the public. Vinis has had some small successes on this front, creating an online dashboard that allows people to track city work. That was low-hanging fruit, though. What has she done lately?

She says that the city manager will make a list of links to audits and council will take input from residents through online polling. While we’re all for using technology better to engage with the public, these are even lower-hanging fruits. The fact is that local government too often is difficult and expensive to pry records out of. We’d love to see greater transparency be a genuine priority.

She does have one substantive proposal on engagement: Creation of a youth advisory board that can bring new voices to public discourse. We’re just not sure why it will take more than a year to get it up and running.

Inclusiveness

The mayor had the least to say on this issue beyond highlighting her push to honor diverse communities with an eye toward a multi-cultural festival in 2021. At least she committed to something.

What the mayor didn’t talk about

It would be unfair to expect the mayor to cover every single issue in a speech, but a few items were glaring omissions.

In all her talk about climate, Vinis did not mention the very unhealthy air we’ve been experiencing, water quality in the McKenzie River and recycling. These have been hot topics that call out for bold solutions.

Also absent was any discussion about what she will do to encourage employers to come here and provide living-wage jobs. A city cannot thrive if few people can afford to live in it. This is the opposite end of the housing equation that density and missing middle housing doesn’t fix.

The mayor said, "Optimism is a choice, and it is infectious." Eugene needs more than optimism to overcome the difficult challenges it faces. It needs leaders to articulate a vision with concrete actions and attainable goals. Unfortunately, Vinis mostly missed an opportunity to do that.