Lead Stories

City Hall was a lauded public building when it was built in 1964, with wood fins symbolizing Oregon’s connection to the forests, a very public terrace and a design that bubbled with democratic values and encouraged a connection between government and citizenry that wasn’t dominated by an imposing tower.

But after years rusting in the garage, Eugene’s own City Chitty Bang Bang might be razed rather than remade into something special.

Et tu, Andy Stahl? Political smears are hardly a modern phenomenon, nor is political intrigue. You can’t throw a stick at the corpus of Shakespearean tragedy without hitting one in which a character is killed or victimized through the evil machinations of another. To the audience of a play, it’s soon made clear who the true villains are, but in politics where we are not just the audience but actually part of the action — all the world’s a stage — who the good guys are can get a little unclear once the mud-slinging begins. 

The Friendly Area Neighbors association held a forum for EWEB candidates recently and only about 15 people showed up and most of them were family and friends of the two candidates, Steve Mital and Will Shaver. EW interviewed the two candidates a few days after the forum.

If you can envision a city as a living organism, with its heart beating outward from the epicenter of downtown, and if you can picture the crosshatching of streets as comprising a kind of circulatory system pumping the blood of commerce, then you might consider taxi cabs to be the white blood cells of urban life. The analogy is clunky but not completely infelicitous: Cabs do serve a particular purpose and, like white blood cells, they can be launched against certain malignancies. Most notably, taxis are an easy cure for the routinely terminal affliction of driving drunk.

Here’s the deal: If we don’t have this little “birds and bees” conversation, there won’t be too many birds or bees left. The planet we live on is threatened by a species of animal whose way of life destructively encroaches upon the habitats and prosperity of other creatures — we are that species, and we just keep coming.

If you want to keep Eugeneans green and fit, you’ve got to start ‘em young. Shane MacRhodes, program manager for Eugene Safe Routes to School Program, says the program makes it safer for kids to walk and bike to school by use of the five E’s: education, encouragement, engineering, enforcement and evaluation. This tidy little description includes a wide swath of projects that shows just how many tools are required to build a bike culture safe enough for tykes.

NextStep Recycling Executive Director Lorraine Kerwood wants to emphasize that there is no “away” in thrown away — all that crap we shove “out of sight, out of mind” remains on-site somewhere, perhaps in another state, another country, outer space. When it comes to waste, everything that disappears must re-emerge. This is especially true of what Kerwood calls “the tide of electronic waste going to shredders.”

Cut a forest in half and nobody is happy — not the timber beasts, nor the treehuggers. 

You know why they teach sharing in kindergarten? Because it sucks to give something away without a promise you’ll get something better in return. Studies of little kids show that as they get older and develop their cognitive skills, they share more because they understand reciprocity better. 

Then those kids grow up to be loggers, environmentalists, politicians and policy wonks, and the sharing and compromise thing gets all messed up again. 

Achilles in camouflage, teens swigging poison and reptiles seducing pharmaceutical interns — yep, the 2012 season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is up and running. Planning a trip to the idyllic town of Ashland? Consider the following, and then grab your tickets.

The name “Waldo” is not poetic enough to describe the clear, pure water of this pristine lake high in the Cascades. Kayla Godowa-Tufti, of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, whose ancestors once lived in the mountains and valleys around Waldo Lake, wonders what the native peoples of the area called the translucent waters. 

Cindy Littrell is in homeowner limbo. The proud grandmother and insurance franchise owner is stuck in a years-long process of applications, phone calls and negotiations, waiting to find out if her house will be foreclosed on.