News Articles

Timber barons can speculate on trees, land barons can speculate on selling properties but the West is not supposed to have water barons. It’s illegal under Western water law to speculate on water. An Oregon administrative law judge has ruled a private company would be speculating on the waters of the McKenzie River if granted its application for 22 million gallons of water a day out of the river. 

On April 27, the judge recommended to Oregon’s Water Resources Department that Willamette Water Company’s water right application be denied. 

As the City Council’s vote on the 10-year Multiple-Unit Property Tax Exemption (MUPTE) for the proposed 1,200-student Capstone project nears, Eugeneans are piping up about potential impacts on the livability of downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods. 

• Eugene’s sixth annual Global Marijuana March will kick off with a list of speakers at noon Saturday, May 5, at the Free Speech Plaza, 8th and Oak, followed by a march at 1 pm. Speakers include Jim Klahn, Rick Staggenborg, MD, Lynnette Shaw, Shelley Fox-Loken, Bob Wolfe, Sam Chapman and Elvy Musikka. Organized by Jim Grieg and Dan Koozer. Other marches will be in Salem, Medford and Portland. Contact jimgreigineugene@gmail.com

The Oregon attorney general primary race between Dwight Holton and Ellen Rosenblum is fraught with complexity and nuance, but for some medical marijuana advocates, the race has boiled down to who’s better on pot.

“Dwight’s Not Right” reads the headline on a press release from Robert Wolfe of Citizens for Sensible Law Enforcement (CSLE), which is sponsoring Initiative Petition 24, which would legalize marijuana for personal use. If the initiative is approved, a ballot measure will go before voters in November.   

After EW commented on Lane County Commission candidate Andy Stahl’s connection to Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole in an April 5 Slant column, the fur began to fly. Letters to the editor, online comments and even tweets chided EW for “smearing” Stahl with the connection to O’Toole and Cato.

Activists gathered at the Eugene downtown post office on Tax Day, April 17, “to challenge militarism and corporate greed and to call for the re-ordering of federal spending and tax priorities from supporting war and Wall St. to meeting human and environmental needs,” according to Michael Carrigan of CALC. 

Remember Mom’s Pies, the venerable old roadside diner up the McKenzie River in Vida for decades? For a while the original recipe hand-made pies were available in the Food Court at Valley River Center, but now we hear the business has moved to 1133 Willamette, another sign of a revitalized downtown. No website yet but find it on Facebook. Phone is 484-6667 or email owner Lou Sangermano at lou@holidaymistletoe.com

Bus tours generally take you fun places; they take you sightseeing. But a recent bus tour took Lane County participants on a trip into environmental justice — or the lack of it. Small houses cringed in front of smokestack plumes and neighborhood residents told of days the smell of chemicals have them hiding in their houses, their children stricken with asthma attacks. This isn’t happening in some big dirty city in some other state. It’s in west Eugene.

Earth Day was first observed in 1970. Forty-two years later it’s still going strong and the Earth still needs saving. Here in Eugene and the surrounding area, a lot’s going on to commemorate the occasion. How do you decide what to do? It won’t be easy, but here’s a roundup of some local happenings going on for Earth Day 2012. For more events, see our Calendar.

The UO neither supports nor opposes the efforts of its faculty to unionize, a spokesperson says. It just objects to the all-encompassing and overlapping categories of tenured professors, tenure-track professors, adjunct instructors, faculty of graduate and professional degree programs, emeritus faculty, postdoctoral scholars, research associates and fellows, visiting faculty and supervisory employees as parts of the same union.

• Finalists for the executive director of Lane Council of Government will speak and take questions from 5 to 7 pm Thursday, April 19, at the Hilton Vista Room. A final decision is expected at the LCOG board meeting April 26 in Veneta. 

• A candidates forum for North Eugene’s County Commission race, sponsored by Harlow Neighbors, will be from 6 to 8 pm Thursday, April 19, at North Park Community Church, 3484 Harlow Road.