News Articles

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.

“If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a speculum — it sucks,” Breeze Harper said to a predominantly twenty-something audience at the UO on April 7. “But the speculum is this commodity that came out of the suffering of African American slavery.”

Animal advocates almost didn’t get a chance to tell the Board of Lane County Commissioners what they think of the plans to make major changes to the way the county deals with its stray pets. The public was allowed to comment April 5 at a commissioners’ meeting, but only after Commissioners Rob Handy and Pete Sorenson made repeated requests to have the animal control issue added to the agenda.

A coalition of peace, justice and labor activists are organizing a series of actions on Tax Day April 17 demanding that Congress redirect war dollars and increase taxes on the top 1 percent to fund education, job creation, universal health care and other vital services.

At 11 am Tuesday, people at Eugene’s downtown post office at 5th and Willamette will be invited to participate in a “penny poll.” Participants will be given 10 pennies to put in jars representing a six-category breakdown of the federal budget.

Matthew Robinson says, “The main reason I’m running is to promote more honesty in politics,” but that seems disingenuous to those who question his last-minute entry into the May Democratic congressional primary against Rep. Peter DeFazio.

His father, Tea Party darling and Republican congressional candidate Art Robinson, is running again this year against DeFazio, and according to an email he sent to supporters, he did not ask his son to engage in a head-to-head with DeFazio for the Democratic primary.

• Local organizations are hosting community meetings to share current information and science on marine debris left by the Japanese tsunami in 2011 from federal, state, and local experts. Lane County events will be at 6 pm Thursday, April 12, at Newport City Hall, 169 SW Coast Hwy; at 10 am Friday, April 13, at the Florence Fire Station, 2625 Hwy. 101; and at 3 pm Saturday, April 14, at the EWEB Training Center, 500 E. 4th Ave. in Eugene. Contact rachael@solv.org

Luminare Press is a new business that provides affordable services for authors who are interested in indie (or self) publishing, including book editing and design, e-publishing, printing, distribution and marketing. “We bridge the gap between writing a manuscript and making a book,” says owner Patricia Marshall, who has a background in magazine publishing, editing and creative nonfiction. See www.luminarepress.com or call 554-7574.