• We are loving the suggestions we are getting for naming Phil Knight’s special new tower protruding over Hayward Field. Points for rhyming, like Phil’s Phallus Palace, which is a current favorite. Keep ’em coming, because the winner gets a Eugene Weekly T-shirt and we get a lot of laughs. Email us at Editor@EugeneWeekly.com.

• Willamette Week’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Nigel Jaquiss and fellow reporter Rachel Monahan essentially forced Jennifer Williamson out of the Oregon secretary of state race. The story accuses her of campaign finance violations, which she denies, but she says she is dropping out to protect her family. We’re interested in the hope she expressed in her email message to supporters that another strong progressive will file before the March 10 deadline. How about a strong progressive from Lane County filing for secretary of state? We can think of several good possibilities.

• The arts is an industry sustaining 4,500 jobs in Eugene. That’s double the impact of the arts in other cities our size, according to Liora Sponko, executive director of Lane Arts Council, speaking to the City Club of Eugene on Feb. 7. She joined Mitra Gruwell, fashion designer and artist with St. Vincent de Paul, and John Weber, new executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, in advocating for the arts in Eugene. We want to know more about Sponko’s observation that today’s students carry great anxiety, and the arts help them calm down.

• Climate change caused some ugly flooding here in Oregon as well as in Washington this past week. Twenty-one people were evacuated by the Oregon National Guard on Feb. 8, a 10-mile stretch of I-84 was closed and a woman died, all due to the flooding. Photos from the Oregon State Police showed the highway under water and floundering big rigs. Gov. Kate Brown declared a state of emergency in Umatilla, Union and Wallowa counties on Jan. 7 due to the floodwaters caused by rain and rapid snow melt.

• Eugene-based Cascadia Wildlands and Beyond Toxics, together with Oregon Wild, Oregon League of Conservation Voters and nine other groups, worked out a Memorandum of Understanding with 13 timber companies, including Weyerhaeuser and Seneca timber, to update Oregon’s outdated forest practices and address pesticide sprays. There was at least one fly in the celebratory ointment of the historic agreement. Forest and Watershed Campaign Organizer Jason Gonzales resigned from Oregon Wild in protest of the agreement. He says in a public Facebook post that “Oregon Wild and others see this as a huge victory, and I think it’s in their right to do so,” but he says he is deeply concerned by what he calls the “protest penalty” in which the MOU states, “any person who intentionally interferes with a helicopter pesticide application may be ticketed for a violation with a presumptive fine of $1,000 for the first offense.” Gonzales cites as an example the possibility of someone videotaping a spray and being fined because the pilot, who may not want to be documented, says he couldn’t spray and was thus interfered with. 

• Correction/clarification: We’ve got some facts to get straight. In a profile on Lane County Board of County Commissioners candidate Laurie Trieger (“Trieger Happy,” 2-6), we used out-of-date numbers on her campaign contributions. Since starting her campaign, she’s raised nearly $30,000. If Trieger were elected, she would be the first woman to serve the south Eugene district, but we should have better fact-checked the assertion that it would be the first time two women have been on the Board of Commissioners at the same time.  

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