• Enjoy this week’s Give Guide and the Winter Solstice and ponder all that is good in the world. Also ponder how much you love Eugene Weekly because, as of now, this will be our last print issue until after the New Year. But find us online at EugeneWeekly.com and get your fill of news and snark in our Tuesday and Thursday email newsletters, which you can sign up for at EugeneWeekly.com/newsletter.
• The city of Eugene reports that there were more than 220,000 scooter rides in the first eight months of the year-long e-scooter pilot program. The city also reports that you e-scooter-haters will be happy to hear that the program is no more. Locally, the scooters were administered by Cascadia Mobility, but Superpedestrian — which operates in 60 cities across the globe, owns the scooters and the software used to run the program — has shut down for “financial reasons.”
• It’s nice that Gov. Tina Kotek finally made it to Lane County on the final stop of her not-quite-whirlwind around-the-state listening tour. We hope she enjoyed the visit — but we also hope she comes back real soon. As the more rural parts of the state have complained, Oregon isn’t just Portland and Salem, and those of us living in the southern end of the Willamette Valley wouldn’t mind a little more attention now and then.
• The new Eugene YMCA’s ribbon cutting and open house was Saturday, Dec. 15. Welcoming hundreds of folks to the fancy new athletic digs were several local muralists whose art decorate the Y’s walls — Esteban Camacho Steffensen, Ila Rose, Liza Mana Burns, Nick Rusnock and Eugene Weekly’s own Chelsea Lovejoy.
• Correction: Rep. Val Hoyle’s communications director disputes a claim made in a letter to the editor published Dec. 14 that Hoyle “slunk off around the corner” to avoid demonstrators against the Israeli war in Gaza at her congressional office. The demonstration was at Hoyle’s Eugene office, says Hoyle staffer Shamma Matalbert, and Hoyle was at her D.C. office that day. Letter writer Susan Shafroth responds, “I am fine if you want to remove that part of my letter, as the part about funding the military over the homeless man in front of her office is by far more important to me.”
• In this week’s keeping tabs on the New York Times, the Dec. 18 story headlined “How College Football Is Clobbering Housing Markets Across the Country” raised our eyebrows as we hear tales of students and fixed income folks struggling to afford housing in Eugene. The NYT writes that around the U.S., “in small cities reliant on college sports to keep their economies humming, short-term rentals are destabilizing housing markets, fueled by wealthy fans and investors who transform single-family homes into de facto hotels for a few weeks out of the year, and often leave them sitting empty the rest of the time.” Huh.
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