It’s the time of year for looking back and for making top 10 lists, so this year, Eugene Weekly decided to remember the biggest dick moves in Lane County this year. Damn kids, 2025 has been a hell of a ride!

 In no particular order — it’s hard to rank dickness — here they are.

(For the readers poll version, and what you all had to say, check out “Dick Moves: Your Move.“)

• Sanipac: It’s too easy to joke about politics and garbage. But Sanipac, Lane County’s monopolistic trash hauler, is bringing new vigor to the metaphor. (Or is it an analogy? Dive into this abuse-of-power dumpster with us and decide.)

Sanipac and a sister company, the recycling Ecosort, have been butthurt for the past two years since losing their bid to run CleanLane, the county’s proposed project to reduce wastes flowing in — and greenhouse gases seeping from — the county’s Short Mountain landfill. Four companies competed for the CleanLane contract. EcoSort and Sanipac finished in a distant last place. 

After losing out, Sanipac launched both a public and covert (that is, dick move) effort to sink CleanLane. As first reported by EW, the companies have all but stopped shipping trash to Short Mountain, just outside the town of Goshen. Instead, Sanipac and EcoSort have been sending trash three hours south to Jackson County. 

Why burn the diesel when we have a perfectly fine landfill here? The southern Oregon landfill belongs to Sanipac and EcoSort’s corporate owner, Texas-based Waste Connections, which helps keep the trash-stained money in the family. 

But here’s the revenge reason: Cutting the trash flow to Short Mountain threatens to undermine the entire CleanLane business model, which requires a minimum delivery level of garbage to pencil out. This dick move threatens to raise rates on Lane County residents. County officials revealed last month that Sanipac and EcoSort have failed to pay millions in service fees due to the county. That’s money that Sanipac’s customers will have to make up in higher rates.

Watch for continued dickery in the 2026 elections. The Board of Commissioners has a 3-2 majority backing the CleanLane project, with Commissioners David Loveall and Ryan Ceniga, in the Sanipac bag, opposing the project. We expect Sanipac or Waste Connections, which collected $6.9 billion in revenues last year, to tip trucks full of cash to influence county elections.

• Speaking of Lane County! Commissioner David Loveall embodies dick moves. Kicking off Board of County Commissioners meetings with Christian invocations is one thing (“God before country,” he said, citing Roberts Rules of Order). But when you have a county commissioner calling women “spinster” and “stripper on a strip pole” and costing taxpayers more than $300,000, that ups the dick moves ante. Let’s not forget, county emails allege Loveall broke policy by bringing a gun and his pet to the workplace. Like most dick moves, there’s a solution to this problem — that 2026 election! 

• The University of Oregon is several dick moves deep this year. First up is the UO president’s (and board of trustees’) silence over a Greek system out of control. Last year, the Weekly exposed the school’s concealment of reports of druggings at fraternity parties, and the UO said as a result, it was changing its procedures. Procedures are one thing, but given the ongoing reports of drink and vape tampering at frat events, something else needs to change. 

Then there’s Adrian Parr Zaretsky, dean of the University of Oregon’s College of Design — and the UO administration that supported her — who threatened an undergraduate student with expulsion over a sophomoric art exhibit, seen by almost no one, that criticized the dean’s politics. After five months of work by an outside law firm, costing the university untold thousands of dollars, an investigator ruled that “no reasonable decision maker could find that [the student] violated the discrimination policy” and dismissed the case.

• ICE and the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained 1,938 people in Oregon from Jan. 1 to Dec. 16, 2025, according to the Department of Homeland Security, Equity Corps of Oregon and the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition. 

While the feds claim to be making the country safer, it’s law abiding community members ICE is targeting. In early November, Juanita Avila, a 30-year resident who holds a permanent resident card and owns Juanita’s Latina Store in Cottage Grove, was thrown to the ground and handcuffed by ICE agents. Later in November, ICE targeted immigrants seeking permits to forage for mushrooms or salal berries on federal land at Bureau of Land Management offices in Springfield.

High five to Lane County Immigrant Defense Network, Community De-Escalation Team, Community Rainbow Guard, Civil Liberties Defense Center and a host of others for pushing back on ICE and defending the immigrant community. Shout out, too, to Avelo Out of Eugene for its work when Avelo decided to become ICE Air. Avelo no longer flies out of Eugene, and we’d like ICE to fly away with them.

• Flock Safety Cameras in Eugene, Springfield and Lane County. When the cities and county in their infinite wisdom decided to sign contracts with Flock’s AI-powered license plate reader cameras, maybe they didn’t look hard enough into the repercussions? Law enforcement said the cameras helped solve crimes. Opponents said the cameras could be used to track innocent people and put vulnerable folks like trans people and immigrants at risk of surveillance by federal agencies. There were protests, appearances at city council and county commission meetings, at least one lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union over public records and at least one of the cameras inadvertently turning on.  

Shout out to groups like Eyes Off Eugene and the Party for Socialism and Liberation that led the charge in demanding greater oversight! 

• This one is personal: Gov. Tina Kotek, who not once but twice refused to extradite EW’s former business manager after she was arrested in Ohio and charged with embezzling tens of thousands of dollars from the newspaper, nearly putting us permanently out of business. This led to the revelation that Kotek’s office also wasn’t going to extradite one of the people charged in the string of burglaries targeting Asian families in Eugene. For it to be a justice system, folks have to be around to face justice. This dick move’s kudos go to the community members, politicians, and damn, even law enforcement, who led the charge that reversed the decisions.

• CAHOOTS closing its doors. On April 7, White Bird Clinic announced that it no longer had the money to continue providing crisis assistance in Eugene. This somewhat unexpected announcement came just weeks after White Bird announced it would reduce its availability. CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets) is nationally recognized as an example for cities to model crisis intervention teams after, and Sen. Ron Wyden led the charge on a bill in Congress, the CAHOOTS Act, that led to CAHOOTS-like services across the country, and perhaps contributed to CAHOOTS’ local disappearance. Recently, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani mentioned the now-defunct Eugene program as an example of what he’d like to model his Department of Community Safety after. CAHOOTS remains alive in Springfield, but in Eugene, those who need it most are left with diminished social resources. After the fall of CAHOOTS, others stepped up to the plate: Radical Assistance for Vulnerable Eugene Neighbors or RAVEN, Willamette Valley Crisis Care, and Mobile Crisis Services of Lane County, which provides CAHOOTS-style mobile crisis services to all of Lane County. 

• Looks like an Amazon megawarehouse is sneaking into Eugene — EW first reported on the proposed “sortation center” near the airport in January, and our Bricks $ Mortar columnist has doggedly gone after the story ever since — from a Kafka-esque virtually unpublicized public meeting that paved the way for the facility to citizen comments on fearing the warehouse and distribution center will exacerbate air pollution, destroy wetlands and clog airport-area roads. So far, despite objections sent to Lane Regional Air Protection Agency and the Eugene City Council, the juggernaut rolls on.

• The Lane Community College Board of Education is looking like a mess right now. The board grilled applicants to fill its position 7 after Lisa Fragala left to become an Oregon state representative — then deadlocked and shelved the appointment until the May election, leaving the seat vacant until July. The vacancy kept the board paralyzed, compounded by allegations of racist and sexist comments made to LCC’s president by then-chair Zachary Mulholland.

Things didn’t improve after the election brought new trustees and filled the vacant seat. At the Dec. 3 meeting, board member Kevin Alltucker unsuccessfully attempted to introduce loopholes that would have limited public comment and altered previously agreed-upon time limits — all while the boardroom and overflow areas were packed with community members waiting to speak. Meetings routinely stretch late into the night, not because of meaningful deliberation or community dialogue, but because trustees remain locked in arguments over process, authority and control.

Props to LCC’s The Torch for being the first to provide coverage on controversy at the board meetings at LCCTorch.com. 

• Last but not least — is the Bigfoot Beverages strike. In a time when unions are surging and support for them is too, it’s disappointing to see the way workers doggedly walking the line have gone unheard. The strike against Bigfoot, which distributes Pepsi-brand drinks to many area bars, markets and schools, began in September 2024 after the company moved to eliminate the workers’ pension and replace it with a 401(k). The company used replacement workers to hold a decertification vote, stripping the union of official recognition. The strike became a lockout. But through it all, striking workers have continued to picket, with the support of  Teamsters Local 206. Honk and wave when you pass them near LCC or at the Springfield distribution center on Laura Street.

Did we miss a move? Let us know in a letter to the editor. Tired of bad attitudes and want to shout out something nice? Write that in a letter, too! Letters@EugeneWeekly.com.