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• It was a great season for the 13-2 Ducks, but you could feel the wheels on the wagon starting to come off even a few days before the Jan. 12 national title game against Ohio State. A drug-related suspension of the team’s second-leading receiver was followed by ESPN analysts warning that, despite a high-powered offense, the Ducks are a scheme-driven squad capable of being exposed as a one-trick pony. And exposed they were. Continue reading
• Sen. Floyd Prozanski will speak to the Cottage Grove Blackberry Pie Society at 7 pm Thursday, Jan. 15, at Hard Knocks Brewing, 1024 E. Main St. in Cottage Grove. • Rep. Tina Kotek, speaker of the House in the Oregon Legislature, will speak at City Club of Eugene at noon Friday, Jan. 16, at the Downtown Athletic Club, 999 Willamette St. Her topic will be “An Opportunity Agenda for Oregonians,” including support for education, higher pay, equal pay and affordable housing. $5 for non-members. See cityclubofeugene.org. Continue reading
The Ducks might have lost some feathers in Dallas this week, but we hear local pizza and other take-out businesses had one of their busiest sales times ever in the hours leading up to the national championship game. One pizza maker we talked to said he was swamped starting at 10 am Monday filling orders for home game-watching parties. As it turns out, comfort food was badly needed, particularly in the second half of the game. Continue reading
• Transition Management, Inc., 521-5897, plans to ground spray and hack and squirt clopyralid, glyphosate, hexazinone, imazapyr, sulfometuron methyl and/or MSO Concentrate on 46 acres near Preacher Creek. See ODF notification 2015-781-00427, call Brian Peterson at 935-2283 with questions. Continue reading
• We’ve ranted against sprawl for decades and we will likely continue to do so ad nauseam. We are not against growth, per se. People have to live somewhere, and our population is growing for a number of reasons, mostly sex. But we see no reason to encourage growth (or sex) to line the pockets of land speculators and shoddy developers. As City Councilor Betty Taylor asks, “Who profits from these plans?” We’d rather see quality of life be our community priority instead of taxpayer-subsidized growth. Continue reading
• The Eugene Police Commission will meet at 5:30 pm Thursday, Jan. 8, at EPD Headquarters, 300 Country Club Road, Kilcullen Community Room. On the agenda is a closed circuit television proposal. Continue reading
We hear the dramatically lower gas prices are good for local businesses. Transportation costs are down for everything that travels by car or truck, which improves profits now and maybe customers will benefit later. Car sales are up and more people are traveling. The downsides don’t get much attention. High fuel prices helped alternative transportation enterprises grow and kept our focus on locally produced goods. Will we see bike businesses and local farmers take a hit, and less support for cycling and pedestrians? We expect urgent care and ER rooms to get more business. Continue reading
• Oregon’s minimum wage goes up 15 cents an hour to $9.25 in January, thanks to a ballot measure in 2002 that tied the minimum wage to inflation. But of course an extra $26 a month in pay won’t bring Oregon’s estimated 72,000 working-poor households out of poverty. Seven out of 10 poverty-level families have at least one parent who is employed, often full-time at minimum wage or above. The Oregon Legislature in 2015 is expected to try to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and Republican die-hards will object, saying thousands of jobs will be lost. Continue reading
We understand why private investors are motivated to build student-housing complexes. College enrollment is predicted to grow and the projects pencil out as profitable even if they are not filled to capacity, particularly if tax breaks are involved. Once built and operating, they can be sold to other big-time investors to cover costs and pocket a few million bucks. But what we don’t understand is why they are designed to accommodate only single students for the life of the building, say 40 to 50 years. Continue reading
M Three Timber Company, 767-3785, plans pre-harvest hack and squirt, spraying Polaris AC on 31 acres near an unknown fish-bearing stream off of Lynx Hollow Road. See ODF notification 2014-781-08761 or call Brian Peterson at 935-2283 with questions. Continue reading