Eugene Weekly

A week before the school year ended, students at Edison Elementary held a protest after being cut off from bento boxes. For most of the year, Ume Grill’s Helen Nahoopii had been delivering the single-portion lunches packed in boxes to kids at Roosevelt Middle School and Edison Elementary after their parents ordered the boxes online. She says the district ordered her to stop because providing the food violates the district’s contract with food service giant Sodexo.  Continue reading →

UO architecture students aren’t just taking classes and making floor plans, they’re using their degree-earning time to rebuild a house — with a special focus on the marriage of design and sustainability. The Center for the Advancement of Sustainable Living (CASL, sounds like “castle”), at 1801 Moss St., is re-creating and adding onto the house where it’s based, while inviting the local residents inside to brainstorm about their own projects. Continue reading →

Eugene and deserts sound like an unlikely combination, but the USDA lists four Eugene food deserts, census tracts that contain a high percentage of low-income people living in areas with low access to fresh, healthy food. For a year, students from the UO Architecture School’s Digital Media Collective (DMC) studied public use of private space and accessibility of healthy food throughout the city, and their final project is the fabrication of food shelving that’s adaptable enough for “pop-up” markets. Continue reading →

UO’s decades-old urban farm program didn’t sprout overnight, but the university’s various farm projects are now growing fast. In addition to the 1.5 acre Urban Farm north of Franklin Boulevard, it added sites on Columbia and Moss Streets in 2012. The Service-Learning Program started a farm at Edison Elementary School in the Fairmount neighborhood. Continue reading →

The Whiteaker is known for its vibrant cultural scene, but some residents say that the nighttime noise level is making sleep difficult, and say it could be time to revise the Eugene noise ordinance to be decibel-based and less subjective. Under Eugene’s current noise code, a noise disturbance can be any sound that “annoys or disturbs a reasonable person of normal sensitivities.” Continue reading →

At more than 400 pages, deciphering a city budget can be like trying to decode DNA. That’s why Eugene needs an independent auditor to examine it, figure out where and how much money the city could save and make it more sustainable, according to city councilors past and present and a former Eugene budget clerk. Continue reading →