Eugene Weekly

GAME VS. BIKE While riding my bicycle home from work Sunday evening, I found myself immersed in the buzz and hum of a most important event. Car after car after bus after 4×4 pickup after SUV were gleefully, if a bit impatiently and aggressively, packing the road, apparently on the hunt for a place to park to get to a big game at Knight Arena. Continue reading →

COSTLY CREDIT CARDS Many of us have been told that we use something every day because it is safer, faster and more convenient. There is a cost to this luxury of modern technology that needs to be realized. As a manager of a small business here in town I can tell you that at the end of the year 2013, our profits were cut down by the usual suspects — wages, energy expenses and maintenance — but what surprised me most was the charges incurred by customers using their debit/credit cards. In fact, we were charged nearly $24,000 last year.  Continue reading →

DESPICABLE TACTICS Continue reading →

NO BASIS FOR DECISION I attended a work session of the Eugene City Council dealing with options for a new or remodeled City Hall. I had a career in construction, and owned and ran a consulting construction cost-estimating business in Eugene from 1980 to 2003. Continue reading →

TOXIC TRAIN HORNS Continue reading →

RED INK LEGACY During a work session, the Eugene City Council — with strong support from Mayor Kitty Piercy — voted 6-2 to demolish City Hall and to construct a new one. In making this truly momentous decision, councilors studied a cost approximation prepared from “conceptual” data provided by the city’s hired architectural firm. How long did the council deliberate over these numbers? Months? Weeks? No. Mere minutes. Would a private citizen so conduct his affairs? Continue reading →

A ONE-TIME GIFT Regarding City Hall, it’s important to understand that steel and concrete are inevitably desirable building materials because they are so structural. Unfortunately, they are also very energy intensive to produce. Therefore, from a standpoint of green building (to say nothing of climate change), concrete and steel should only be used as a last resort and only in the context of extreme building longevity during which the embodied energy costs can “amortize out” over time.  Continue reading →

NEW LIFE FOR CITY HALL To the mayor and councilors: Most of us who have lived and worked in Eugene since the 1960s remember the “urban renewal” that took the lives of historic structures that should have been updated — no longer “viable,” they said. Let’s build what so-and-so city has built, they lauded. Buildings have come and gone in Eugene — the city is not know for its sympathy to commercial and civic structures (e.g., its history).  Continue reading →

MISTAKEN IMPRESSION To the Eugene mayor and council: I’m very much in favor of Eugene building a new City Hall, but I don’t believe you have to waste the present building’s combined economic and historical worth in the process to do it. I also don’t think Eugeneans presently understand or would approve of the total cost commitment of your two-phase, headquarters-hindquarters concept if they did.  Continue reading →