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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 31, 1973)
'-V An Independent Student Newspaper Committee hears about tourism, billboards SALEM (Special) — Both the Senate and the House En vironment and Land Use Com mittees met today and heard testimony on controversial separate bills. The Senate committee’s public hearing concerned the Mac pherson Land Use bill, SB100. The House committee heard testimony on billboard removal along interstates and primary highways and the spending of state funds by. the highway division for promoting tourism. Opponents of the Senate bill voiced major concern over the establishment of a commission of land-use planners by ap pointment instead of by election. George Aukland, engineer, from Portland, said, “This bill gives the power to a distant bureaucracy. It has always been in America that those who serve the community must answer to the community. If those who serve the community don’t an i swer to it they will ultimately serve themselves.” The bill provides for the ap pointment of the commission by the governor. Hector Mac pherson (R-Albany), initiator of the bill, argued that the com mission would be guided and watched over by the governor. He felt this would make the all important link between those who are elected and those who serve. Alton Austin, a citizen from Portland, said that an organization like the commission would only lead to ‘‘more favoritism, conspiracy and chaos on a larger scale.” He further felt that the bill leaned more towards dic tatorship than towards democracy, •"it could possibly • lead to bloodshed and violence. This is exactly what we’re trying to stop.” Proponents of SB100 were generally in support of the concepts behind the bill, but they " I Photo by Phil Waldstein What” You say they’re putting a cover on the outdoor court yard in the middle of the EMU. Yes rain fans, workmen are putting a cover on the courtyard. According to EMU Director Dick Reynolds, the cover will stop water from leaking into the basement through the floor of the court. “It seems to be the only solution,” he said. All is not lost, however, because the roof “will create an alternative to any type situation now on campus,’’ Reynolds said. The cover will be made of translucent plexiglass, will allow air to circulate freely and will have heat lamps built in. For those die-hards who insist on open spaces, the new EMU addition will have five such uncovered retreats. "What we're doing is killing two birds with one cover,” Reynolds quipped. did suggest some minor changes. Joyce Cohen, representing the “Tri-Counties New Political Association”, said, “Senate Bill 100 gives Oregon a chance to set development guidelines and institute state requirements with a minimal amount of upheaval.” Cohen felt, however, that it didn’t take into account the voice of the people as much as it should. In addition, Cohen felt that the bill did not provide adequate means for enforcing the guidelines it would establish. “If - we’re going to invoke legislation, then we ought to have some means of enforcement.” Craig Markham, representing the Oregon Sierra Club, said the bill would “provide an excellent system of checks and balances.” He also said it would “institute a just and effective form of land use planning.” Testifying before the House committee, Alfred Hampson, chairer of the travel information council, cited an incredibly “smart” advertising industry and a discrepancy between state and federal financing as being responsible for the lack of progress in Oregon billboard removal. To illustrate his point, Hamp son said, “Of the $300,000 ap propriated in 1971, none has actually been spent for billboard removal.” Hampson, the only person to testify at the hearing for HB 5071, said that the federal highway department wasn’t interested in the program. He felt they were “very cynical and uninterested.” HB 5071 would limit biennial expenditures from fees, monies, and other revenues collected or received by the travel in formation council to ap proximately $261,000. The disagreement between state and federal authorities concerns how much money the federal government should contribute to billboard removal. In Oregon, billboards are divided into three categories: — Fully compensatory, the owner must be paid the full value of the board. (The state has established billboard value at 32 times one months rent.) — Partially compensatory, the owner is reimbursed only for the board that existed in 1965, regardless of any enlargement he has made. — Non-compensatory, new boards that have been con structed since 1965 and the owner is not reimbursed for. The agreement was that the federal government would pay 75 per cent of the removal costs. The disagreement stems from the so-called value of the bill board. The federal government feels that 32 times one month’s rent is too high a price. Hampson cautioned the committee that although the progress made hadn’t been as much as originally hoped for, “a tremendous amount of progress has been made.” The committee also heard testimony concerning the use of state funds to promote tourism in Oregon through advertisement. HB 5060 would limit the ex penditures from fees, monies or other revenues collected by the highway division to $423 million. Gary Sund, a representative of the highway division, said that tourists dropped $60 million into the economy last year and that the tourist industry created some 64,000 jobs. He pointed out that the highway division ad vertisement on a national scale had undoubtedly contributed to those totals. Bill Stevenson, senator from Multnomah County, testified against the allocation of any money to the highway division for advertisement purposes. Stevenson said that the money would be “an unnecessary and unjustified subsidy of industry. There is no correlation between money spent on advertising and the income from tourism.” Stevenson told the committee that the money could better be spent on things that would benefit both the Oregon resident and the tourists. “Rest stops are an effective way to do this,” he said. Meat boycott ‘successful9 in publicity demand By WALTER WENTZ Of the Emerald -‘I think today was a success ... “We picketed for about half an hour, and then they came out and offered to print our ad.” So Tilly Collins, Eugene housewife, described the picketing of the Eugene Register-Guard’s of fices by members of a newly-organized meat boycott group. The picketing Tuesday morning culminated an attempt by the group to enlist public support. Small classified advertisements, inviting the public to form a boycott group, had been submitted to local newspapers last week. The Register-Guard refused to print the ad in their classified section, saying only that it was “against their policy” to do so. “We just had to have some publicity in Eugene, otherwise the group would never get anywhere,” declared Collins, organizer of the meat boycott. “I was surprised when they (the Register-Guard) finally gave in.” The meat boycott, taking form around Collins, Lorna Evans of Springfield, and Shirley Hulegaard of Eugene, held its organizational meeting Jan. 22. Since then it has been growing, with or without Eugene publicity. Despite cold, rainy weather, nine or ten pickets showed up to protest the Register Guard’s lack of action and to talk with reporters from the local media. The whole thing had its beginnings. Collins said, in “the absolute foolishness of the high price of meat.” “Six weeks ago,” she recalls, “it was an nounced on the news that the price of meat would go up 10 cents a pound. It did. But then just two weeks later, the price of meat in England went up 12 cents a pound. This makes you think there is something behind it . . . “The meat dealers try to say that people are just eating more meat. Ridiculous! Could they be eating enough to suddenly push the prices up this high? ” Collins said. “The supermarkets have told us they’re barely breaking even in the meat departments. A friend of mine who works in one of their meat departments says that this just isn’t true, that they have a mark up ranging frori) 15 to 20 per cent, she said. “The cattlemen may be losing money because of stock losses, as they say. The supermarkets may be just breaking even, as they say. But I would love to know where all the money is being made. This definitely goes beyond the cattlemen and the markets,” she said. “But we can’t get at the middlemen—we can’t even find out about them—and there wouldn’t be enough of them in any one city to do any good by picketing them,” she said. The group will hold its second meeting, in order to decide upon future courses of action, Thursday evening in the Springfield Library at 7:30 p.m. “Today we finally got some publicity,” Collins says. “I think we can get moving now. Everyone is just at the end of their rope—not only on meat prices, but on prices for everything.” She says that future actions will probably in clude the picketing of at least one large super market. “We really don’t want to pick on any one particular store,” she says, “But we have to start somewhere.”
