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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (March 4, 1974)
Firemen work to clear debris away from the fire gutted Hirons Drug Store on Franklin Boulevard Photo by James Link Friday morning. The store was destroyed in a blaze earlier that morning. Cause of the fire is unknown. Hirons fire-cause unknown; affects jobs, business, union By DENNIS PFAFF Of the Emerald “Frustration” is the word which sums up the aftermath of the Hirons Drug Store fire, which occured early Friday morning. Arson is being investigated as a possible cause of the blaze which completely destroyed the street level section of the Franklin Boulevard store and is estimated to have caused about $250,000 in damage. Aside from the monetary loss, however, is the fact that eight to ten people, employees of the store, are now out of work. Added to this, is the fact that the Retail Clerks Union, which has been on strike at the store for the last five months, has seen its efforts go to waste. Jim McCormick, presiaem <x the Union local 201 stated, “After all of those hours they (the picketers) put in, in the cold and rain, to see it all go to waste, is just really a shame.” Mc Cormick expressed sympathy for John Hirons, owner of the store, saying, “We hate to see anything like this happen to anyone.” He also said that no decision had been made on whether to con tinue the strike at the Hirons store at 185 E. 18th St. No strikers were present at the store this weekend, however. Ttie major issue in the strike had been the matter of union security at the Franklin Blvd. store. Hirons himself issued a plea to area retailers by saying, “I’m not going to be able to assimilate eight or ten employees into the 18th street store, and they need a place to work.” Saturday, he said he had been calling stores as far away as Cottage Grove to find jobs for the displaced employees. Hirons said that the full value of the loss won’t be known until insurance investigators have assessed how much merchandise can be salvaged from the basement portion of the store. Another complication is that the drug store was connected to the McKay’s grocery store, and that both establishments were insured as a single unit. Hirons said he will make no decision cm whether to rebuild until after the in surance report is received. Lloyd Davis, a detective with the Eugene Police Department, who is in charge of the in vestigation into the cause of the fire, said “There’s so much debris, we’re still shovelling through it to find out where the fire started.” He said that the lack of tar and smoke on the windows indicated that the fire consumed the building very quickly, which is one charac teristic of an arson-started fire. However, he also said an arsonist would have been prevented from entering the building through the doors, since firemen repo.ted that they were all locked when they arrived. Davis indicated that the fire would not be an easy one to in vestigate, saying, “One of the bad things about a drug store, is that there is so much flammable material inside that it’s difficult to determine what started the fire and just what kept it burning.” He said that crime lab reports should be back soon and in dicated that the investigation will be handled “like any major fire. We always assume arson until we are satisfied that it isn’t.” He said that more definite information should be available by the end of the week. He also said that he was unaware of a report that a gas company representatives had been checking the Hirons premises for leaks about ten days before the fire. Nevertheless, as a result of the fire, the unemployment rolls have risen, a union has been stymied, and Eugene has lost a business. “Frustration is a good word to use,” was all Jim Mc Cormick could say in conclusion. LTD open to cutting bus fares for students If the University, student government and Lane Transit District administrators can hammer out an agreement soon, University students may begin to reap the harvest of a more convenient and less costly mass transit system by next fall. LTD planner Dave Reynarson, University planner Harry Van Oudenallen, Survival Center Co-director John Eliassen and OSPIRG representative Dan Mulholiand met Friday to discuss the possibilities of increasing service and reduction of fares to 10 or 15 cents per ride for students, the implemention of a pass system which would allow students unrestricted use of the buses in return for a quarterly or yearly subsidy paid to LTD, extended use of shuttles from the down town transfer point to the University and the beginning of service from certain areas of Eugene-Springfield direct to the University. THE TWO MAIN stumbling blocks to any improvement of the existing system are the present limited capacity of the transit district and the necessity of obtaining additional funding from the University. Dave Teynerson of LTD thought that the first problem could be sur mounted, however. “Given enough lead time, we can carry a fantastic load,” he ex plained. While many buses are overloaded already, Reynerson believes that the system could handle the increased loads by next fall. He said that the transit district hopes to increase its daily capacity from 16,000 to 20,000 riders within six months through the purchase of more used vehicles. If the University did begin to generate more riders through a reduced fare program, the LTD planner is confident that the system would adapt. “While we don t have any extra capacity right now, we ve always been able to provide for extra capacity when it is needed,” he said. If, however, the University were to opt for a pass system which would allow students to board buses simply by flashing their I.D. cards, the demand on LTD would necessitate the purchase of a number of new vehicles. Since it takes 12 to 18 months from the time of order until LTD receives new buses, the transit district would have to order now to accomodate a large influx of riders in fall 1975. AT PRESENT, REYNERSON said, LTD is readying an order. If University hopes to make additional use of the system, LTD will have to increase the size of its request. For these reasons, Dave Reynerson would prefer to see a small increase in ridership for fall 1974(perhaps fueled by reduction in token cost) and a larger increase in fall 1975. If more students did begin to use the buses, LTD would accelerate its plans to provide shuttle service between the mall and the University throughout the day and move more quickly to set up direct routes from areas of off-campus student concentration (such as south Eugene) to the campus. At present, most travelers must take the indirect path of going downtown and transferring to a University bus. Lane Transit District is, however, reluctant to proceed with plans for improved service for students until it receives some initiative from the University. So far, Reynerson claims, it has received little. The Legislature has exempted the University, Eugene-Springfield’s single largest employer, from paying the payroll tax which funds LTD. If the University were not exempt it would pay in the neighborhood of $141,000 annually. Because the University does not contribute to the transit system,Reynerson explained, some people in the area feel that “money from the local business community is being used to subsidize University students. “If the University would take the initiative, I think it would carry a lot of weight (in promoting a more comprehensive transit system),” conjectured Reynerson. In an effort to remedy the current impasse, representatives of the survival center, OSPIRG, ASUO and the administration will meet Monday morning. Among the possibilities they will discuss are the subsidization of student fares by the ASUO or the Administration. While it is unknown how much a “free” system would cost (because it is not known how many students the buses would have to carry), it has been computed that if the University sold 25,000 tokens per week it would cost $50,000 a year to reduce the price of a token to a nickel or $100,000 to bring the price of a ride down to a dime. Conduct Code may face revision Clark criticizes court acquittal Hie Student Conduct Code may be in for a revision or two as a result of University President Clark’s recent criticism of the Student Court’s acquittal of two University students charged with disrupting a University sponsored activity. The students, Tony Gregg and Esaway Amasha, were acquitted of the charges of “intentionally obstructing and disrating” the February 15 luncheon of the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association conference held in the EMU Ballroom. Clark, in a statement released last week, called the court’s decision “most disappointing’’ and said “if such intrusive conduct were viewed as per missible under the code, then no campus event would be safe from harassment or disruption.” He went on to say that “if the code cannot be construed to reach such conduct as occurred on February 15, then th/e code itself must be strengthened and improved. I shall call on the faculty...to give prompt study to remedying the code in all necessary respects.” Clark said Sunday that he has been reeking advice on the necessity and manna* in which the code could be amended from faculty members. He said the present code could be amended through faculty legislative channels or the Student Conduct Committee, which reviews all decisions of the Student Court, could go back to the Student Court with a different interpretation of what constituted a “significant disruption.” In either case, said Clark, the acquittal of Gregg and Amasha cannot be reversed. The two students responded to Clark’s written statement Friday by issuing a statement of their own. In it, they said Clark’s ef forts to strengthen the conduct code “is proof that Clark’s in terests are not with the student and human interest but rather with the status quo.” Gregg and Amasha, both members of the Eugene Liberation Coalition Movement, called on Clark to “abandon this reactionary way of solving problems and open a line of communication with the students to help the farmworkers in their struggle.”