NE W S
FORECLOSURE HOUSE
UNOCCUPIED
More than four months after the Occupy Housing and
Foreclosure Action Committee (OH-FAC) moved into the
foreclosed home on the corner of 12th and Lawrence, it’s
being reoccupied by its owner. Occupiers say owner Karen
Atkinson, who left the home two years ago, is in a sort of
“legal limbo,” but she’s challenging the foreclosure.
OH-FAC member Vickie Embree says the committee
will continue its education-centered work. “The state
went from mostly non-judicial to mostly judicial
foreclosures and it’s just totally changed the landscape,”
she says. Unlike non-judicial foreclosures, judicial
foreclosures are processed in the courts. Legislation
passed in the spring guarantees mediation for Oregonians
in non-judicial foreclosure, but Embree says that a
SLANT
• A homeless micro-housing pilot project requires
four to six months to get a conditional use permit?
Holy freezing to death on the streets, Batman. We
respect the need for due diligence, but when lives are
at stake, a little expediency is in order. Kudos to the
council for approving the Opportunity Village pilot
project, and in particular to Councilor Alan Zelenka for
making sure a location was chosen before the council’s
winter break, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking
those at risk on the streets are now safe. Eugene must
lift the camping ban for the winter — calling ourselves
a human rights city while we criminalize keeping warm
is a human wrong.
• Eugene city planners have rarely shown any vision
or leadership in the public interest and now we hear of
staff urging the Eugene Planning Commission this
week to overturn the hearings official’s denial of the
Deerbrook housing development in the Amazon
headwaters. The vote pitted the three neighborhood-
affiliated commissioners against the four development-
affiliated commissioners, and the neighborhood lost.
Next stop will be the Oregon Land Use Board of
Appeals. City staff is on the wrong side of this
important environmental issue, along with others.
Why? We’ve met some enlightened planning staffers,
but old ideas about growth and development are
institutionalized.
significant shift to judicial foreclosures means fewer
people are benefiting than expected. She says OH-FAC is
also looking into helping people in foreclosure access
legal help.
Before OH-FAC moved in, the committee says the yard
and house, vacant since the foreclosure process began, had
been used as a dumping ground and grounds for taking
dumps. “We picked it up, and we came back three weeks
later, and it was a mess again,” Embree says. “That’s when
we decided, well, we can’t just clean it up and leave it —
we need to stay here.” The Occupiers cleaned the yard,
painted the fence and helped keep the rhododendrons in the
front yard alive for the summer. They also hosted an event
during a September ArtWalk.
For foreclosure help, check out OH-FAC’s support group,
which meets at 5 pm every Wednesday in the Growers
Market, 454 Willamette St., or write to oebankbusters@
gmail.com — Shannon Finnell
• City Hall belongs downtown, and efforts to move it
elsewhere are misguided. City halls are the center-
points of cities all across America and in fact their
precise locations are used to calculate the mileage
between cities. The EWEB headquarters along the
Willamette is attractive, but it is five blocks east of the
city center and not nearly as accessible as the old City
Hall that now stands vacant. A huge foundation of solid
concrete and steel can be found at the City Hall site
that can be reinforced and built upon to make a fine
new City Hall, and the rebuilding can be done in stages
(see our cover story May 17).
What should become of EWEB’s beautiful site by the
river? We still wonder why EWEB managers would want
to give up those fine buildings; we would like to see that
prime property remain in public ownership, perhaps
becoming part of our higher education system, or leased
out to a private enterprise, to be reclaimed for public use
years from now when it’s needed. And the adjacent
excess EWEB land? Ideal would be some limited
redevelopment including restaurants or a pub and lots of
inviting public parkland along the river as part of a string
of parks all the way to Glenwood. We’ve paid little
attention to planning for the south side of the river.
Future generations will value our riverfront lands much
more than we apparently do now.
• New UO President Michael Gottfredson amiably
repeated the university’s “talking points” Dec. 7 before
the City Club of Eugene, echoing interim president
Robert Berdahl and former president Richard Lariviere
on this same civic platform: the importance of
a “premier public research university”; desperately
declining state financial support (currently 5 percent);
COAL SPILL TRASHES
OCEAN WATERS
Worse than coal in your Christmas stocking is coal in
your water. A recent accident at a coal terminal in Vancouver,
B.C., calls attention to the impacts that coal exports have on
oceans and waterways around the ports. A large bulk carrier
of coal collided with one of the coal trestles at the Westshore
Terminals port in Canada on Dec. 7, spilling several tons of
coal into the ocean. This is in addition to a coal carrier that
ran aground in November, and another that recently docked
with a large crack in its hull.
While Oregon’s controversial Coos Bay Bulk Terminal
coal export proposal, a partnership between Metro Ports
and the Japanese company Mitsui, hasn’t been making
many headlines lately, it is still in play, and the Portland
area just wrapped up a series of public meetings about
cost shifting to students, donors and grants; rising
demand with 25,000 freshman applicants this year;
and the immediate need for an independent UO
governing board appointed by the governor, a hot issue
before the 2013 legislature since only UO and PSU are
demanding such a board. We’re a little wonk-weary of
new education boards and czars and kicking cans
down rutted roads, but let’s see how Gottfredson works
with the Legislature and the governor. He’s only been in
Johnson Hall four months.
• Big business still has too much power in Oregon.
Take the case of Nike. We suspect the company had
already decided to do a major expansion in Oregon, and
then turned its fleet of attorneys to strategize reducing
future tax liabilities. All it takes is a threat to not do the
expansion and Nike gets a special session of the
Oregon Legislature. Is this what Oregon’s all about?
• We who are not in the 1 percent get a little envious
and maybe resentful when we hear about the dozens
of EWEB salaries that exceed $100,000 a year, though
few of us have the expertise or the fortitude to do the
kinds of work EWEB workers are called to do. A front-
page story in the R-G Dec. 2 fueled passions about
these high salaries in a time of recession, and made it
look like unions are to blame for high utility rates. But
then way, way down in the story on the inside pages
we discover that salaries are not a major factor in high
utility rates. What? Most readers don’t follow story
jumps to inside pages. Our daily paper tends to either
ignore or bash organized labor, mirroring its own dark
history with its unionized employees. This story, at
least the way it was edited and presented, is one more
example.
SL ANT INCLU DE S SHORT OPINION PIECES, OBSE RVATIONS A N D RUMOR-CHA SING NOTES COMPILED BY THE E W STAF F. HEARD ANY GO O D RU MO RS L ATE LY ? CONTACT T E D TAYLOR AT 484 - 0519 , E DITOR @ EU GE NE WE E K LY.COM
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December 13, 2012 • eugeneweekly.com