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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 27, 2012)
NEWS >>> CONTINUED FROM P. 8 We hear the Eugene Airport is super busy over the holidays with more than 1,800 people departing the day after Christmas, up about 17 percent over last year. Cathryn Stephens, deputy airport director, predicts Dec. 27 and 30 will also be big days for arrivals and departures. She says the more typical departure rate is about 1,100 a day. “Survival Skills for Artists” is a 10-week course geared toward visual artists who are “seeking the tools to move their art into the professional art arena,” offered by the city of Eugene’s Cultural Services in cooperation with LCC. Classes meet evenings between Jan. 8 and March 12 at the Hult Center. Tuition is $125. See hultcenter.org or call 682-5000 or stop by the Hult Ticket Office weekday afternoons. Need access to capital? Email spam often touts free “stimulus” money for small businesses, but Oregon residents can apply for legitimate microloans (below $35,000) through Entrepreneurial Development Services (eDev). Individual Development Accounts (IDA) is a program that provides matching small business grants to individuals who submit a business plan, take a financial literacy course, complete 30 hours of training, and otherwise qualify. BJ Jones of the Backstage Bakery in Cottage Grove recently completed the IDA process. eDev has offices at 1445 Willamette St. in Eugene and the phone number is 463-4627. Community Mediation Services, a Eugene- based nonprofit, has a new home at 93 Van Buren St. and will be offering its annual 40-Hour Basic Mediation Training on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays beginning Feb. 8. The training is designed to provide “conflict transformation” skills for the workplace, home or in community volunteer service. Early registration by Jan. 25 is $625. See communitymediationservices.com or call 344- 5366. Bicycles donated to St. Vincent de Paul are being refurbished and resold for $15 to low-income individuals and families, and some are being given away for free, according to Shane Ayrsman, St. Vincent’s mechanical coordinator and former owner of Revolution Cycles in Eugene. More than 150 bikes have been inspected and repaired, many of which would have gone into metal recycling or left to rust. Unwanted bikes can be dropped off at St. Vincent’s donation centers around the valley. See svdp.us or call 345-0595. ACTIVIST LERT • Occupy Medical is seeking monetary donations to make it through the long, wet winter. OM tells us “We are doing what we can to treat and prevent the spread of diseases like pertussis, HIV, hepatitis, diphtheria and pneumonia. Your support saves lives.” St. Vincent de Paul was providing financial assistance, but the funds ran dry in December. Checks can be made out to Occupy Medical and mailed to the Tamarack Center, 3575 Donald St., Suite 230, Eugene 97405. The group’s nonprofit status is pending. • The State of the County Address will be at 10 am Monday, Jan. 7, at Harris Hall, 125 E. 8th Ave. in Eugene. Eugene’s 2013 State of the City Address will be at 5:30 pm Wednesday, Jan. 9, in the lobby of the Hult Center. Donations of canned food for FOOD for Lane County will be collected at the door. connecting her front teeth to her palate, a broken jaw, mul- tiple through-and-through lacerations to her face, both eyes swollen shut, strangulation marks to her throat and skin removed from her thigh and knees, possibly from being dragged. Farish says that, after immediate reconstructive facial surgery, his sister is healing, but her jaw remains wired shut. Sergeant John Umenhofer of the Springfi eld Police De- partment says, “We’re still investigating, but at this point we still don’t have a lot of information about what hap- pened or where it occurred” because the victim was unable to provide information. “If anyone has any information we urge them to call us,” he says. Farish says that other kids have come forward to re- port being attacked in the area, but his family is having a hard time getting the information out. “People need to be warned that these people are still on the streets,” he says. “‘There’s no public threat’ is what people have been told,” he says. “I don’t know what justifi es a public threat.” Farish set up a Facebook page, “Justice4Love,” to get the word out in hopes of catching the assailant (wkly. ws/1ep). Warning: there are graphic photos of the girl’s in- juries. He also created a SELCO account called “The Love Fund,” where people can donate to her signifi cant hospital bills for her emergency reconstructive surgery. “They’re going to be staggering,” he says. — Shannon Finnell FOREST PLANS MADE IN SECRET? Private citizens, members of Cottage Grove’s Forest Web and former Lane County commissioner Jerry Rust are concerned the decisions about Oregon’s public forests, and specifi cally the O&C forests that have been used to gener- ate cash for counties, are being made in secret. Rust and Cristina Hubbard of Forest Web held a press conference and delivered letters to Gov. Kitzhaber’s offi ce on Dec. 18 asking him to open his O&C “timber panel” up for citizen participation. Tim Raphael, a spokesperson with the governor’s of- fi ce, says he has not yet seen the letters in the offi ce. He adds, “The governor is pleased with the substantive discus- sion underway and has approved extending the meetings into January.” O&C counties were in the past funded by logging on federal Bureau of Land Management O&C forests and lat- er as logging slowed, by Secure Rural Schools payments. Those payments have dried up, and the O&C counties, in- cluding Lane, are looking for funding. The panel is made up of county commissioners, forest industry representatives and conservation groups. Conser- vation group Oregon Wild, a vociferous opponent of the DeFazio-Schrader-Walden forest trust plan that would di- vide the forest between logging and conservation, was not invited to be on the panel. Hubbard says she and Rust wanted to call attention to the fact that the timber panel is not open to public comment and that there have been “no public comments or hearings since DeFazio fi rst introduced the bill.” An Oregon reporter for the conservative think-tank funded Watchdog.org, who attended Rust and Hubbard’s press conference in Salem, was reporting that Sen. Ron Wyden would introduce a Senate version of the O&C trust bill, but Wyden spokesperson Tom Towslee says the story was inaccurate, and Wyden’s offi ce doesn’t know what the results of the committee’s discussions will be. He says Wyden “will obviously look very closely with what they come up with.” lighten up BY RAFAEL ALDAVE 10 December 27, 2012 • eugeneweekly.com Hubbard says Forest Web is concerned about the tim- ber trust and forest plan because Cottage Grove, where the group is based, is surrounded by BLM lands with private properties checkerboarded among O&C lands. She says if the O&C lands are managed like private industrial timber- lands, then clear-cuts and pesticide sprays could take place next to Cottage Grove residences and farms. She also says the plan exempts the logging portion — which, Hubbard says, “is starting to look more like 70 percent” of the O&C forests — from federal environmental laws and “that’s re- ally critical.” The concerns regarding decisions about logging public forests being made in secrecy are at the county level as well, activists say. Lane County resident Mora Dewey attempted to attend the meeting of the Association of O&C Counties (AOCC) that was held in Eugene in early December. Dewey says she has been working to make the AOCC meetings public since 2009, because though the membership of the AOCC is elected public offi cials, the group itself is private. Commissioner Faye Stewart, who was at the AOCC meet- ing, confi rms that it is a “private volunteer organization” and that Lane County has paid dues for 2012-2013. In previous budget cycles, Lane County paid $37,000 in dues for its AOCC membership. The County Commission voted 3-2, with Rob Handy and Pete Sorenson voting no, to sign a memorandum of understanding with the AOCC in August to allow the group to represent Lane County during the BLM’s forest planning. Dewey attended part of the AOCC meeting but was asked to leave for a “private” discussion. She says she questions how a private group made up of public offi - cials can make decisions affecting public lands in secret. — Camilla Mortensen POLLUTION UPDATE Nine more local facilities’ industrial stormwater pollu- tion control plans are up for public comment this week. These plans are for facilities that have applied for Clean Water Act permit coverage under the new industrial storm- water permit issued by Oregon Department of Environ- mental Quality (DEQ), and that took effect July 1. Com- ments are due by 5 pm on Jan. 3. The facilities (all located in Eugene) are: Pierce Fittings, Precision Machine & Mfg, Rear’s Mfg, Peterson Pacifi c Corp, Quality Metal Finishing, Pennington Crossarm Co, Pacifi c Recycling, Parker-Hannifi n Corp, and Real Wood Products. Visit wkly.ws/1e5 to see stormwater plans, and wkly.ws/1e1 to comment. During the past year’s reporting period, which ended July 1, Pacifi c Recycling’s discharges exceeded permit benchmarks for suspended solids, copper, lead and zinc, including a copper discharge of over seven times the benchmark in their current permit. That copper discharge exceeded the benchmark in the new permit (the permit for which they’re applying for coverage) by 37 times. The worst results are from Dec. 28, 2011. DEQ sent Norpac Foods, Inc. a pre-enforcement notice on Dec. 13 for illegally allowing food process- ing wastewater to discharge to waters of the state at its Stayton food processing plant on Nov. 14. The wastewa- ter discharged to a roadside ditch that fl owed to the San- tiam River. In referring the violation to DEQ’s Offi ce of Compliance and Enforcement for formal enforcement, Senior Water Quality Specialist Robert Dicksa noted that Norpac’s violation might have caused signifi cant en- vironmental harm. Norpac’s permit expired in April of 2000, and has been administratively extended by DEQ. Norpac owns the Santiam and Flav-R-Pac brands. — Doug Quirke/Oregon Clean Water Action Project If you are reading this, you survived the end of the world. Congratulations! Happy New Year!
