Eugene weekly., April 11, 2013, Image 9

ACTIVIST
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
ON CITY FEE
Progressive former city councilor Bonny Bettman Mc-
Cornack walks into a meeting of Glenn Beck fans — it
sounds like there’s a punch line coming, but at the meeting
of 9.12 Project Lane County April 9, when Bettman McCor-
nack presented her position against the proposed city fee on
the May ballot, there was an air of agreement in the Izzy’s
Pizza banquet room.
In front of the conservative audience, Bettman McCor-
nack questioned why the ballot measure asks citizens to vote
on human services instead of other options, such as using the
city’s reserves or whether this is the right time to contribute
to a fund for rebuilding City Hall. “That should be the bal-
lot measure!” a voice from the audience called out, repeating
Bettman McCornack verbatim.
Lela Trope, a founder of 9.12 Lane, says she attended
the meeting knowing that Bettman McCornack is a self-pro-
fessed progressive, so she was curious to see how their opin-
ions on fi scal matters would cross or diverge. While Trope
says that Bettman McCornack’s “hot-button issue” seems to
be human services, and Trope’s interest is more tax-focused,
Trope says they agree about the unfairness of picking some of
the city’s most popular programs for the ballot. “She knows
full well that the human services are the carrot and the stick,
but the nice thing [about meeting] somebody like that is that
they understand that it’s the carrot and the stick,” Trope says.
“A lot of people will vote for almost anything just to protect a
niche, and she knows better, and I really like that.”
Glenn Stutzman, who organized the meeting, says that he
did a little more background research than usual before Bet-
tman McCornack visited the group, but he was encouraged
by a positive opinion of her previous talk on the fee from
Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group founded by
the Koch brothers. He says the presentation confi rmed what
he suspected. “There is a need to justify their existence by
spending money taking care of people, and to do that they
have to have an ever-increasing supply of money, but a lot
of what they get into is outside their actual responsibility,”
he says.
Stutzman says that transparency about the city’s cuts in
recent years, touted by the pro-fee faction, is another issue
for him. “They say they’ve laid people off, but some of those
layoffs were empty positions to begin with,” he says. “One
of the facets of these departments within a city is that those
departments pad their departments with empty chairs, so that
when it comes time to cut back, they can cut back, maybe,
but not really.” — Shannon Finnell
LERT
• Glorybee’s 38th annual Bee Weekend is April 12-13
at the Factory Store, 29548 B Airport Road in Eugene,
right off Highway 99. The free two-day event centers on
beekeeping practices, demonstrations and activities
such as honey tasting and children’s contests and crafts.
Check out glorybeefoods.com or call 689-0913.
• The Yes for 4J Schools campaign is under way with
Gerry Gaydos and Sabrina Parsons as co-chairs, joined
by school board members and local students. Measure
20-210 on the May ballot is a $170 million bond that
would cost the median Eugene homeowner about $42
dollars a year. Details at 4j.lane.edu or yesfor4jschools.
com or email jwfrancois@comcast.net
• Green Drinks, an informal monthly gathering of
local progressives, will begin at 5 pm Friday, April 12, at
World Café, 449 Blair Blvd. The free networking event
happens every second Friday. See heliosnetwork.org
• The Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides
(NCAP) will celebrate heroes who are working to reduce
pesticide use in their communities during a fundraiser at
6 pm Tuesday, April 16, at Holy Cow Café, 2621 Willamette
St. Holy Cow is also donating 25 percent of its daily
profits to NCAP. The free event will feature speaker
Colehour Bondera, member of the National Organics
Standards Board, organic farmer and activist from Hawaii.
The first-ever winner of NCAP’s Community Hero Award
will be announced. Contact Katie Kis at kkis@pesticide.
org for more information.
• A public comment period on nine plans for state-
owned forests managed by the Oregon Department of
Forestry began April 8 and ends at 5 pm May 23. The
forests include several tracts in Lane, Benton, Polk, Coos
and Curry counties. See wkly.ws/1g4 for a list of forests
and the issues involved, and how to submit testimony.
Comments can be also be emailed to sfaoplans@odf.
state.or.us
• Three volunteers from Springfield are needed to
serve on a citizen planning committee to help monitor
the execution of a long-range plan for the Whilamut
Natural Area of Alton Baker Park, a 237-acre urban
greenway connecting the communities of Eugene and
Springfield. Completed applications are due by April 24.
Visit willamalane.org or call Greg Hyde at 736-4050 or
email gregh@willamalane.org
• Media activist and author Jean Kilbourne and World
Pulse founder Jensine Larsen will speak at the Lane
Peace Center’s sixth annual Peace Symposium, with the
theme of “Rise to End Gender Violence!” Friday, April 19,
in the LCC main campus Building 19. Look for more
information in EW next week or visit wkly.ws/1g6
SKEETER DUKE
BY PAUL NEEVEL
animals and humans were not harmed through their actions.
The attorneys for Daniel McGowan, who was sentenced to
seven years for his actions, argued that being labeled a terrorist
might result in the activist, whose background included politi-
cal pie-throwing, being put in a terrorist prison.
McGowan in fact did spend much of his time in prison in
a secretive “Communications Management Unit,” where as
he recently blogged, “the communications restrictions at the
CMUs are, in some respects, harsher than those at ADX, the
notorious federal ‘Supermax’ prison in Colorado.”
McGowan was the subject of the 2012 Oscar-nominated
fi lm If A Tree Falls, featuring a number of Eugene activists, at-
torneys and fi lmmakers, documenting some of the arsons and
other actions around the Northwest for which he was jailed.
He continued to write political pieces from prison. The Center
for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which is representing Mc-
Gowan and other prisoners in a case challenging the CMU’s
constitutionality, says, “new documents uncovered in the case
indicate he was placed in these highly restrictive experimental
units as retaliation for his political writings on current events
and issues while he was in prison.”
A couple days after McGowan’s April 1 blog about CMUs
was posted on the The Huffi ngton Post’s website, McGowan,
who had been released to a halfway house for the last six
months of his sentence, found himself back in a federal deten-
tion center. According to a press release from the CCR, Mc-
Gowan was issued an “incident report” indicating that his blog
post violated a Bureau of Prisons (BOP) regulation prohibiting
inmates from “publishing under a byline.” But the CCR says
that “the BOP regulation in question was declared unconstitu-
tional by a federal court in 2007, and eliminated by the BOP
in 2010.” The CCR says that after the group brought this to
the BOP’s attention, McGowan was released and the incident
report expunged.
After he was released, the CCR says McGowan was pro-
vided with a list of prohibited activities by halfway house staff,
“which he was required to sign.” The list forbids him any me-
dia contact without approval from the BOP, though the prison
system’s “regulations only require pre-approval of in-facility
interviews.” The list also says he can’t publish any writing of
his own without prior BOP permission. “As far as we know,
this is a made-up rule applied only to Daniel, in a further at-
tempt to chill his freedom of speech,” the CCR says.
In an earlier statement, the CCR attorneys said, “If this is
indeed a case of retaliation for writing an article about the BOP
retaliating against his free speech while he was in prison, it is
more than ironic, it is an outrage.”
According to the BOP website, McGowan’s projected re-
lease date is June 5. — Camilla Mortensen
HAPPENING PEOPLE
>>> CONTINUED FROM P. 7
The son of a Navy test pilot, Skeeter Duke lived all over
the map before landing in Oxnard, Calif., for junior high and
high school. “I married my high school sweetheart the day
before the Tet Offensive,” he says. “We broke up a week
before Woodstock.” Duke taught preschool in San Jose,
studied for a bachelor’s in history and lived in communal
housing with pot-smoking antiwar freaks. “On the first
Earth Day in 1970, my friends bought a brand-new Pinto,
dug a hole and pushed it in,” he says. “A week later, I sold
my VW. I haven’t had a car since.” He moved to “The Farm,”
a commune west of Creswell, with 10 others in 1971, then
to Eugene for a job at the UO Child Care and Development
Center. He campaigned for Jerry Rust, got arrested for anti-
nuke sit-ins, played drums in rock bands and sold mobiles
at the Saturday Market. He’s been active in the Community
Village at the Oregon Country Fair since 1977, and a
member of the East Blair Housing Cooperative since 1984.
“We own 22 households in two clusters,” he says. “We
have chickens, bees, fruit trees and raised beds.” A history
buff since childhood, he has recorded public-affairs radio
programs on cassette tapes since the Three Mile Island
nuclear accident in 1979. “I have close to two million
tapes,” says Duke, who hopes to find a safe repository.
“The insurance company says they have to go.”
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