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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (July 3, 2014)
Emerald Valley Weatherization is going through transition to new ownership. The Springfield business, founded in 1993 and now owned by Lonnie Lee Stringer and Carla Dee Stringer, canceled some of its pending work orders last week and shut down its website, but is back in business this week, according to Kristin Mason, who tells EW she and her husband are taking over and buying the business. Mason is the daughter of Carla Stringer and says Lonnie Stringer, her stepfather, was wanting to sell but a pending deal fell through. “Since then we have talked extensively,” she says. “We have great employees and a great reputation and the decision to close was going to distress a lot of people. We have agreed to just let me take over.” Emerald Valley does ductless heat pumps in addition to doors, windows, insulation and other contracting business. The company’s website is back up and Mason can be contacted at kristin@emeraldvalleyweatherization.com. Wildtime Foods has a new production facility under construction at West 2nd and Van Buren in the Whiteaker neighborhood. Groundbreaking was June 27. Wildtime produces handmade granolas, trail mixes and raw grain cereals under the Grizzlies brand. The new 7,000-sq.-ft. building will house offices, production and warehouse space. Businesses involved are Arbor South Architecture, Chambers Construction and Downwind Development. The project is expected to be completed in October. WTO RIOTS IN SEATTLE The Green Lane Sustainable Business Network July luncheon will include a program on “EWEB — Where Does Our Water and Energy Come From?” at noon Wednesday, July 9, at the Hilton main level meeting room. Speaker is Jeannine Parisi of EWEB. Lunch is optional. See greenlane-sbn.org for registration and more information. Soccergolf is a cross between soccer and golf and the grand opening of the first soccergolf course in Eugene was June 28 at the RiverRidge Golf Complex at 3800 N. Delta Hwy. The game is played on golf courses and uses a regulation soccer ball and 21-inch holes placed off the greens. A nine-hole round of soccer costs the same as golf, $6.50 for adults and $5 for those 17 and under. See riverridgeor.com or call 345- 9160. Eugene Mindworks is a new business incubator space at 207 E. 5th Ave. above the Tap & Growler and Café Lucky Noodle. The newly renovated 9,200-sq.-ft. space opened July 1 and offers open area desks and private offices, two conference rooms, a lounge, resource library, wifi and free parking. See eugenemindworks.com or call 515-9330. A free session on “How to Create and Protect Business and Product Names” will be at 6 pm Thursday, July 10, at the Eugene Public Library downtown. Speaker will be Frank Plaisted, who will talk about trademarks and trade names and how to use them. Sponsored by the LCC Small Business Development Center and SCORE. Call 682-5450 for information on this and other free clinics for small business. A new Farmers Insurance branch agency has opened at 783 Grant St. in Eugene. Partners are Kenny Weaver and Steen Jones. Jones is trilingual, fluent in English, Spanish and Japanese. Call 505-9253. Amber Everly, director of quality assurance at Oregon Ice Cream, has been appointed to the Eugene Toxics Board representing local industry in Position 2. Lisa Arkin, executive director of Beyond Toxics, has been reappointed to Position 5, an advocacy post representing environmental concerns. Andree Phelps has been appointed to the Neutral Position. The Toxics Board makes policy governing the city of Eugene’s hazardous materials reporting program. See Eugene-or.gov/toxics or call 682-7118. A nonprofit you might not of heard of is Casting for Recovery, a national program which provides all-expense-paid fly-fishing weekends for women who are breast cancer survivors. The fall retreat in Oregon happens the weekend of Aug. 1 at Black Butte Ranch in the Bend area. The June retreat was held at the Big K Guest Ranch on the Umpqua. More information about the program, including videos and applications, can be found at castingforrecovery.org. Landlords in Oregon can no longer discriminate against rental applicants who are using Section 8 vouchers as a source of income. Oregon’s Housing Choice Act went into effect July 1 protecting renters but also providing landlords with financial assistance in case renters using Section 8 cause unreimbursed damages up to $5,000. For more information, contact the Housing and Community Services Agency of Lane County. lighten up BY RAFAEL ALDAVE A question to the 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court: Tell us again why corporations can avoid paying for contraception in their health-care plans if doing so would violate their sincerely held religious beliefs, but we mortals cannot avoid paying taxes to finance wars that violate ours? 6 July 3, 2014 • eugeneweekly.com PHOTO: J. NARRIN EUGENEANS FEATURED ON NAT GEO ’90S SERIES Vanilla Ice, Rob Lowe, Courtney Love: The list of 1990s icons interviewed for National Geo- graphic Channel’s three-night series The ’90s: The Last Great Decade? is as quirky and odd as that peculiar era of jelly shoes and grunge. The epi- sodes — which will be seen in 171 countries and aired in 45 languages — also include local videog- rapher Tim Lewis and former Eugenean Tim Ream as well as footage from their documentary of the Seattle World Trade Organization riots, Breaking the Spell: Anarchists, Eugene and the WTO. Lewis says the series, which airs starting Sun- day, July 6, handles the footage of the controversial 1999 WTO protests “really well,” instead of try- ing to demonize the protesters and anarchists and blame Eugene. Media at the time laid much of the blame for the riots on Eugene and its “black bloc” anarchists. Lewis says Nat Geo saw the footage in Break- ing the Spell, possibly as a result of the Oscar-nom- inated documentary If a Tree Falls in which Lewis EUGENE HUNGRY FOR FOOD SECURITY Eugene’s City Council will meet in September to talk about local food security — reliable access to healthy and nutritious food. “It’s kind of a multi-level problem,” says Deb Johnson-Shelton, Lane County Food Policy Coun- cil president. “The more quality food you make ac- cessible at more affordable prices, the healthier the nutritional environment is for everyone.” Food inse- curity is strongly correlated with household income, she says. Johnson-Shelton says local government can help by increasing the accessibility to small produce stands, like those outside of town on River Road, and educating youth and families on healthy cooking and eating practices. “We live in such a fertile area where there’s so many resources to deal with hunger,” she says. appears, and flew him down to San Francisco for interviews. Breaking the Spell, available from CrimethInc.com, chronicles the protests from the streets in the middle of the night-and-day action of “The Battle in Seattle,” as well as interviews and footage from Eugene. Nat Geo “didn’t make the anarchists look evil,” Lewis says. He and Ream also collaborated on an earlier film, Pickaxe, which documents the year- long Warner Creek forest protests outside Oakridge that involved many of those activists who went on to protest in Seattle. Lewis is currently at work on a documentary about the mining of Parvin Butte in Dexter. He says that All About Parvin: Voices from a Lost Val- ley will start coming out this fall as a series. In ad- dition to documenting the destruction of the scenic butte up until now, it will “parallel the action” of the ongoing controversy rather than come out three or four years later as typical documentaries do. The ’90s will also feature sections on the rise of Nirvana, the dot-com bubble, Viagra and the Clinton “sex scandal.” Go to channel. nationalgeographic.com for more information. — Camilla Mortensen “We are so well set to solve these problems.” Yet a motion to establish a food security task force failed during the council’s June 25 work session and the topic was put on the table for future discussion. City Councilor Alan Zelenka, who introduced the motion with Councilor Greg Evans, says tabling the discussion will likely cause the city to miss out on grant money to start the task force — between $75,000 and $150,000. Evans says he hopes to see an aggressive urban agriculture program that will allow the Willamette Valley to be self-sufficient and also grow food that could be marketed throughout Oregon, the North- west, nationally and internationally. “Eugene is poised to address an opportunity that has long been overdue,” Evans says. “We’ve been doing it with wine for years. Now we’re doing it with the microbrew … and I think that food is the next logical step for us.” A Lane County local food market analysis, done CONTINUED P. 8 >>>
