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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (June 2, 2016)
LET TERS EVICTION LAWS As the property manager for an intentional community, I am interested in the potential 90-day no-fault eviction law. Oregon already has generous renters’ rights, including the following: 1. Squatters who live in the same location for more than two weeks have all the rights of paying renters, even if they have never signed a contract or paid a cent. 2. If you live somewhere for less than a year, your no-fault eviction comes with a 30-day notice. 3. After a year of residency, you are legally entitled to a 60-day notice. I always educate our renters on this score, because most don’t know their rights. 4. If you don’t leave at the end of the 30 or 60 days, your landlord must evict you through a court process that often takes another month (or several months). 5. Your landlord is not allowed to take your belongings. If you abandon your belongings, you are supposed to receive a VIEWPOINT 30-day notice to remove your belongings, after which the landlord has the right to sell or throw away (but not keep) your abandoned stuff. There are many legitimate reasons why a landowner would evict a tenant, including personality clashes in cases where landlord and tenant live together. Many times we have had occasion to use no-fault evictions, usually because the tenant cannot get along well with other residents. Money is not the only interaction between landlord and tenant. Portland’s 90-day eviction law recognizes this concern by exempting situations where the tenant lives in the landlord’s home. In that case, the usual 30 days before one year, 60 days after one year rule applies. If Eugene makes the same exemption, I will support the change to a 90-day no-fault eviction. Kara Huntermoon Heart-Culture Farm Community Eugene CLIMATE UPDATE At the climate recovery ordinance update on May 18, Eugene City Council discussed with experts its strategy to contain the worsening of our climate. Replacement of incandescent lights in streets with LEDs made sense because of the energy to be saved. Natural gas was proposed as source of energy in the area. Methane (natural gas) burns cleaner than coal and biomass, but is by no means ideal. Its primary source is the notorious “fracking” which pollutes our dwindling supply of fresh water. No reuse of old light bulbs for poorer communities was offered. Instead the less efficient light sources will be recycled for their minimal metal contents. The elephant in the room, the source of our energy, was completely neglected. Hydro, which diverts rivers, an unexplained biodiesel fuel, which was just developed, and the already mentioned fracked gas are some of our projected electricity and heating sources. Absolutely no mention LETTERS POLICY: We welcome letters on all topics and will print as many as space allows, with priority given to timely local issues. Please limit length to 200 words and include your address and phone number for our files. Email to letters@eugeneweekly.com, fax to 484-4044 or mail to 1251 Lincoln, Eugene 97401. BY TIM HILTON Cultural Destruction THOUGHTS ON EUGENE CITY HALL FROM SPRINGFIELD M ay was National Preservation Month. I’m a little late writing this, as I’ve been so distracted with the elections and gardening. I’m also still peeved by that hatchet job on Springfield EW recently published, so writing this got sidetracked. But, if I could now hold your attention for a moment to celebrate the completion of 50 years since the National Trust for Historic Preservation became a national project. Now is a good time to look back at our local successes and failures, and to look forward to the role preservation has in the future and give credit where credit is due. Well, that’s what I started to write, but once I came to the assessment of the primary local “failure” for the preservation world, I realized that it was so heinous that I could not allow the names associated with local preservation successes to be seen in print with the following cast of characters. No one likes to dwell on failure, but sometimes there are lessons to be learned. Certainly there is one tax-funded act of public vandalism that stands above all others: the demolition last year of Eugene’s City Hall. I won’t go on about how it has turned into a giant bait-and-switch fiasco that is blowing up all over retiring Mayor Kitty Piercy’s legacy. But she, councilors Alan Zelenka, Greg Evans, George Poling, Claire Syrett and Chris Pryor — with the advice of City Manager Jon Ruiz, the city’s architects and consultant Rowell Brokaw Architects — voted in favor of demolishing the nationally award-winning, long neglected City Hall complex, with mayoral candidate and Councilor Mike Clark, Councilor Betty Taylor and retiring Councilor George Brown dissenting. 10 was made of solar, wind and tidal energy. Councilor Betty Taylor pointed to the need of not just bicycle lanes, but a way to protect these green locomotion means from theft. Chris Pryor and the other councilors said that changes upon Eugene’s citizenry that will cause stress are not planned nor desired. The world population by the projected timeline (2030) might grow by at least another billion. If we don’t diminish our CO2 output and fix it in the ground with vegetation now, we’ll be experiencing worse, uncontrollable hardships. The need to use fossil fuels for transitioning to renewables is key. David Ivan Piccioni Eugene June 2, 2016 • eugeneweekly.com In my more forgiving moments I understand how, being mere philistines and political trend-chasers, the city councilors might fall into such a blunder. But the failure of the professionals — City Manager Ruiz, the city’s architects and consultants — to misrepresent the total cost of the new project, weighed against proposed re-use of the existing publicly-owned and already-paid-for structure, verges on malpractice. Only ISIL rivals the present Eugene City Council and its advisors in cultural destruction at the scale of last year. Seriously. And for what? A soon-to-be neglected, uninspired developer’s glass-box-in-a- parking-lot. It will garner no accolades for civic improvement because there is no vision or public support. This reckless and wasteful act embodies the antithesis of the preservation and sustainability ethos. This disaster needs to be held up as an emblem of how not to develop a city. These leaders should be the last people that Eugene residents look to when future opportunities for development present themselves. Any development policies these officials have signed off on while holding office should be immediately reviewed by members of the press and public to consider their reversal (MUPTE, Kesey Square). Not only is this an architectural and urbanist issue, but it is also a basic economic one. The replacement price for the covered parking that was destroyed along with the former, already-paid-for City Hall is estimated at about $4 million. The demolition cost is coming in at $2 million. That is $6 million of value spent to get a clean, fenced-off city block of gravel — $6 million of public treasure destroyed or spent with only an empty site to show for it. The people involved with this project would not recognize “green design,” preservation tools or sustainable practices if they came up and slapped the councilors and city manager on their faces. People have said, “It’s time to move forward and forget about past mistakes.” I say it’s time to look at past mistakes before moving forward. In fact, the past is filled with lessons that, had it been respected, might have avoided the present situation. Preservation, adaptive re-use, conservation and restoration are distinct tools in the development toolbox. Unfortunately, it has taken 50 years for most communities to utilize these tools because for so long it was difficult to quantify their intrinsic value. Often they are decried as an obstruction, anti-progress and certain to guarantee a long and expensive permit process for development and construction. These red herrings have proved mistaken across the country, where popular destination retail and residential properties are located in redeveloped historic areas and, in the face of development, those locals have streamlined the permit process. Adaptive re-use has changed the face of American cities from coast to coast. Growing out of real world experiences in protecting historic structures has come the realization that these same principles could apply to present problems faced by the building industry. The same rationale used to show the value in re-using old buildings can, by adopting re-usable models for new construction, remove demolition from the equation. For example: When we build new buildings such as parking garages (a badly needed commodity today) with an eye to easy conversion into life- work, hospitality or cultural spaces (badly needed commodities tomorrow), we remove a great amount of waste and spent energy from the system. It is reported that 80 percent of landfill waste and 80 percent of expended energy are spent in areas related to construction. These are huge numbers. If we are to have a sustainable future, these numbers have to be tamed. Planned adaptive re-use is a very good tool to make large gains in reducing future waste and future energy. Tim Hilton has been the chair of the Springfield Historic Commission, but he is writing as a private citizen.
