LET TERS
of the opulent against the majority.”
On the good side of local news, the Rights
of Local Community Self-Government
Charter Amendment has finally been
cleared by Lane County’s Circuit
Court out from under corporate-funded
opposition for the gathering of signatures.
Community Rights Lane County is now
looking for volunteers to move the Charter
Amendment toward the ballot.
No one will ever come knocking
on your door to give you your rights.
Like the suffragists, the abolitionists
and civil rights fighters of generations,
it will take work and unity. Join us at
communityrightslanecounty.org.
Eron King
Triangle Lake
KIDS PAY
Well, another school and testing year
is over. This year, Oregon started giving
standardized tests to kindergarten kids.
Apparently, you’re never too young for
data collection. And while California just
joined 29 other states in no longer giving
invalid, unfair high school exit exams,
Oregon still insists on them. More data.
Beyond the federal and state over-testing,
Eugene School District 4J administered 72
additional reading and math standardized
tests from kindergarten through fifth grade.
Wait, there’s more. Kids at three local low-
income middle schools may wind up taking
up to 36 more reading and math standardized
tests. Wow, up to 108 tests worth of data!
Confused about the use of Smarter
Balanced test scores, which come out after
students have left for summer? That’s
because they are really designed to score
teachers and schools — even though the
American Statistical Association says they
are worthless at doing that.
And weren’t the Common Core
curriculum and accompanying tests
invented to have a common comparison
between states? Guess what? Only 42 states
now adopt Common Core, with many more
having second thoughts, and only 30 states
now use the Common Core-related tests.
Aren’t the Common Core and
Smarter Balanced tests necessary to
fix education? Guess what? Recently,
more than 100 educational researchers
in California found no improvement in
educational quality or achievement gap
with Common Core and found the tests
lacking “validity, reliability and fairness.”
Meanwhile, corporations make bundles,
politicians and school boards pretend
they are doing something worthwhile and
educational testocrats get high-paying
jobs. Kids pay the price.
DESIGN MATTERS
Roscoe Caron
Eugene
GREAT SCANDAL
PREVENTABLE DEATHS
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has called the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) a
“cesspool of corruption” and a “snakepit
of Big Pharma lies.” Strong words for the
agency tasked with protecting the public
health, don’t you think?
Vaxxed:
From
Cover-up
to
Catastrophe explores one particularly heinous
cover-up, which came to light when Dr.
William Thompson, a lead research scientist
in the CDC vaccine division, divulged key
details to researcher Dr. Brian Hooker in a
series of recorded phone calls. Approximately
10,000 documents were thrown into a trashbin
that showed a clear link between the time of
administration of the MMR vaccine and an
increase in the rate of autism, particularly in
African-American males.
There is a reason why Robert De Niro
went on the Today show and called this
film “a must-see.” When government
agencies commit fraud, the American
taxpaying public deserves to know about it,
especially when it concerns the collective
health of our nation’s children.
I urge you to see this film while it is in
Eugene, and bring your friends and family.
This just could be one of the greatest
scandals of our time.
Jennifer Grafiada
Eugene
Suicide is one of the 10 leading causes
of death in the United States, and it’s
preventable. Nine out of 10 people who
die by suicide have a diagnosable mental
health condition, like depression, at the
time of their death. Together, we can help
people who struggle to seek help, improve
the quality of their lives and stop this tragic
loss of life.
My family has had to grieve the losses of
three men who lost their fight with suicidal
ideation. I personally live with bipolar
disorder and have spent my adult life trying
to advocate for myself and others who are
trying to find happiness living with mental
illness. I volunteer with the American
Foundation for Suicide Prevention to raise
awareness and teach our communities ways
all of us can help to prevent suicide.
I will be traveling to Washington,
D.C., next month to tell my members of
Congress how important this issue is to me.
It is important to me because it affected me
and my family directly.
Please take five minutes right now to
call your U.S. representative and senators
at 202-224-3121 and tell them to make
mental health a national priority by funding
suicide prevention research today.
Join me in this fight to #stopsuicide.
Together we can make a difference.
Sara K. Scofield
Eugene
BY JERRY DIE THEL M
Moving the Pieces of the Puzzle
A BETTER PLAN FOR THE COUNTY COURTHOUSE AND CITY HALL
Y
ou know those puzzles where you push one piece out of the way in
order to place another?
It all started out by pushing the old block-sized Eugene City Hall
out of the way to make way for the new. Putting a new four-story,
30,000 square foot City Hall on the southwest corner quarter of that
old block left behind three quarters of a blank block to fill. The plan was to reserve
the northwest quarter behind the proposed new City Hall for a future Phase II,
60,000 square foot City Office building so that the city would eventually occupy
the whole western half of the block, leaving the eastern half open for another use.
So what might one do with that other open half a block of land downtown?
Enter the “switch.” Lane County could have the eastern half of the old City Hall
block for a new Lane County Courthouse. In trade, the city would receive the lost
North Park Block and the half block of land along 7th Avenue buried for the past 50
years under the “butterfly” parking lot. That in turn would make possible a restored
North Park Block and expanded site for the Saturday and Farmers Markets, including
the possibility of an indoor market building. So what was not to like?
From the county point of view, it made much better sense to build the new
County Courthouse on the western side of the now open block so it could better
continue to connect to its Public Services Building. But that would move the
proposed new City Hall building further down 8th Avenue to the corner of 8th and
High. The Phase II City Office Building meant to consolidate city services would
then end up behind it on the corner of 7th and High Street — no one’s first choice
location for downtown central city services.
And how far out was the County Courthouse project — five years? And what
were the realistic prospects that the city would ever build its Phase II office building
behind the new City Hall anyway? The cost of the 30,000 square foot Phase I
building has already climbed from $15 million to a controversial $25 million. A
Phase II 60,000 square foot office building could be expected to cost at least twice
that much or more by the time it got built.
6
June 16, 2016 • eugeneweekly.com
Enter a different switch?
New planning has shown that a new consolidated County Courthouse will need
to be 250,000 square feet and that a best configuration and fit would require the
entire vacated City Hall block. But where, then, would the new City Hall building
go? Building the large new County Courthouse on the butterfly site would be a
possibility, but that would foreclose forever any North Park Block or Farmers
Market aspirations. And it would leave the new City Hall building sitting lonely
on its 8th Avenue corner wistfully awaiting a Phase II and some other compatible
use that might never come.
The answer to the puzzle:
The county gets the whole block of the old City Hall site. The city moves its
four-story, 30,000 square foot City Hall to the one-half block site at north end of
the butterfly parking lot along 7th Avenue. The old 60,000 square foot (four floors
of 15,000 square feet) County Courthouse is in time remodeled (and its steel frame
upgraded to present-day seismic requirements) for one-quarter of the cost of a
new Phase II City office building. And, if desired, the two city buildings could be
connected by a skyway over Oak Street.
The North Park Block is restored and becomes the home of a long-awaited
improved market environment. For the next several years, the county plants solar-
collecting trees and parks on its warehoused block, and with the best of good
fortune has a brand new building in place when the world comes to visit in 2021.
Because it no longer needs to be courthouse secure, the whole Oak Street
side of the Public Services Building is opened up to the Park Blocks, igniting the
process of turning the Park Blocks’ buildings’ backsides into front sides all around.
The new City Hall sits poised above its restored Park Block and Market civic
center.
And we all lived happily ever after.
Jerry Diethelm is a Eugene architect, landscape architect and planning and urban design consultant.