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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 13, 2016)
NEWS • The David Minor Theater celebrates its 8th anniversary with a special viewing event “Beer and Beyond” 6:45 pm and 9:15 pm Saturday, Oct 22. The theater says, “An evening of celebrations including discounted movie tickets and a special back-to- back screening of the new Star Trek Beyond epic are planned.” Tickets are $4. For more info, go to davidminortheater.com. • At the Oct. 8 Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Eugene’s Alesong Brewing & Blending tells us it earned a gold medal in the “brett beer” category for its “Touch of Brett” saison. “GABF is the largest commercial beer competition in the world and recognizes the most outstanding beers produced in the United States,” Alesong says. The 2016 GABF competition winners were selected by an international panel of 264 expert judges from the record number of 7,227 entries received from 1,752 U.S. breweries across 96 categories. LANE COUNTY AREA SPRAY SCHEDULE Weyerhaeuser Company, 746-2511, plans to aerially apply urea fertilizer to 684.1 acres south of Vida and the McKenzie River near West Fork Deer Creek and tributaries and to East Fork Deer Creek tributaries. See ODF notification 2016-771-11891, call Brian Dally at 541-726-3588 with questions. Compiled by Gary Hale, Forestland Dwellers, 541-342-8332, forest- landdwellers.org. POLLUTION UPDATE The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) fined Dorena Hydro $11,400 Sept. 26 for various Clean Water Act violations associated with reduced dissolved oxygen levels in the Row River caused by the operation of Dorena Dam Hydroelectric Project. The violations occurred in April, when the Row River is designated as an active salmon and steelhead spawning area. Starting sometime in March, one of the monitoring sensors at the project indicated a need for maintenance; however, it appears that Dorena Hydro ignored this information, leading to a malfunction and to illegally low oxygen levels in the river. Dorena Hydro also failed to properly notify DEQ of the malfunction and failed to take the project offline as required in the event of such violations. It appears that Dorena Hydro is owned by ACD Hydro, a Delaware corporation that is not registered with Oregon’s Corporation Division. BY KIANNA CABUCO CAMPUS LIFE COSTLY FOR OUT-OF-STATE STUDENTS E ach year, tuition and fees have increased at the Uni- versity of Oregon. Meanwhile, student loan debt has reached $1 tril- lion nationally, “becoming the second-largest con- sumer obligation after mortgages,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For out-of-state students, jumping through the hoops necessary to become an Oregon resident can save thou- sands of dollars in student debt. This past year, undergraduate tuition went up from $189 to $198 per credit for residents and from $672 to $702 for non-residents. Add in school fees, and a full-time student taking 12 credits as a resident of Oregon will pay $2,993.25 per term. For a non-resident, that same 12 credits plus fees will cost $9,041.25, and that’s with the bare minimum of credits to qualify as a full-time student. Brian Stanley, residency information officer at the UO, helps students through the process of gaining residency and determines whether a student qualifies for an in-state or out-of-state tuition rate. According to him, there are two ways students can gain residency: First, if a student is a dependent, his or her par- ents have to move to Oregon and live there for a year be- fore they can become residents. The student would then qualify as a resident. If students are independent and providing more than half of their own support, they have to live in Oregon for 12 months, take eight credits or fewer per quarter and do something other than go to school, such as work or volun- teer. “When you boil it down it’s about — can you show presence and can you show a purpose primarily other than education?” Stanley says. “I don’t determine whether the state thinks of someone as a resident for things like paying taxes and getting a driv- ers license,” he continues. “What I’m trying to determine is whether a person meets the narrow requirements that it takes to get the benefit of paying at an in-state tuition rate.” Stanley says he often hears of students receiving mis- information about residency from peers or well-meaning professors, but if students are interested in the requirements for gaining residency, they should set up an appointment with him, he adds. “There are a couple of organizations out there that purport to provide advice to students about how they can establish residency for a fee,” Stanley says. “We feel very strongly that students can get all the same information that they’d get from those organizations from us for free.” He also warns that if students are trying to “game the system” in some way and they’re caught, they could be written up for a conduct viola- tion. “It’s really up to them if they want to jump the hurdles to get that benefit,” Stanley says. Gus Morris is a journalism major at the UO going into his third year and is finishing the process of gaining residency after moving here from California. He says he only needs to finish the paperwork. “It was definitely not as hard as I thought it was going to be,” Morris says. The school itself has numerous ways stu- dents can find and understand the requirements for becoming a resident of Oregon, he adds. “You can definitely still go to school while you’re doing it,” Morris says. “You just have to be careful.” Morris says the cost of his junior year and senior year com- bined will equal the amount he paid for his freshman year. Like Morris, Elle Sullivan dedicated her second year of college to gaining residency. Sullivan is going into her fourth year of college and fin- ished gaining residency a little more than a year ago. Origi- nally from central Indiana, she had planned to study marine biology and journalism. While going through the residency process, Sullivan took classes online and was also dual enrolled at Lane Community College. On top of that, she worked at the UO Outdoor Pro- gram and at Noisette Pastry Kitchen in downtown Eugene. “In order to convince my parents to let me go to an expen- sive out-of-state school,” Sullivan says, “I worked out a deal where I’d be responsible for anything that would cost more than what it would cost for me to stay in state.” Sullivan says that when she first saw the requirements on- line, they seemed terrifying and impossible. But, she says, she found the process manageable with some guidance. “It was hard and it sucked,” she adds, “but it made me grateful to be able to come back and focus on school full- time.” Through a combination of gaining residency, scholar- ships and her parents’ help, she says she hopes to graduate debt-free. 12 CHARLES DENSON BY PAUL NEEVEL HAPPENING PEOPLE Doug Quirke/Oregon Clean Water Action Project October 13, 2016 • eugeneweekly.com Though he was born in Eugene, Charles Denson moved to Silver City, Nevada, with his parents when he was 6. “We came back to visit family in the summer and for weddings,” he says. “I moved back in 2006 after high school and got started at Lane Community College.” He began to volunteer with campus groups addressing environmental and social justice issues, and he traveled to Copenhagen in 2009 with a group of young people to lobby U.S. delegates to the United Nations negotiations on climate change. “It was my first involvement with protests and direct actions,” he says. Also in 2009, he helped organize Power Shift, an environmental conference at the University of Oregon, and he became acquainted with the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC) through its workshops and trainings for activists on complex legal issues. Denson graduated from the UO in 2012 with a degree in political science and then spent two years as a field organizer for the Democratic Party in Arizona and Iowa. Early in 2015, he started work at CLDC as membership director. “Now I’m associate director,” he says. “My job is mostly outreach, event planning, fundraising, all the non-lawyer stuff. In less than two years, we’ve worked on a lot of great cases and trained over 5,000 people.” CLDC will present Theater of Dissent, an evening of benefit dinner theater, 6 to 9 pm Thursday, Oct. 27, at the Wesley Center, 2520 Harris Street in Eugene. CLDC lawyers Lauren Regan and Cooper Brinson will portray themselves in a mock court scene, defending activists arrested at a pipeline project. Purchase tickets for $50 and read about real-life CLDC court cases at cldc.org.
