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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 31, 2017)
LET TERS HOUSING HYPOCRISY In “Say Adieu to fees for ADUs” (EW, Aug. 17), Terri Harding continues Eu- gene planner’s “alternative facts” cam- paign against single-family homeowners. Harding claims the Eugene City Council “passed some amendments to our zoning code in 2013” that accidentally made sec- ondary dwelling units (SDUs) more diffi- cult to build. Actually, the City Council approved Ordinance 20526 in 2014 to provide pro- tections for single-family neighborhoods around the University of Oregon. As Hard- ing well knows, the amendments were no “accident.” These new development standards arose from the Infill Compatibility Stan- dards Task Team on which Harding served. Community members spent months de- veloping standards to help ensure future SDUs would be compatible with their sur- roundings. Meanwhile, Eliza Kashinsky spouts off about “affordable” housing, yet she bought a single-family home on a 9,000 square- foot lot in the Jefferson-Westside Special Area Zone. The S-JW zone permits two full-size houses on Kashinsky’s lot, and S- JW’s flexibility enables Kashinsky to build another house for $100 to $135 per square foot, radically less than most new housing costs. Nevertheless, Kashinsky whines that “[t]he complexities and limitations in the code are making it very complex.” She plans to rent the house for $800 to $900 month, returning more than 10 per- cent on her investment. If Kashinsky is truly “less about making money” and re- ally “want[s] to help someone else have a home,” she should cut the rent to $500 or $600. In the end, it’s just another example that so much preaching about affordable housing is more often about making a buck than solving the housing crisis. Paul Conte Eugene THE REAL SOLUTION? What does Naomi Strawser suggest we do with the “known neo-Nazis [liv- ing] comfortably within our boundaries” LET’S MAKE A DEAL [“Setting the Terms After Charlottesville,” Aug. 17]? Seize their property by eminent domain? Criminalize their thought and speech so we can lock them up? Hound them into fleeing? Form vigilante mobs to kill them outright? Obviously, neo-Nazis are already de- tested by the vast majority of people living in Eugene. The counter-march to the Hate is Not Welcome rally, if EW is to be trust- ed, amounted to a single Trump supporter holding up a Trump/Pence campaign sign. By that measure, the white supremacists are outnumbered in Eugene by about 1,500 to 1. Whatever the actual ratio, it’s clear that white supremacists cannot feel reasonably comfortable in expressing their views here. They’re not quoted or referenced approv- ingly in any paper, ever. They never have a voice in any public decision. They are not welcome to espouse their views anywhere outside their own company. They are, in a word, marginalized. So, I have to wonder what Strawser is suggesting. Does “living comfortably” equal being allowed to live at all? Is the price of being reckoned an ally destroying the legacy of free speech and freedom of, and from, religion in this country? Do we have to drive out and eliminate the white supremacists, who are already marginal- ized and despised, just to prove that we’re not with them? If that is the price, don’t you know that you can count me out. Timothy Shaw Eugene MARIJUANA CARPETBAGGERS I would like to express my support for the will of Creswell voters (“Pot Petition,” EW, July 27). Although pot smokers were able to change the laws, communities like Creswell were given the chance to opt out. They did. People like One Gro’s Mike Arnold have for decades dissed those in the coun- terculture as dirty, smelly, drug addled hip- pies, but now they want to exploit the hip- pie culture of pot, but “sell it in a way to not market it to potheads.” I’m offended when non-pot-smoking B Y B O B WA R R E N A River Runs Through Us THE MCKENZIE AND THE SYMPHONY MAKING MUSIC TOGETHER I like to float rivers. That’s a huge understatement. There is almost nothing that I would rather be doing than floating on a river. There is something magical about spending days on end moving at the pace of a river, moving with the current. It’s called river time. It’s slow and it’s quiet. That’s a big part of it, the slow quiet. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find quiet these days. But I have always found it on the river. It’s the best vacation I can think of. And it is one of the only escapes from the deluge of electronic devices. The river changes your attitude. It slows you down. Generally and thankfully there is often no phone or data reception on the river. For this brief moment in time you can be with other people who are not staring at a device. The longer you are on the river, the deeper you go into the experience. After 15 or 16 days floating in the Grand Canyon, you are not the same person any longer. You are in a personal space you really cannot get to any other way. And you will have been perma- nently changed by the experience. You come out at the bottom of that canyon, or almost any multi- day river trip, a different person. On commercial trips I’ve been with a group of total strangers, not knowing a sin- gle other person. Somewhere downstream a miraculous transformation occurs. The people I’d never met before are now friends. We have come together around this common experience of being on river time. Wonderful things can hap- pen on a river, if you just go with the flow. My wife Mary Maggs and I had that kind of experience recently on a very special float on our very own McKenzie River. We were floating with the staffs of the McKenzie River Trust and the Eugene Symphony. This was a day float, from the 4 A ugust 31, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com McKenzie River Trust’s Finn Rock boat launch to the Helfrich landing. Short but wonderful. It was a day of bonding for the two dedicated staffs working to create a collabora- tive effort to connect both our natural and cultural landscapes: the McKenzie River Trust, working to protect and restore this river that runs through us, and the Eugene Symphony, working to enhance our cultural home waters with the music that nur- tures and inspires us. This initial confluence of staffs will culminate with a symphony concert at the Hult Center next February. This will be a celebration of art, culture and our natural heritage. The symphony will perform Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. But it will be the four seasons of The McKenzie River. The concert will be a multi-media event with big screen photo and video images of the McKenzie River through the seasons while the symphony performs Vivaldi. There is a natural connection between the arts and the environment that is part of who we are as a community. The McKenzie River Trust and the Eugene Symphony are embarking on this collaborative effort to enhance and expand on that natural connection. It only makes sense to connect nature with culture. The McKenzie River Trust protects and restores the river that runs through us. The Eugene Symphony, as a world-class arts organization, protects and restores the spirit that resides within us. The McKenzie River is one of our natural treasures. It provides us with our drink- ing water, unparalleled outdoor recreation, rare wildlife habitats and makes a signifi- cant contribution to our local economy. The entire run of wild Chinook salmon in the Willamette system migrates up the McKenzie, a little more than 1,000 fish. The Eugene Symphony is a community treasure, a nationally acclaimed cultural institu- tion right here in our community. It creates and performs major musical events that attract world-class performance artists and help to define who we are. This collaboration can be the beginning of a longer, growing partnership that connects our cultural and natural resource communities. We are nurtured by the arts, our culture and our natural environment. There is already a natural connection be- tween these communities of interest. It just makes sense to connect them in ways to enhance, support, and restore the arts, while protecting and restoring the river that runs through us all. Bob Warren retired in 2012 as the regional business development officer for Business Oregon for Lane, Lincoln, Linn and Benton Counties. He is currently a member of the board of directors for McKenzie River Trust.
