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Briefs: Hospital Hope
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Exclusion
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News: Active
Inerts -- What pesticide labels don't tell you might be information
you'd like to know.
Happening
People: Melinda Holben, teacher.
Hospital
Hope
The city council voted this week
to study options for locating Sacred Heart hospital downtown and for
a quick analysis of the relative costs and impacts of a downtown site
versus a site in far north Eugene.
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Slant
You Name It!
--Nobody at the
UO has agreed to change the name of the Grayson building, but
somebody should. Jeffrey Grayson, its namesake, has been charged
with one of the largest swindles by an investment firm manager
in U.S. history. A court-appointed receiver wants the UO to
return the more than $800,000 that bought the gross gold letters
across the front of the former law school.
Any suggestions for a new name? A retired history
professor whose office is in the building suggests the "Rogue."
Send us your ideas and we'll give you some space.
--Another Eugene building in search of a name
is the new federal courthouse. Lots of energy already is going
toward the "Wayne L. Morse Federal Building." That's safer than
naming it for a living personage. If you like the Morse moniker,
tell Congressman DeFazio or Senator Wyden.
--Isn't "the Shedd" a great name for what is
sure to be a great center when Ginevra and Jim Ralph finish
turning the First Baptist Church into an arts institute in downtown
Eugene? It will be named after her great-grandfather, John Graves
Shedd.
--Another new name on the street is The Eugene
Grassroots Journal, successor to The Other Paper.
Coming out six times a year, the Journal will be "reporting
on progressive social change, for a more just and caring society,"
the masthead says. Lynn Reichman is the editor. The July/August
issue is out there at 75 locations.
--This community deserves the names of the "Gang
of 9," who continue to run ugly quarter-page political ads in
the R-G. They should be registered as a political action
committee with donor records open for public scrutiny. Meanwhile,
anyone care to speculate on which pro-sprawl characters are
members of the Gang? Send us your guesses and we'll give you
some space.
You name them!
Slant includes short opinion pieces and rumor-chasing
notes compiled by the EW staff. Heard any good rumors lately?
Call the editor at 484-0519. |
The two studies will be done in about two months.
A public input session will be held on July 24th.
Calls and letters to the city favor a downtown site
over the North Eugene site by a margin of about two to one, according
to a staff tally. Downtown supporters say moving the hospital and
its thousands of employees north will damage the struggling city core
while creating unlivable and expensive sprawl and traffic congestion
on the edge of town. Critics also fear that if ambulances have to
drive miles through traffic to reach the new hospital, the healthcare
of the patients will suffer. Only one of the eight city councilors,
Pat Farr, has said he prefers to move the hospital north.
But at Monday night's meeting, Mayor Jim Torrey threatened
to veto any council effort to block the hospital's move to a North
Eugene site by rezoning the property. The council had voted to study
the possible rezoning last month. "I will do my very best to find
three city councilors to sustain such a veto," Torrey said.
Councilors Farr and Gary Papé said they also
oppose rezoning. Councilor Nathanson, the likely swing vote on the
issue, said she has second thoughts about rezoning. "What we did [last
month] isn't working very well yet," she said.
But even without the rezoning, the hospital will likely
need the council majority's support to build on the North Eugene site.
The hospital's preferred design would require buying more land that
would have to be rezoned by a vote of at least four councilors and
the mayor.
Torrey repeated hospital CEO Alan Yordy's threat that
Yordy may move the facility to the Gateway area of Springfield if
the council doesn't vote the way he wants.
But moving out of Eugene may be unlikely. Such a move
abandoning Eugene would leave Oregon's second largest city without
a hospital and face fierce opposition.
Councilor David Kelly said that moving the hospital
near McKenzie Willamette could create a regional healthcare monopoly.
"The most likely result would be an end to McKenzie Willamette and
therefore an end to healthcare competition in the area."
Meanwhile, two downtown options appear to be gaining
favor in the community and on the council. One option that staff will
study is building a new hospital around the hospital's clinic on Willamette
St. Councilors voted to have staff study locating the hospital in
the most suitable part of a 12-block rectangle bordered by 11th and
14th avenues and Oak and Lincoln Streets.
Citizens for a Hospital in the Heart of Eugene, a
group including local doctors and architects, proposed a similar option
last month. The clinic site on Willamette Street is surrounded by
parking lots and other underutilized land and is only a block away
from the downtown bus station, the group says. The site would promote
livability as opposed to sprawling traffic and give a needed boost
to downtown.
The hospital has not entirely ruled out the possibility
of the clinic option. City Manager Jim Johnson said he spoke with
Yordy this week. "This does have complications but the [hospital]
board is willing to look at all options."
Another option discussed by councilors is a reconfigured
expansion of the current Hilyard St. site. Councilor Bonny Bettman
said she'd like staff to study the option of the hospital expanding
one block to the west to Ferry Street while using a block south of
13th for construction staging. --AP
Nader
in Portland
Joined by buddies Eddie Vedder, Jello
Biafra and Danny Glover, Ralph Nader will attend the kickoff event
for the Green Party's "People Have the Power Tour" August 4 in Portland.
The event will feature an afternoon of teach-ins and
workshops on such topics as labor, the environment, campaign finance
reform and taxes. After the afternoon workshops that are designed
to teach people about the issues and how to get involved in direct
action, the evening's events will feature music and a large rally
"to get people fired up to start doing something about these things,"
says Steering Committee member Jason Morgan. Thousands of people are
expected to attend.
The events begin at 11 am with the rally beginning
at 6 pm at the Rose Garden in Portland. Tix are $10/General Admission
and $8/Students. Call 503-223-2790 to reserve a ticket and for more
information. --AS
Eugene Exclusion
Eugene is heading toward expanding
its downtown exclusion ordinance for people accused of a crime on
the pedestrian mall to cover the entire city, city councilor David
Kelly says.
"It will simply become a Eugene exclusion ordinance,"
Kelly warns. The city council is considering a four-fold increase
in the size of its downtown exclusion area. But Kelly says that the
expansion will create a slippery slope toward covering more territory
within the city.
Currently the area includes only the three block pedestrian
mall from Oak to Charnelton streets, a few adjacent alleys and the
two park blocks. The police have proposed expanding the area to include
an eight block area from Oak to Lincoln between 8th Avenue and the
south side of 10th Avenue. The exclusion area has strong support from
downtown businesses and appears headed for approval by the council
on July 23.
But police reform and civil liberties supporters have
criticized the current exclusion area because they say it allows officers
to ban homeless people and kids accused of petty crimes from a part
of the city. The officers can issue an exclusion order even before
a trial -- an unconstitutional power, critics charge.
Michelle Perkins, who works with homeless, underclass
and drug addicted clients, testified that those she tries to help
will suffer due to the proposed law. "If you care more about people
than businesses, which hasn't been shown so far, you won't expand
the exclusion ordinance."
Kelly said he recently tried to convince the council
to use a more long-term approach to the street crime problem by increasing
funding for drug treatment during the budget process. Kelly said he
had little support. "There was dead silence," he said. --AP
Durning
at Da Vinci
Noted author and Seattle environmental
leader Alan Durning is scheduled to make a free public presentation
from 7:30 to 9 pm Thursday, July 19, at LaSells Stewart Center at
OSU in Corvallis. The event is part of the 13th annual da Vinci Days
Festival, a non-profit community event that celebrates art, science
and technology (www.davinci-days.org).
Durning is founder and executive director of Northwest
Environment Watch in Seattle. NEW is a non-profit research and communication
center that promotes a sustainable economy and way of life in the
Pacific Northwest.
His presentation is entitled: "Salmon, Sprawl, and
Aikido Politics: How can the Pacific Northwest Create a Way of Life
That Will Last?" He will share his martial arts inspired study of
the "aikido moves" that can be made toward sustainability. This presentation
will be sign-language interpreted.
Durning is author of numerous books about sustainable
economy and way of life including, Green Collar Jobs: Working in
the New Northwest Tax Shift, and The Car and the City: 24 Steps
to Safe Streets and Healthy Communities. He is lead author of
This Place on Earth, 2001: Guide to a Sustainable Northwest.
Back to Top
Active
Inerts
What
pesticide labels don't tell you might be information you'd like to
know.
By
Orna Izakson
When you go to the store to buy a pesticide --
for your garden or for your farm -- there's one thing you'll
see on the label and one set of things you won't. The first is the
active ingredient, the part that kills whatever critter, weed or mold
you're after. The second, what you won't see, is the rest of the formula.
Those chemicals are lumped together by the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency and pesticide manufacturers under the category of "inert" ingredients,
which have been protected from consumer's eyes for decades as "trade
secrets."
Activists have spent years trying to look at the rest
of the ingredients in pesticides, arguing that the chemicals there
can be as potent as the active ingredient, or even more so. In 1996
a federal court awarded the Eugene-based Northwest Coalition for Alternatives
to Pesticides (NCAP) the right to find out about inerts in several
common pesticides, including the familiar Round-Up, Velpar, Garlon
and others. The group has since filed hundreds of requests under the
Freedom of Information Act, and what they found came as little surprise.
Caroline Cox of NCAP says one of the 19 inert ingredients
in the household product Round-Up Ready to Use is considered to be
possibly carcinogenic to humans. The ingredient caused bladder tumors
in studies with male rats, she says. But while those studies are enough
to show the chemical is carcinogenic for the animals, it doesn't definitively
tie it to the same effect in humans.
Garlon, often used for killing poison oak or roadside
weeds, includes one inert ingredient that caused tumors in adrenal
glands, another that causes birth defects including cleft palate,
and petroleum solvents that Cox says can damage the nervous system,
kidneys and eyes.
Two other studies showed that inerts can be quite
active. One study, Cox explains, looked at the effects of Round-Up
on the body's process of creating the sex hormone testosterone. The
researchers studied how one protein moves molecules to the site where
they are turned into the hormone. The scientists found that while
glyphosate -- Round-Up's active ingredient -- didn't inhibit
that process on its own, the full formula did.
"Since they saw the effect with Round-Up and not with
glyphosate," Cox says, "they concluded that it was the inert ingredients"
that caused the effect.
A second study found that the neurological effects
on rats of the agricultural pesticide Gaucho lasted twice as long
in the full formula as they did with its active ingredient alone.
"This goes to show the kind of impact that the inert
ingredients can have and how little we really know about that," Cox
says.
Terry Witt, executive director of Oregonians for Food
and Shelter, says naming specific inerts on a pesticide label is pointless
at best.
"It's an unnecessary cost that has absolutely no benefit,"
he says. "Unless you are a Ph.D. toxicologist, you're not really going
to know what all this information means. My guess is you're lucky
if one out of 1,000 people actually understood what that information
would mean, and probably one out of 100,000 would actually care."
Witt says additional labeling requirements would "be
an arbitrary set of constraints clearly designed to increase the cost
and compliance burden of pesticide manufacturers.
"The biggest argument they cannot overcome in all
of their rhetoric is the fact that there is no other pest tool that
compares in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and even safety, to
pesticides," Witt explains. "So what they have to do is come up with
a mechanism by which they can create doubt and increase the regulatory
burden either on the manufacturer-registrant or the user."
NCAP made the news last fall when it initiated another
lawsuit against the EPA. In that case, NCAP argued that EPA was taking
too long to consider a 1998 proposal to change pesticide-labeling
rules to require that companies name all the inert ingredients in
a particular formula. The organization has since been joined in that
suit by the Attorneys General of 11 states, including New York, Alaska,
Arizona, Minnesota, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, as well
as Guam.
Oregon, NCAP's home state, is conspicuously absent
from the list.
"The Oregon Attorney General's office just has not
really been interested," Cox says. "They didn't give us a specific
reason, but it hasn't been something they wanted to be involved with."
More than a month after asking the AG's office why
it didn't get involved in the suit, Eugene Weekly also did
not get a definitive answer.
"We may not have seen the request [to join the suit],
or may not have had time to look at it," says spokesman Kevin Neally.
The AG's office usually doesn't join in on such suits for several
reasons, including advice from state agencies, a request from the
governor, or because the quality of the suit does not meet the state's
standards, Neally says.
Back to Top
 
Melinda Holben
After her long strange trip (98 Grateful
Dead concerts) was over, Pennsylvania native Melinda Holben went back
to school at Cal State-Sacramento for a teaching degree. She taught
for a year in Smith River, Cal. It was "beautiful but boring --
I came to Eugene looking for culture," she says. "I found culture,
community and friends."
In the summer of 1998, Holben "sat down with the telephone
book" and tracked down a teaching job in rural Lorane. "I teach fifth
and sixth grades in a little red schoolhouse," she says. "I had 28
kids this year." Holben brings her class into Eugene to check out
the ballet, the symphony, and the galleries. They traveled to Portland
to watch Tibetan monks deconstruct a sand mandala, and they camped
overnight at Saragosa.
"Melinda is a phenomenal teacher -- she's a breath
of fresh air," says colleague Georgann Squire. "She takes kids places
and brings the real world, people and experiences, into the classroom."
At the end of the school year, Holben and her class put on an art
show. "It's like a vaudeville performance -- this year we did
Beatles songs," she explains. "Kids are great -- always willing
to play with you."
-- Paul Neevel
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