Register-Guard letters and op-eds

update: November 2022

The R-G has stopped publishing letters to the editor and op-eds as a cost cutting move by their parent company. They offer as a substitute the ability to post comments to selected articles. Traditionally letters to the editor have been a central place for newspaper readers to read what others in a community think about important issues - but no more, at least not for what's left of the R-G. It's a shift toward the anti-social media model, which makes it easy to keep comments relatively obscure and unnoticed.

 


The Register Guard was one of the last family owned, locally run newspapers in the country before a national conglomerate, bought the company. After the change, the new management fired their long time editor, cut other staff and trimmed the letters and op-ed sections. Much of the new paper is filled with national "fluff" stories with only a small percentage generated locally.

This writer had many letters and op-eds published in the RG over the past two decades, including on the West Eugene Porkway (WEP), other local controversies, Peak Energy, and other topics. Curiously, I have had a greater success getting op-eds into the politically moderate RG than into the more left wing Eugene Weakly. Perhaps being more sympathetic to the Weakly's view but still in disagreement on some core topics made it more difficult to be published there.

 

sent to Eugene Weakly on November 11, 2022

It is sad that the Register Guard's distant corporate owners ended letters to the editor and op-eds. These are critical parts of any newspaper's voice. They can promote perspectives sometimes absent in the rest of the paper.

My letters and op-eds to the RG were the only times they mentioned legal problems of the proposed West Eugene Porkway. I was involved in stopping the highway from 1999 through its cancellation in 2007 (various versions were considered since 1951).

The WEP would have violated federal laws including "section 4(f)" of the 1966 Transportation Act which bans federally funded roads through parks like the West Eugene Wetlands conservation park. This is why the Federal Highway Administration chose "No Build."

Section 4(f) may be the strongest federal environmental law — it requires avoidance, not mere mitigation — but it doesn't apply to the plan to widen Beltline highway across the river from 10 to 16 lanes for a third of a billion dollars. ODOT and FHWA approved this in March without public notice.

The RG has run stories about Beltline widening but the only dissent they have published have been my letters. As far as I know, the only time EW has mentioned this project have been similar letters.

My politics do not fit the conventional wisdom of either the RG or EW, so they relegated my contributions to the letters section, not as sources for news stories. SustainEugene.org has copies of the letters and detailed background.

Mark Robinowitz
Eugene

 

 


a sampling of letters and op-eds published by this writer in the R-G:

 

sent February 11, 2020

On February 10, Oregon's environmental establishment announced a truce with timber companies, accepting continued aerial spraying of poison and clearcuts in exchange for vague promises about better regulation of the abuse.

Unfortunately, the agreement's details show it is not cooperation and dialogue, but rather capitulation by the environmentalists to continued clearcutting and toxic spraying.

Some Oregon timber companies have sprayed poison from helicopters for a half century, sickening people and contaminating wildlife.  In the 1980s, public pressure forced federal forests to stop this abuse but it continues on corporate forests.  I have details at www.sustaineugene.org/spray.html

The agreement withdraws proposed environmental ballot measures for a 500 foot buffer around schools and homes, a meek, unenforceable approach considering copter rotors can blow sprays for miles.  It also promises that downwinders will be notified they are going to be poisoned, a parody of democratic participation.

A simpler, effective approach would ban aerial spray.  In the 1970s, lead in the air was reduced by banning it from gasoline, not creating complicated categories of when it can be used. Prevention is the only solution to pollution.

If a foreign country sprayed these poisons over Oregon we would consider it an attack.

Mark Robinowitz
Eugene

 

 

www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/search/1553101-47/story.csp
GUEST VIEWPOINT
West Eugene Collaborative being too narrow
BY MARK ROBINOWITZ
Published: Oct 27, 2008

The West Eugene Collaborative is an effort to bring together people from diverse backgrounds to examine solutions to decades of failed land use and transportation policies. However, the collaborative needs a broader range of perspectives to be effective.

The collaborative is an outgrowth of the failed West Eugene Parkway, a highway first proposed in 1951 and formally canceled by the Federal Highway Administration in 2007.

The parkway was not approved because it violated nearly every federal transportation law — including Section 4(f) of the 1966 Transportation Act, which prohibits highways built with federal aid from being built through protected parklands such as the West Eugene Wetlands.

Only $17 million of the required $169 million official price tag was appropriated, despite promises from parkway promoters that “the money was there.” And the state’s traffic analyses showed it would not solve traffic snarls.

In June 2001, an intergovernmental meeting called the West Eugene Charette brought together the Eugene, Lane County, state and federal governments. Participants agreed the parkway could not get federal approvals, and it was time to move beyond this failed proposal.

Mayor Jim Torrey, County Commissioner Bobby Green and Oregon Transportation Commissioner Randy Papé were part of this consensus, but a few weeks later they changed their minds and put a nonbinding resolution on the city of Eugene ballot that passed 51 percent to 49 percent.

This local resolution in favor of the parkway could not force the Federal Highway Administration to approve a road they knew was illegal, and the city never authorized a dime toward its construction.

After the city reaffirmed its rhetorical support for the parkway, Oregon Department of Transportation officials spent at least $2 million to study further a project that privately they knew was unlikely to be approved. If the June 2001 “no build” consensus had been implemented, our money spent on these failed studies could have been used to fix West 11th Avenue intersections to facilitate traffic flows.

Adding extra turn lanes would not solve all of the transportation and land use problems, but it would be part of the solution. If pro-parkway politicians had agreed to remove the parkway from life support when they agreed it was unlikely to be built, these fixes already would have been in place.

During the debates about the Parkway, a citizens-led alternative was developed — Wetlands: West Eugene Transportation, Land and Neighborhood Design Solutions (to read more about it, visit www.greenwasheugene.com/wetlands.html).

One of the West Eugene Collaborative’s consultants told me that the wetlands alternative was well presented, and one of the private citizens responsible for the collaborative told me she thought it was “brilliant.” But despite this private praise, wetlands supporters were not invited to participate, and the collaborative has avoided including it in its deliberations.

Worse, the collaborators did not welcome west Eugene’s neighborhood groups until after more than a year of meetings (they now have included two of the eight groups).

The wetlands alternative recommends a combination of road fixes and land use changes to improve traffic flow, reduce travel demand and mitigate dumb land use planning in West Eugene. West 11th could be improved significantly through intersection work without the collaborative’s expensive and unworkable suggestion for a “boulevard” widening.

A couple of small links, such as between Second Avenue and Garfield Street and First Avenue and Seneca Road, could fix connection issues without having to build any part of the parkway.

Perhaps the biggest bottleneck is the Roosevelt Boulevard/Highway 99 intersection, which the parkway Environmental Impact Statement admitted would remain a problem even if the parkway is built. Since the nearby Highway 99 bridge over the railroad needs to be replaced, a renewed focus on this area might find the resources to reconstruct this intersection.

Any road construction in west Eugene will be inadequate if the underlying land use issues are avoided. While it took decades to create the problems, the city continues to permit uses that make the situation worse.

Eugene could follow Hood River’s lead and ban oversized big-box stores, a law that the Oregon Supreme Court upheld in 2002. The recent approvals near West 11th of a Lowe’s hardware store next to a Home Depot store instead could have included mixed-use residential development — the only way that the proposed West 11th bus rapid transit line could be viable.

The wetlands alternative developed two options for the Belt Line Road/Roosevelt intersection based on projections of energy supplies. If gasoline prices remain relatively low, then this intersection would be expanded into a grade-separated interchange. But if the era of cheap gas is ending, then traffic also is going to be diminished as expensive oil slows travel demand, and therefore an interchange would not be needed.

The collaborative would better serve the community if it refocused on how to mitigate the effects of the energy and economic crises.

Mark Robinowitz was the primary “road scholar” for the wetlands alternative.

 

June 24, 2002
Letters in the Editor's Mailbag - The Register Guard
Parkway faces obstacles

Last month's Grant County vote to endorse logging national forests without U.S. Forest Service approval resembled Eugene's vote on the West Eugene Parkway: Both sought to violate federal laws about public lands that belong to all Americans.

The Federal Highway Administration, not local elections or the City Council, will decide whether the parkway is approved. The parkway has severe legal, environmental and financial obstacles, including Section 4(f) of the Transportation Act (which prohibits federally funded highways through parks and wildlife refuges).

On May 1 [2002], Lane County asked the Oregon Department of Transportation to widen Highway 126 from the West Eugene Parkway across Fern Ridge to Territorial Highway, vindicating accusations that the parkway would convert Veneta into a Eugene bedroom community.

ODOT's 1996 traffic study predicted that the parkway would overload Sixth and Seventh avenues beyond capacity. This would force future efforts to upgrade Sixth and Seventh to Interstate 105, or possibly revive the 1970s plan for a “Sixth-Seventh Freeway.”

The pending revisions to the TransPlan would effectively cancel the Belt Line/West Eugene Parkway grade-separated interchange to transfer money to the parkway, even though ODOT reports state that the interchange would be needed for parkway traffic.

The parkway's $88 million cost estimate ignores the Veneta extension, upgrading Sixth and Seventh avenues, the Belt Line/West Eugene Parkway interchange and other tributary projects. It also needs updating for inflation. The full cost is about $150 million, more than ODOT plans to spend on road construction in the Eugene-Springfield metro area over the next 20 years.

MARK ROBINOWITZ
Eugene