Ems don’t belong at Lane Events Center
Do any proponents of building a baseball stadium at the fairgrounds live nearby? Would they welcome the stadium next door?
I live close enough to be an involuntary participant in whatever happens at the Lane Events Center.
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At our neighborhood meeting, we found out that the $10 million offered by the Ems does not go to construction, but rather to leasing the facility once built.
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Traffic congestion/parking: There is parking at the fairgrounds, but I know from living here since 1982, that people look for parking away from the venue to avoid exit traffic when an event ends.
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Light/noise pollution: Night and weekend games would make it difficult for neighbors to enjoy their yards.
A stadium that brings 2,000 to 6,000 people into a neighborhood for three to six hours doesn’t belong there. It’s one thing for a neighborhood to grow around an established venue, but to build a large, noisy, new venue in the middle of a neighborhood would place an unfair burden on homeowners in the fairgrounds surrounding area.
I love the Ems and have attended 100s of games, but I strongly oppose the team moving to the Lane County Fairgrounds.
Christine Beneda, Eugene
How can you defend Putin?
Well, it didn’t take Jack Dresser long to defend the indefensible (Letters, March 10): the unprovoked and immoral bombing of Ukraine by Russia, a country led, Dresser writes, by “a world leader [who is] to be taken seriously.”
When a possibly deranged Putin threatens to use tactical nuclear weapons, he should be taken very seriously. Dresser has a history of defending murderers, like Syria’s Bashar al Assad (see his September 2013 guest view “Poison gas is ploy to draw U.S. into Syrian war”). But to say this war is all NATO’s fault is laughable, and to claim that Russia “will tolerate no further encroachment on its borders” is historically absurd: just ask the people of Crimea, Chechnya and Georgia who encroaches upon whom.
No one believed, before the war, that Ukraine would have been granted membership in NATO— a purely defensive alliance. But even if it were, a sovereign state has every right to form or join any alliance it desires. And clearly, it is Russia that is the aggressor here — a nuclear power so insecure that it bombs maternity hospitals. How can any human being defend so appalling, abhorrent and criminal a war as the one Russia has unleashed upon its neighbor?
Jeffrey Hurwit, Eugene
Homelessness is a housing rental issue
I’ve run the local Homeless Action page on Facebook for more than 11 years. Homelessness is a rental housing issue.
Landlords have way too much power over renters. A drastic shortage of apartments has allowed greedy landlords to jack up rents and move-in expenses to levels that working-class renter can’t pay, and many are dropping off the bottom into homelessness.
I support all of the rental protection ordinances Eugene’s Housing Policy Board has proposed to the City Council. These ordinances would shift some of the power from landlords to exploited renters by:
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Putting limits on application fees, which have become a racket
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Reducing minimum gross income requirements for renters
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Prohibiting denials of application because of bad credit scores
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Limiting maximum move-in deposits to twice the monthly rent
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Requiring landlords to compensate renters for no-cause evictions or steep rent increases that result in self eviction I hope our Eugene City Council will listen to renters, who are over half of Eugene residents. It’s time for the city to deal with our issues.
Lynn Porter, Eugene
Good people are out there
On March 19, while entering the Country Club Road on-ramp to Highway 126, I was forced to pullover with car trouble. While I was crawling on the ground in the rain, looking under my car to see what the trouble was, two separate Good Samaritans stopped to help me. They crawled under my car and made the temporary repairs, which allowed me to drive directly to the repair shop.
The point I would like to make is that two separate individuals who stopped in the rain, got wet and dirty, fixed the problem and would not accept payment for their efforts after I offered several times. They both drove away with smiles.
Good people still abound I am forever grateful.
Jim Ferguson, Eugene
Should the world end, let it be on the high ground
As distressing as it is to contemplate, is not the whole world, with the exception of Ukraine, submitting to Vladimir Putin’s threats and dictates in exactly the same way that his fearful security council did in approving his ego-driven war? Does the free world not see the danger of bowing to a psychopath’s threats by allowing him to dictate our behavior as well?
Might it not be better to accept the inevitable and hit Moscow with everything we have now, rather than later, in a pre-emptive first strike in order to remove Putin and the threat? It seems unlikely that those who now fear him would opt to continue the carnage, providing robots have not completely taken over.
What President Truman did by dropping the atom bomb on Japan during World War II was horrible, but it ended the threat and ultimately saved lives. Are we not likely facing the same problem today? Short of a SEAL team or some other motivated assassination, is there any other solution?
Putin is not going to stop with Ukraine. If civilization and life on earth is going to end with a bang, let it be motivated by a moral and ethical stand, not by fear and politics. Thomas Lincoln, Springfield
Falling back to the 1970s
The Senate recently unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act that will end the biannual practice of “spring forward” and “fall back.” Great idea, most would agree. But instead of having standard time year-round — which sleep experts recommend — our senators have elected to make daylight saving time permanent. That’s the same as changing the westernmost states from Pacific Time to Mountain Time.
We’ve tried this before, back in the 1970s, and it was generally well received — at least until winter arrived, when in parts of the country, the sun didn’t rise for weeks until after 9 a.m. In the end, the “extra” hour of daylight in the evening just wasn’t worth the additional hour of darkness in the morning, and we returned to the biannual clock-turning.
But advocates for that extra hour in the evening — great for running errands and exercising after work, they say — have now persuaded our lawmakers to try again. Maybe people these days will respond differently than we did in the 1970s? Unlikely.
The bill now is in the House, and there appears to be no stopping it.
Whitey Lueck, Eugene
LTD taking the right steps
In response to Shannon Rosetta (Letters, March 20), the city, county, LTD and other agencies are taking the right steps so that all users, whether they are driving, taking the bus, walking or riding a bike, will be able to get where they need to go safely.
There is simply no good reason to allow a vehicle weighing 4,000 pounds with one or two people the convenience over a bus with 50 riders. Try to remember that all of us need to use less energy, be it oil, gas or electricity for a sustainable future with cleaner air quality.
Richard Hughes, Eugene
This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Keep Ems out of Lane Events Center, daylight saving, and defending Putin?