Below are the articles, both short and long, that I wrote during my Reporting 1 class at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. In this reporting class, we were required to cover a neighborhood and some of the topics that were of high concern in that neighborhood. I covered downtown Eugene and had a fantastic time doing so.
Securing Downtown
The opening of the new police station makes downtown patrons feel more secure, or that is what was intended.
Towards the end of January, thanks to the work of city council and local businesses, a downtown police substation was opened up to help with public concerns of safety in the area. The police department’s new location is part of the new Lane Community College building that recently opened across from the Eugene Public Library. It means a consistent police presence in the area, which has been successful so far.
Two years ago city council approved a measure that implemented the downtown police team, which is paid for by the businesses in the area. The measure was approved because of an increasing danger in the downtown neighborhood.
Currently, the bicycle patrol is made up of nine officers and one supervising officer, according to Eugene Police Sgt. Larry Crompton. Crompton said that 10 officers are assigned to the downtown substation, but only about three or four are scheduled for a day.
“People are saying ‘Well you have 10 officers down here now it should be a lot safer’” Crompton said. “But with scheduling and (other responsibilities) there are only an average of two bike officers a day.”
Furthermore, downtown patrons often complain when they have been cited with a violation of traffic laws or other small violations and, according to Crompton, they often express that the police should be focusing more on the groups that do not exude safety.
New Odyssey Juice Bar owner, Walt Hunt, who said that he has heard people complaining about the bicycle officers “picking on people.” Hunt said that he has never personally seen police targeting happen, but he has heard the complaints from numerous downtown regulars. Although, he said, “It has hugely improved, and it has been all positive so far.”
This point is well known by Crompton who said a lawsuit is a possibility if the downtown station is thought to be targeting the homeless community. “We have to treat everyone fairly under the 14th Amendment, otherwise we get sued,” Crompton said.
The problem that the downtown police team must face is that of aggressive pan handling in the area. With the opinions of the public being shared so willingly, Crompton said he is constantly reminding people, people who do not believe they should be cited for anything small when there are bigger issues to take care of downtown, of the 14th Amendment.
The response from the community has largely been positive and very supportive according to Crompton. Crompton said, “The liberal perspective is that the presence is enough to discourage activity, and others say that after awhile, you have to enforce the laws as well. Everyone has their opinions.”
Schedules to Change
Eugene’s 4J School District’s main point of concern for a 2013 meeting was changing high school scheduling practices.
In light of the budget cuts nationwide, the Lane County’s 4J School District meeting May 1 continued discussion on what some consider the best economic scheduling option, the 3 x 5 schedule. This schedule (3 trimesters, 5 classes per day) gives the district the best option at reducing class sizes and requires less staff, according to the 4J website.
The May school district meeting for 4J was extremely crowded and the attendants of the meeting were excited. In attendance were a lot of teachers and students who were asking for a delay on the implementation of the 3 x 5 schedule.
Most of those who spoke in support of the delay were students, all between 8th grade and their sophomore year of high school. Among these students was Mia Goodman, a current sophomore in the 4J school district.
“No one knows how (the 3 x 5 schedule) will work,” Goodman said. “In the 2 x 7, I can fit my classes; we need more time for the 3 x 5 decision.”
This was a common concern among all the students who spoke in the open forum for the spectators of the meeting. However, parents also had input to the issue. One parent in particular, Terry Monroe, wanted to see proof of the benefits from Churchill High School—who implemented the new schedule for this school year.
“I believe in the intentions of the board to make this change, but there is no evidence that the 3 x 5 will be best for all four schools,” Monroe said. “Wait two years to see how Churchill responds to the change.”
Monroe’s particular response sent the audience into a frenzy of applause, whistles, and cheers because that is what a majority of the audience has been asking for since the new schedule was voted on in April of last year.
After the open forum, board members were able to respond to the comments from the gallery. Jim Torrey, a member of the board since July, 2007, was the first to respond to the many complaints of the schedule change.
“I hear your complaints, but in the last three months I haven’t heard a better alternative,” Torrey said. “If you have a recommendation then I’d love to hear it”
The overall theme of the board’s response was that they worked very hard to make a decision that benefited the school’s students in a budget neutral way. Thus, the 3 x 5 seems to have the most economic and class size benefits out of the other options they looked at.
Organic Food in Eugene
A closer look to the movement that is sweeping the nation, but has found solid footing in the Northwest.
The U.S. Northwest is known for its vibrant environments and vast amounts of local organic farming, all of which being consistently protective through political activism. In fact, both Portland, 56 restaurants, and Seattle, 78 restaurants, are among the top nine cities with the most organic food restaurants, according to Organicauthority.com and urbanspoon.com.
However, Eugene isn’t too shabby itself in having many organic restaurants, whether it’s exclusively organic or mostly organic. In fact, 12%, or 30 out of 250, of Eugene’s total restaurants are listed as organic, according to tripadvisor.com and urbanspoon.com. The most recent to join these ranks is Red Wagon Creamery, owned by Stuart and Emily Phillips.
“Red Wagon Creamery is a small-batch ice-cream company,” Mr. Phillips said. “We make artisan flavors using local ingredients from scratch.”
In a city dedicated to organic and local food, however, opening up a new organic food hub is not easy. But Mr. Phillips thinks he has the right formula to compete in this popular Eugene market.
“We compete by focusing on unique flavors that are sourced locally,” Phillips said. “A lot of other places buy organically from big distributors instead of going to the farmers market and picking out the ingredients themselves.”
And his strategy seems to be working well. After the new, organic ice cream parlor opened up only a couple of weeks ago in downtown Eugene it seems there is nothing to worry about for Phillips.
“It has been more popular than I would have thought in its first couple weeks,” Maddy Henshaw, an employee of Red Wagon, said. “I think Stuart mentioned making more money this last month then they made in a whole year as a food cart.”
However, Red Wagon is just one organic restaurant in this city and after the freshness of a new ice cream parlor subsides, it must compete with the established organic hubs of Eugene.
Cozmic Pizza is an all-organic pizza restaurant in the heart of downtown Eugene. Even the soda that they serve to their customers is not brand name, like Pepsi or Coke.
“People come to Cozmic for all organic food and when we offer them soda they kind of scoff,” Cozmic Pizza General Manager, Alec Cox, said. “When we tell them it is also organic, from agave plant, they are much more receptive.”
“Two years ago, we had a bad reputation in organic food and service around Eugene,” Cox continued. “However, over the last eight months we have grown a bunch because, I think, people realize our ingredients are local and completely organic.”
Although both restaurants are organic, they are different enough not to have to compete with each other. Red Wagon gets their ingredients from the farmers market to set themselves apart and Cozmic tries to do things a little different as well.
“We try to provide our customers with an experience that is healthy,” Cox said. “We try to have fun with it and make unique flavors that hopefully our customers enjoy.”
However, Eugene takes it a step further than the number of organic restaurants by, once a term, bringing in locally grown foods for an organic feast in the University dining venues.
Carson and Barnhart, the two buffet-style venues on campus, have a Farm-to-Fork meal. Mollee Bennett, a resident of University Housing as a three-time Resident Assistant, has been to many Farm to Fork meals in dining.
“I think Farm to fork is a really good opportunity to showcase the importance of eating locally grown, organic foods to new students who may have never tried it before,” Bennett said. “I think it demonstrates just how potent the influence of the food culture in Eugene is that we have this event in our residence halls.”
However, for as popular as the seemingly young organic movement is in Eugene and the rest of the Northwest, there are still issues with the definition of organic.
According to the USDA website, for organic food to receive the proper certification, it must first have its operations certified under the USDA guidelines as well as provide a history of the substances applied to the crop in the last three years, among other requirements.
Unfortunately, not everything labeled organic on the shelves can be trusted. According to an article by the Seattle Times, foods that are not organic end up on the shelves officially labeled as organic because the USDA does not enforce their own rules.
“I feel like it’s necessary for consumers to be informed about the food they are eating,” Bennett said. “There is room for improvement when it comes to the regulation of this food.”
For organic restaurants this should be an issue. According to Mr. Phillips, all organic restaurants are supposed to have a paper trail that leads back to the organic farmer through different organizations.
However, as easy as that process seems to be, Phillips said customers should always be weary because there are always going to be places that claim they are organic when they aren’t.
“It is realistic to have that with business, not knowing what is truthful on the other side of the counter,” Cox said. “But we get our ingredients from local farms when we can, even though there it usually costs one dollar more per pound, we are committed to producing 100% organic food.”
Eugene, in particular, has one of the highest percent of organic restaurants compared to total restaurants within its city limits at 12%, according to tripadvisor.com and urbanspoon.com. However, Portland, two percent, and Seattle, three and a half percent, are the faces of the organic popularity in the Northwest.
As Eugene is trying to separate itself from the umbrella that is the nationwide organic movement. That may be a lot more difficult than a surplus of organic restaurants.
According to the Organic Trade Association, the nation’s total organic food sales have risen from $1 billion in 1990 to just under $27 million in 2010.
The USDA has noticed the same growth over the years. Its website confirms a double-digit growth over the last decade in the sales of organic foods.
However, not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon of naturally grown crops and naturally fed animals. Even in Eugene, full of support, there are people who do not want to join this ever-growing movement.
“I just don’t think it is worth it for a lot of people,” said Caleb Conley, a University of Oregon student. “The cost of organic food in comparison to the taste just isn’t worth it for me, that’s why I’ve never really been a fan.”
The Eugene community has always been an image of inclusion and support for differing views. The ratio of those who support organic and those who don’t may be well shy of 50-50, but it is clear which direction Eugene is moving towards.
With its new Red Wagon Creamery, Eugene as a city adds to its already vast organic selections. And those large organic numbers are part of the reason Eugene is unique in an already unique world.
Managing Traffic
The profile of the man who is mainly in charge of the flow of traffic throughout the greater Eugene area.
He monitors the activity of every streetlight throughout the greater Eugene’s city limits—daily. When something goes wrong, he is the guy to call. What he does makes this city run smoothly.
His job is to keep the time of all the traffic throughout the city, fix it when it gets breaks down, and reset it when it’s time for a new system. The job belongs to Mike Ferchland, the only traffic signal technician in the city.
For this reason, Ferchland must know of the ins-and-outs of the city’s traffic signal system throughout the city. From his computer, he watches as green dots signify the properly working traffic signals throughout the city, according to Ferchland.
“We have real time communication with 80 percent of the traffic signals in Eugene,” Ferchland said. “I can click on any one of these dots and see exactly what is happening at that intersection in real time.”
According to Ferchland, the five varieties of dot colors mean different statuses for the traffic signal that it represents. Green means everything is working fine. Blue means that there is a small, minor tweak that caused the system to flag the intersection in order to be monitored.
“It’s not a critical failure,” Ferchland said. “It’s a non-critical alarm that can be caused by no one driving on it for a while, as an example.”
As the traffic signal technician, no action is required of this non-critical alarm, according to Ferchland. However, when the color is red the signal is unable to communicate with the technician back at the office. A red dot means that the controller, the piece of technology that tells the traffic signal what to do and when, shut down or maybe there was a power outage.
“I get a certain amount of information from (the computer), and then I have to go out into the field,” Ferchland said.
As the only technician in Eugene, Ferchland must go to every critical call personally with his team of three electricians. This solid team of four manages 145 traffic signals and over 9,000 streetlights.
But, Ferchland’s job is more than just fixing the problems that occur in the traffic signaling system in Eugene. He says he earned the rare opportunity to do the traffic signal timing, a job normally taken on by the traffic engineer.
“I enjoy traffic signal timing, and in this way my job is unique to the city of Eugene,” Ferchland said. “When we reorganized, because of my experience, I started taking over the traffic timing responsibilities.”
Most of the timing that Ferchland has been in charge of is the basic traffic system current Eugene residents have come to get used to. The downtown traffic signals are on a progressive, fixed-time system, which is different than the rest of the city. However, Ferchland said that this is a normal system for cities with decent sized downtowns.
“We use coordination so the signals progress as you drive through,” Ferchland said. “So you have to divide up the time accordingly.”
When this system was first implemented this fixed time was 60 seconds of green light for each traffic signal in the progression. However, when the EMX bus system was put in, 60 seconds wasn’t enough time for the buses to get through the intersections.
“So we had to extend it to a 72 second cycle to accommodate the EMX buses,” Ferchland said.
The technician’s job is weather flexible and there is something to do either when the weather is nice or if it is rainy. Because of this, the technician always has a job to do and the timing sequences can be changed and improve if need-be.
Ferchland has the most unique traffic signal technician position in Oregon. An added originality to an already unique city.
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