Community Voices Weekly: 23 days and counting

Happy Sunday, Lookout Eugene-Springfield,

Every Community Voices Weekly dispatch brings us hurtling a week closer to Election Day. With Nov. 3 just three weeks (and two days) away, our email inbox is full of endorsement letters for candidates and ballot measures. So full that we’ve been increasing the number of letters we run each day to get them published in a timely manner.

Here’s where our endorsement scoreboard currently stands.

Lane County Commissioner (District 5, East Lane)

Heather Buch — 7

Jake Pelroy — 1

Springfield City Council (Ward 4)

Callee Ackland — 7

Jill Cuadros — 3

Oregon House District 7

Kori Rodley — 1

Eugene Clean Energy Fund

Support — 4

Oppose — 1

Is your candidate or cause trailing, or not on the board? Write an endorsement and send it to lte@lookoutlocal.com (350 words or fewer, please)

Is your candidate leading, and you want to pile on? Consider reading through recent letters supporting your pick first so your letter stands out.

Clean energy conflict

What’s on my mind as election day nears? I’ll be interested to see how the final vote tally comes down on the Eugene Clean Energy Fund ballot measure, which would charge a fee on the profits of the biggest national companies operating in the city to fund sustainability projects.

Will it reduce household energy use while creating clean energy jobs, as its supporters promise? Is it a tax that businesses will pass on to inflation-weary consumers, as the measure’s opponents warn?

A pair of Community Voices writers on opposite sides of that debate weighed in on the measure.

Guest columnist Carl Bybee said local media coverage of the ballot measure has failed to connect opponents’ arguments to a broader campaign by corporations against climate action.

“Through lobbying, misleading messaging and inaction, corporations have left Oregon communities increasingly on their own to build climate resilience, and this vote takes place against that background,” Bybee wrote.

But Eugene letter-writer John Doty said it’s just common sense that the companies hit with the new fee would pass it on to their customers.

“That money must come from somewhere. The people who will feel those increases the most aren’t the wealthy or the corporate executives,” Doty wrote.

A call to action on campus and beyond

If you just read one Community Voices submission from last week, make it Whitney Hoshaw’s.

Reflecting on the recent campus sexual assault case at Cornell University, the five reported assaults on or near the University of Oregon campus recently, and her own personal experiences, Hoshaw penned a guest column wondering if anything has really changed since the #MeToo movement, and calling on people who haven’t been victims to find their voice and be better advocates.

“It’s easy to find outrage and lend a listening ear until it requires you to take action and accountability for all the misogyny you’ve let go unchecked in your life,” Hoshaw wrote.

Standardized testing? Still?

Recent state testing results showed modest improvements in math and English language arts test scores at local school districts.

Among those who weren’t impressed? Letter-writers Larry Lewin and Roscoe Caron, who have each penned numerous Community Voices pieces criticizing the current state of public education.

Of the standardized tests pushed by Oregon education leaders, “Somebody needs to say the obvious: This quarter-century model is a failure. Who here in Bethel, Eugene 4J or Springfield is ready to admit this?” Lewin wrote.

Caron offered a literary rebuttal, spanning works from Chicken Little to King Lear, to hammer home his view that standardized tests reinforce a failed system.

“Teachers and students know the testing system is fatally flawed, but the education and political establishment insist on pushing forward, despite the evidence,” Caron wrote.

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