The Bus is obviously non-partisan and has no role in National elections. No way would we promote one candidate over another…however, I think this is a great video for all to see. The last frame says “VOTE”…and that’s all I’m saying.

In the past year there have now been three mass murders in malls: Salt Lake City, Omaha, and now a Chicago suburb. This isn’t a coincidence. The culprits are evil. And the national media has increased the likelihood of the past two of these based on their reporting.

I ended my post after CNN glorified the last culprit by saying “the next shooter is watching.” We may never know if this culprit watched and was influenced, but I know where I’d put my money.

The solution? We don’t need to censor the news or dictate what they should report. Though we must have news available that report stories based on their substantive importance. People have always been able to get tabloid journalism — but having it saturate and even replace the medium that keeps us informed is truly un-American. The cornerstone of our democracy is an educated, voting populace — and we must get our information from somewhere.

Although not a Lane County issue presently, I thought I’d bring up an issue that deals with many of the same equal rights/environment problems that arise in the Eugene area.  Up here in Albany, an entrepreneur, Mark Davis, recently bought a historic home with the intention of fixing it up to code and leasing it to an organization called the Oxford House.  The Oxford House provides a sober living situation of people recovering from addictions.  The Oxford house has stated that it will place 8 residents in the facility.  See the local news story.

What’s not to love?  After all, we desperately need more sober living facilities, and Oxford House claims a low rate of police response to their facilities.  Well, all is not happy in Whoville. Albany recently rejected an attempt by a contractor for the Psychiatric Security Review Board (PSRB) to place a group home for the guilty but insane in a different neighborhood.  The neighbors complain that this residence was recently a notorious meth house. A neighbor complained to me that she would routinely watch her former neighbor come out on the front porch with a gun in the middle of the night and shoot out the street light so that he could do drug deals there.  The city finally had to put a bulletproof glass shield around the light.

Further, the house sits right across the street from a preschool and right next to a bed and breakfast.  The neighborhood already has 5 other Oxford Houses, compared to 2 for all of Corvallis, a city with a larger population.  The Oxford House justified this by saying property values are better in Albany. The neighbors replied, “See what happens to Corvallis property values if you put six rehab facilities (plus two homeless shelters) in the same neighborhood.” Benton County seems to have low crime rates largely because it pushes low income people out with high housing prices.)  The Oxford House countered (truthfully) that federal law prohibits discrimination against recovering drug and alcohol addicts.  The neighbors replied that it does not prevent restrictions on housing for parolees, and that this is not a rehab facility, but rather an unsupervised halfway house for criminals.

So who’s right?  It’s hard to say.  The downtown neighbors have a point – concentration of all the facilities in the same place creates urban decay, as evidenced by some of Eugene’s neighborhoods.  Oxford House does not have an unblemished record in Albany, as its other facilities tend to be eyesores and the residents tend to engage in mildly antisocial behavior.  On the other hand, the decision to deny a group home for PSRB inmates was probably not reasonable, since that particular neighborhood has few facilities and would not be unduly injured by pulling its weight in social services.  The Oxford House refuses to distinguish between recovering addicts who voluntarily seek treatment and those who are mandated by the criminal justice system. This is not a distinction without a difference.  People tend to get sober when they commit themselves to it, not when they’re forced into it.  A far better solution would have been to start an Oxford House in a neighborhood with a lower concentration of the same sort of services.

What should the Lane Bus care? Eugene has many of the same challenges.  The Eugene downtown and close-in residential neighborhoods are attempting to recover from a combination of poor urban planning on the government side and commercial short-sightedness on the business side of things. Good progressives tend to react favorably to facilities like the Oxford House, without necessarily looking at the broader picture.  A family probably doesn’t have the right not to live next to a rehab facility, but it’s not unreasonable not to want to live in between two of them.  Similarly, it’s easy to support a social services facility downtown with the justification that easy access to the other services there, but there can be too much of a good thing.

Consider the current dilemma of where to site the new McKenzie-Willamette Hospital. Many of us opposed the Delta location as it tended to encourage suburban sprawl.  Fair enough.  However, as my dad pointed out, that facility would have been much more accessible to the rural residents of Western Lane County than most of the other possible sites.  The take-away from all this is that there’s no substitute for 1) electing local officials who will take a deliberate approach to planning, with due regard to equal rights for the disadvantaged and reasonable planning to encourage a positive urban environment, and 2) engaging in that process with an eye towards all the legitimate interests involved.

Marty Wilde