West Eugene activist wants local officials who care about ‘We The People’

Presenter: Underground Echo is broadcast on KEPW 97.3 every Wednesday at 6 p.m. The show will feature a West Eugene activist who is helping to launch a new political party called ‘We The People.’ Here’s Echo:

Echo (Underground Echo): I’m Echo and our guest is Robin Bloomgarden, a Eugene community advocate. She serves as a member at large on the Active Bethel Community (ABC) board, and she’s been a consistent voice on industrial siting and public health protections in West Eugene. Robin, welcome to Underground Echo.

Robin Bloomgarden: Thank you.

[00:00:32] Echo (Underground Echo): What do you think about your Bethel neighborhood?

[00:00:34] Robin Bloomgarden: Well, it’s a work in progress. We’re kind of like the ugly stepsister of Eugene. We just get pushed out of the way and things don’t really move along, but we are making waves…

[00:00:48] I moved into a duplex, it’s been eight or 10 years at least. And before I even moved in, I would be over there once in a while ’cause it was a property that my family owned, so I would be in the neighborhood and I noticed this god-awful smell, this heavy chemical smell.

[00:01:11] It was like you could cut it with a knife in the neighborhood. It came at any time, day or night. This blanket of chemical smells would be everywhere. And all you could do was run for the car or run in the house and shut all the windows.

[00:01:27] And that went on for a long time and people were agitating, Beyond Toxics was agitating, for at least 12 years. And I got involved with them, like, way back when, trying to make something happen.

[00:01:45] Finally we were able to force Georgia Baxter to shut the thing down. We were trying to make her do the right thing. And instead she just shut it down, but didn’t want to pay any of the bills or the fines or anything, and just left the mess there.

[00:02:04] I mean, they were just, you know, throwing stuff out into the air, which is totally illegal. But they did that for years.

[00:02:11] Echo (Underground Echo): How did Baxter change the way you think about permitted versus protected?

[00:02:15] Robin Bloomgarden: Oh, big time. I mean, I’ve thought about that a lot over the years anyway, going down to Salem and stuff. But permitted is useless. You know, LRAPA, all these agencies permit X amount of poisons in the environment. You know, because it’s all about allowing the businesses to make as much money as they can, and then they permit them to poison people.

[00:02:44] Echo (Underground Echo): Wow. And that’s, that’s the truth, folks.

[00:02:47] Robin Bloomgarden: It is.

[00:02:48] Echo (Underground Echo): What’s one myth about the Bethel community you wish folks across town would retire?

[00:02:53] Robin Bloomgarden: Well, that we’re just not worth anything. You know, that it’s just a bunch of poor people and we have nothing to offer, which, we have a lot less to offer than the rich neighborhoods do because the city has ignored us completely. So we have nothing.

[00:03:10] But you know, we are people. We’re in West Eugene and we’re trying as hard as we can to be recognized as just part of the population of the city of Eugene, and be treated well, you know?

[00:03:28] Echo (Underground Echo): Absolutely. And when you sat first in the ABC meeting as a neighbor, not a board member, what were you hoping to fix in a single season and what have you learned about the actual timeline of change?

[00:03:43] Robin Bloomgarden: It’s really, really slow. I mean, it is slow. I’ve been fighting city hall here since I moved here in 2010, and almost nothing has changed for the better. Yeah. In all those years, I mean, I used to be down at city council every meeting and go to work sessions and nothing really ever changes. It’s like glacial.

[00:04:11] Echo (Underground Echo): Wow. Absolutely. You’ve taken your neighborhood concerns to Salem. Tell me about the hydrogen blending.

[00:04:19] Robin Bloomgarden: So that was something that happened about two, three years ago. Suddenly we found out that EWEB was going to provide space over at their building, over there, off of Roosevelt. And they were going to provide space so that NW Natural could start putting hydrogen gas, mixing it, blending it into everybody’s regular NW Natural gas product.

[00:04:49] And they weren’t going to tell anybody, but we found out about it and we raised a huge stink. I mean a lot of people raised a stink. It’s (pardon the expression), but it went away really fast. We were amazed how fast it went away, ’cause it doesn’t usually work that way. Story. Yeah. That was amazing.

[00:05:14] The thing is that that stuff is explosive, you know? And if people don’t even know it’s in their gas lines—

[00:05:23] Echo (Underground Echo): Wow. I didn’t think about that.

[00:05:24] Robin Bloomgarden: And most of the homes in West Eugene are older. They just, you know, they’re functioning, and that’s about it, you know? They’re just barely surviving because people can’t afford to have fancier stuff.

[00:05:39] And so people would’ve had no idea that that was going into their gas lines and they were going to do it in West Eugene as an experiment. So there we are. They’re doing it to us again, using us as lab rats. But we got rid of it.

[00:05:58] Echo (Underground Echo): What about your public health development standards?

[00:06:01] Robin Bloomgarden: That came out of about three and a half years worth of what we called the core group meetings that were all about the Baxter thing, and we went through this whole thing with a bunch of different agencies.

You know, EPA came from, you know, the western region a few times, and, and we had all of these DEQ people and people from the health authority and people from LRAPA and people from DEQ.

[00:06:36] There were like dozens of these people, and we met with them on a regular basis for over three years. We’re still meeting with them. We meet about every six or eight weeks if there’s something to talk about, but as we got to know each other better and started really seeing how they need to work together instead of everyone’s in a silo doing their own thing and not really knowing what LRAPA is doing, or DEQ is doing, or EPA is doing.

[00:07:07] They all started to realize that, you know, it really makes a lot of sense for the other agencies to know what’s going on with each other. And out of that came this idea—It might’ve been Lisa Arkin that brought it up, I’m not sure—but of having a public health overlay zone over the whole city.

[00:07:29] And so when, when companies want to come in and, and put some noxious company in with nasty chemicals, and of course LRAPA would be permitting it, that there would be this overlay that they had to fit into the overlay and it couldn’t really affect local residents, residential areas right near whatever that was.

[00:07:58] And we were hoping that it could be over the whole city, ’cause it’s kind of based on one that the city ended up with, that’s like Clear Lake. It’s called the Clear Lake Overlay Zone. That was the only one we had and we were trying to kind of expand on that and make it for the whole city so that these noxious companies can’t just set up shop in the middle of residential areas.

[00:08:25] Echo (Underground Echo): That’s so powerful. So we’re going to bring it back around and there’s a local effort folks, and they’re arguing that the two-party system is broken and that citizen initiatives and local representation should be the spine of our politics. And it’s branded ‘We The People Lane County edition.’

[00:08:43] Robin Bloomgarden: I’m not a party person. And I mean that in a political party sense, but I feel really good about this party. And if we could just get some people, I think locally we could make a difference.

[00:09:00] We have high hopes, and what we would really like to do is start at the local level. We would like to be able to offer information about various elected offices like judges. Who are they? Nobody’s ever heard of them, and there’s only one ever running. So it’s either vote for them or don’t vote. So what we would like to do is put someone else running against them. And then also provide information about the records of both of these people, whoever these people are.

[00:09:40] We want people to know who these people are, that they’re going to make a choice of. And that’s one of the first things we want to do. And then there’s the county commissioners, there’s three of them coming up, and we want to just provide historical information so that people have some idea who they’re voting for.

[00:10:01] At this point we’re really focusing on local elected officials. We want to get some different people in there who care about what’s going on locally, and we will branch out from there. But first we have to get some people elected who are not the usual suspects.

[00:10:22] First we were just trying to communicate to let people know who we are, you know, and then maybe they might be interested in what we’re doing. We started out sending out about 7,000 emails, to introduce ourselves. And almost immediately, I think 700 of ’em or something went through and then all of a sudden everything else was spammed.

[00:10:48] Everything else was spammed, and we couldn’t get any out at that point. So then we regrouped and we decided that we were going to just make postcards and mail ’em out to people with the same information on it and hope that people were interested .

[00:11:05] And we’ve had a few responses, but so many of them come back. And the post office, I’m thinking that the post office has got it in for us, you know, we get so many things sent back that are not even canceled. The stamps are not canceled, but the cards are, you know, they’re all messed up because the post office has done something with them.

[00:11:34] We’re now, you know, we’re trying to figure out a different way to do this, but it is really aggravating and half the cards we get back aren’t even canceled, which is really strange. They’re all coming through Portland and they’re not canceled. And I just, you know, it’s frustrating, but we’re going to keep working at it.

[00:11:56] We think we might have a different way to do emails, but that’s still in process. So other than what we’re doing, talking about things on the radio and some articles in the paper, that’s kind of where we are. We have heard back from a few people who actually got something, and they’re interested.

[00:12:12] But what we need are young people or even old people who know what the heck they’re doing. People who can do research on, like, judges or whatever. We need some research done and we need social media action.

[00:12:34] Echo (Underground Echo): It kind of points to something going on with the post office folks. Maybe somebody out there is an investigative person and would like to dig into that, if you’re listening.

[00:12:45] Robin Bloomgarden: That would be nice.

[00:12:47] Echo (Underground Echo): Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you’d like to cover, Robin?

[00:12:51] Robin Bloomgarden: You know, EWEB needs—Have you ever had a personal contact from EWEB? I’ve never heard from them. We get these once a month, we get an insert in our bill, but you can’t call anybody. You can’t email them because it goes right straight to the main office and then they filter everything.

[00:13:12] So there is no contact with these people who are volunteers, but I can’t figure out what they actually do other than rubber-stamp what the guy at the top tells them to rubber-stamp.

[00:13:27] So there’s a lot of work we need to do in this town and we really need to have a city council that, you know, will take the bull by the horns as they say and actually do something and we don’t have it yet.

[00:13:43] There’s been a few people over the years that really wanted to buck the system and change it and make it stronger, and they were basically drummed out, every time. They were drummed out.

[00:13:58] Echo (Underground Echo): Wow.

[00:13:59] Robin Bloomgarden: Yeah, it’s really sad. It’s all about the builders, the developers, the people with money. Those are the people that get what they want. And nobody else really gets anything they want. It’s sad. It’s very sad and it makes me mad. Yeah.

[00:14:19] Echo (Underground Echo): And you really believe that ‘We The People’ can make a difference?

[00:14:22] Robin Bloomgarden: Well, it’s certainly better than all the other stuff out there, and certainly better than the two major parties. They don’t care about us at all. So, you know, why would you even want to work with them?

[00:14:38] Echo (Underground Echo): Well, yeah, ’cause you have to say that, like, let’s say you’re a staunch Democrat or a staunch Republican either way, and the other party is the one you’re blaming for everything going wrong. Well, what is your party doing about it?

[00:14:53] Robin Bloomgarden: Right? What have any of those people done for any of us at our end? You know, I mea , it’s been 40 years probably since the Democratic Party actually even pretended to care about the rest, the base. So it’s all about the people with the bucks now.

[00:15:16] Echo (Underground Echo): If you’re curious about ‘We The People’ in Lane County, read the platform, ask real questions and demand kitchen table answers, especially about siting oversight and cumulative impact. My thanks to Robin Bloomgarden for the clarity, the stubbornness, and the neighborly insistence that policy belongs to the people.

[00:15:35] Presenter: KEPW’s Underground Echo interviews West Eugene activist Robin Bloomgarden. You can hear the full interview with Echo and Robin Wednesday evening at 6 p.m., right here on KEPW 97.3, Eugene’s PeaceWorks Community Radio.