Politics & Government

Police reports show at least one of the four Ethiopian athletes who went missing after the World Junior Championships in Eugene last month planned to seek asylum. We checked in with an immigration lawyer to find out their chances of success.

Oregon Representative Peter Defazio is continuing a string of town hall meetings this week with stops Lane, Douglass, and Linn Counties.  

The US House is adjourned for summer break and that means lawmakers all over the country are back in their Districts meeting with constituents.  Oregon District 4 Representative Peter DeFazio is holding nine town hall meetings this week.  The stops include Roseburg on Tuesday; Lebanon, Albany and Corvallis on Wednesday; and Florence and Veneta on Thursday.

KLCC's Tripp Sommer speaks with Joseph Pietri, author of "The 15-Ounce Pound:Big Pharma's Plan to Patent Pot".

The city of Coos Bay voted 6 to 1 last week to enforce an existing ordinance prohibiting medical marijuana dispensaries within city limits.

Oregon Treasurer Ted Wheeler, the state’s banker, was in Eugene Tuesday.  In his first full term, the 51-year-old Democrat leads the bipartisan Retirement Savings Task Force studying how to improve retirement savings options for Oregonians.  Before presiding over the first in a statewide series of conversations on the topic, Wheeler stopped by the KLCC studios and spoke with KLCC's Claude Offenbacher.

Benton County is unsure how to manage an 18 mile railroad corridor it purchased late last year. The County is seeking public comment on the best use of land that extends from Monroe to just south of Corvallis.

Residents near Mount Pisgah are opposed to a plan by the City of Springfield to increase its Urban Growth Boundary. The group "No Industrial Pisgah" is meeting with two state lawmakers this week to find out if there's a way to prevent the UGB expansion.

Lane County is trying to be more open to the public by providing free access to emails and to meeting rooms.

Members of the public and the media can now go to the County Administrator's office and log-in to a computer terminal to read emails between the County Commissioners and the Administrator. The terminal displays messages in an email group collected when constituents contact their commissioners from the Lane County website. County Administrator Steve Mokrohisky says these emails have been available by request, for a fee, in the past.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Civil Rights Act. We celebrate it at a time when Oregon's population is not quite two-percent African-American.  A Portland State University professor is criss-crossing the state asking this provocative question: Why aren't there more blacks in Oregon?

It was a bittersweet commemoration as a packed auditorium listened to the Northwest Freedom Singers and heard Portland State University professor Walidah Imarisha says that in the 1840's, Oregon became the only U.S. territory with a racial exclusion law:

Even though a new Eugene City Hall is now in preliminary design phase, some Eugenians still have reservations.  Among these is architect Jerry Diethelm. Although having no direct involvement with the project, he thinks the proposed city hall is the wrong building in the wrong place.  He’s asked how his city hall vision differs from that of the City Council.  On July 18, John Rowell of Rowell-Brokaw architects, a principal designer of the new Eugene City Hall, was on KLCC discussing his firm’s plans.  That interview can be heard below this story.