Resident wants county named after a different Lane.

Byline: COUNTY BEAT By Randi Bjornstad The Register-Guard

The county commissioners have gotten another letter from Eugene resident Peter Roberts, urging them to consider renaming Lane County for another famous Lane, and void the association with Gen. Joseph Lane, the county's pro-slavery, Indian-fighting namesake.

A couple of months ago, Roberts cited the precedent of King County, Wash., which changed its affiliation with a similarly objectionable historical figure to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. - without even having to change the stationery.

At the time, Roberts suggested swapping Joseph Lane for Franklin Knight Lane, no doubt a fine, upstanding man and former secretary of the interior partly responsible for starting the National Park Service. However, that Lane had no real affiliation with Oregon, much less Lane County.

This time, Roberts nominates Harry Lane - grandson of Joseph but apparently without the baggage - described in a 67-page collection of eulogies as a man with a magnetic personality and "fearless, with a pungent witty verbal style and a fondness for telling funny stories in which he was the dupe," Roberts writes. "He was dedicated to the issues of child labor, pure food and Indian rights."

Born in Corvallis in 1855, this Lane served two terms as mayor of Portland, raised money for victims of the 1906 earthquake and served four years of his term as a U.S. senator from Oregon before dying in San Francisco in 1917.

He reminds Roberts of another senator, Wayne Morse, after reading one eulogy, which said, "No caucus bound him. No one told him how to vote. He had only one master - his conscience."

So stalwart he must have seemed that after a newspaper printed that a man named Lane had been run down by a streetcar in Portland, one of Lane's acquaintances said to another, "No streetcar will ever run over Harry."

Lane change, anyone?

Moody's report leaves

county officials moody

In the good news/bad news department, Lane County's on thin ice with Moody's Investors Service, one of the Big Three credit-rating companies that evaluates the financial health of local governments and decides what interest rates they have to pay to borrow money.

That's the bad news, of course. On the brighter side, after its most recent evaluation, Moody's didn't downgrade the county yet - it just said the outlook for the future appears to be negative and could result in a downgrade in the next year or so.

The problem seems to be the county's dwindling reserve accounts, which by law must not dip below 5 percent of the general fund amount but have plummeted in recent years from healthy double-digit levels to just 7 percent.

In these tough times, Moody's said, it's unlikely that the county will be able to bring its reserves back up significantly - guaranteeing enough tax and other income to repay its debts - hence the prospect of a future downgrade.

For the moment, though, Lane County retains its "Aa" rating for issuing general obligation bonds, although with a "3" appended, which means it's at the bottom of the category, defined by Moody as offering "excellent financial security."

If it dips in the future to the "A" level, it will mean the county merely has "good financial security," like most of the state's other counties.

Only four counties in Oregon - Washington, Multnomah, Clackamas and Lane - currently enjoy "Aa" status now, and none rates the even higher "Aaa" designation.

Five-year anti-drug grant

aimed at county's youths

The use of alcohol and other drugs has been on the upswing in Lane County, but a new five-year Drug Free Communities grant may help turn those statistics around.

First-year funding for the program will be $100,000, and program coordinator Brinda Narayan-Wold says it "couldn't come at a better time."

The county will use the grant to improve its prevention services and get local media more involved in putting out anti-drug messages to influence children to avoid alcohol and drugs. It also will try to bolster the ability of the juvenile criminal-justice system to deal with young drug offenders.

For more information about the program, call 682-3817.

Randi Bjornstad can be reached at 338-2321 or [e-mail].