Merkley hears Lane County businesses on rising costs, housing strain
Lane County business owners said diesel, fertilizer and vendor contracts are pushing up costs, while Merkley made housing supply his main answer.
Diesel, fertilizer and locked-in vendor contracts were the pressure points Lane County business owners brought to Sen. Jeff Merkley at Cafe Soriah in Eugene, where rising costs were already filtering into prices customers see and the bills owners have to pay.
Merkley met Friday afternoon, June 5, with small business owners and leaders from the Eugene Chamber of Commerce and the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce. Eight workers and members of the local business community took part. Merkley said he wanted to hear directly about the costs of diesel and fertilizer, the housing squeeze, and how SNAP affects small grocers and farmers, a reminder that the affordability problem reaches from farm fields to neighborhood storefronts.
Housing was the clearest policy answer Merkley offered. He said the biggest challenge is increasing supply to bring prices down, and he argued that more homes need to be built. “We have to produce a lot more housing,” Merkley said. He also tied the shortage to his long-running criticism of private equity in the individual housing market, saying that Wall Street’s role has made it harder for ordinary buyers and renters to compete.
Business owners pressed a different, more immediate problem: tariff uncertainty. Eugene Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Brittany Quick-Warner said many companies are locked into vendor contracts that stretch beyond price swings, leaving them with little room to renegotiate when their costs rise. Some businesses, she said, are absorbing extra expenses they cannot easily pass along. That kind of squeeze is especially hard on small operations, which often have to set prices months ahead and then live with the margin risk when supplies jump. Allison Straub, CEO of Burley, said she has seen pricing fluctuations from 0 to 145 percent, a range that makes it difficult to plan how to do business.
Customers are feeling the pressure too. Several business owners said spending has softened as households try to absorb higher prices for food, housing and other basics. Merkley linked the broader price surge to tariffs, inflation and the Iran war, underscoring how global instability is landing in Lane County in the form of higher bills.
The roundtable made clear that affordability here is not an abstract political slogan. It is the cost of diesel for a delivery truck, the price of fertilizer for a grower, the rent that keeps a worker in Eugene or pushes that worker out, and the contract terms that determine whether a storefront can survive another quarter.
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