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Monday Mailing

Year 22 • Issue 03 28 September 2015 1. Updated Pendleton Transportation Plan will Consider Walking, Biking, Riding 2. Power Up: Panasonic Building 65MW Solar Farm in Remote Southeast Oregon 3. LNG Opponents Ask Brown to Intervene 4. Running a Food Hub: A Business Operations Guide 5. La Grande Man Pushing for Secession to Idaho 6. Children of Rural and Minority Oregonians Suffer, Study Says 7. The Most Popular Type of Home in Every Major American City, Charted 8. The Mainstream Appeal of Outlaw Street Art 9. 40+ Sources of Funding for Walking and Biking Improvements 10. 24 Commentaries on Race in Food System Work 11. Sage Grouse Listing Decision: What Oregon, National Leaders are Saying 1. Updated Pendleton Transportation Plan will Consider Walking, Biking, Riding Thousands of people drive Pendleton’s streets every day, but only a fraction of that number walk, bike or use mass transit around town.

The city aims to change that by updating its transportation system plan with a focus on those modes of transit.

Having last updated the plan in 2007, which was centered around cars, much has changed in Pendleton since then, including St. Anthony Hospital’s move from eastern Pendleton to the south.

Quote of the Week: "The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others" ~Gandhi Oregon Fast Fact: Oregon grows 98 percent of the hazelnuts in the United States. There are more than 3,755,000 hazelnut trees in Oregon, worth $49.5 million, grown on 30,000 acres, mostly in western Oregon.

The city received a grant from the Oregon Department of Transportation to fund the planning process, which the city used to hire four transportation consulting firms through June 2016.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Power Up: Panasonic Building 65MW Solar Farm in Remote Southeast Oregon Panasonic has agreed to buy solar panels from Hillsboro-based SolarWorld USA to build out a 65 megawatt solar energy farm in southeast Oregon.

The project will break ground in Malheur County in 2016, according to a release put out by SolarWorld.

Alvin Scott, planning director for Malheur County, said at least 13 commercial solar projects have received conditional approval in the county, though none have yet to break ground. Panasonic indicated to Scott that it would start construction in spring 2016.

To access the full story, click here.

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3. LNG Opponents Ask Brown to Intervene Confident that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will eventually issue a license for Oregon LNG’s $6 billion liquefied natural gas terminal and pipeline on Warrenton’s Skipanon Peninsula, opponents are calling on Gov. Kate Brown to take a stand against the project.

The commission’s environmental staff held two public comment meetings at the Clatsop County Fair & Expo Center Monday, allowing concerned citizens to weigh in on the agency’s draft environmental impact statement for the Oregon LNG project. The nearly 1,000-page draft statement, released in August, concluded that the proposed project will result in adverse environmental impacts on water quality and fish and wildlife habitat, but that the company could minimize and mitigate these impacts to less-than-significant levels.

The commission will review all oral and written comments and respond to them in the final environmental impact statement, scheduled for release in February. The commission will consider the final statement when deciding whether to authorize Oregon LNG to proceed with development in Warrenton.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Running a Food Hub: A Business Operations Guide The USDA report, Running a Food Hub: A Business Operations Guide, was just released and provides ample resources to the ins and outs of food hub operations. The second report in a 3-part series, this 'how to' guide provides in-depth guidance on starting and running a food hub enterprise, including classifications, operations, marketing, products and servicing, and risks.

Check out the recently released report, or take a look at Volume 1: Lessons Learned From the Field.

5. La Grande Man Pushing for Secession to Idaho Residents in eastern Oregon and Washington have discussed breaking away from their more liberal neighbors to form a new state for years, but a new twist has been added to the conversation: Why form a new state when the rural counties could just join Idaho instead?

Ken Parsons, a 72-year-old farmer from La Grande, said the idea was floated offhand by someone else in a letter to the editor in the La Grande Observer. After thinking about it for a couple of months and discussing it with friends, Parsons said he has decided to try to get input from residents of neighboring counties, including Umatilla and Morrow County.

“It’s an intriguing idea,” he said.

As Parsons sees it, rural Oregon and Washington residents who are tired of being outvoted by the population centers in Portland and Seattle would be better understood by politicians from the more rural, conservative Idaho. Legislators born and raised in the most urban parts of their state “don’t have any idea,” he said, of how environmental lobbyists often hurts farmers, hunters and others in more rural parts of the state.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Children of Rural and Minority Oregonians Suffer, Study Says Oregon parents fall into two camps: White or Asian parents in the Portland metro area, who are overwhelmingly well-educated and well-off, and everyone else, whose economic circumstances tend to be bleak.

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That is a key finding of a new study by Children First For Oregon that dug into how children's economic circumstances differ according to their parents' standing: where they live, their racial and ethnic backgrounds and how much education they completed.

Two very different sets of parents share the same economic limitations. First, those living outside the Portland metro area, who are largely white. Second: Latino, black Native American and Pacific Islander parents, who are more concentrated in the Portland area. Both are largely consigned to lowand medium-low wage occupations, the study found.

To access the full story, click here.

7. The Most Popular Type of Home in Every Major American City, Charted The detached, single-family home — far and away the most common style of housing in America — is rare in Washington, D.C. Only about one in 10 homes inside the District is designed this way, with a private front door to the city, maybe a yard in the back, some buffer space keeping the neighbors at bay. Windows all the way around!

Instead, we live differently here: with meager lawns (if we have any at all), common stoops, shared walls (or ceilings), and echoes of our neighbors' dubious TV choices.

The District is a city of row homes and modest apartments, which makes the feel of the place — and your housing options here — significantly different from what you'd find in New York or Chicago or Kansas City To access the full story, click here.

8. The Mainstream Appeal of Outlaw Street Art When it comes to street artists, Shepard Fairey is about as establishment as it gets. Even if you don’t know his name, you’d probably recognize at least a couple of his images: the much-imitated “Hope” poster that came to symbolize Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and the “Obey” series that features the enigmatic face of the wrestler Andre the Giant. Fairey, 45, began his career by plastering his work around Providence, Rhode Island, in the dead of night, but now he has pieces in the collections of several major museums and has designed album covers for pop acts such as the Black Eyed Peas.

The artist was invited to Detroit earlier this year by Dan Gilbert, the founder and chairman of Quicken Loans and one of the driving forces behind the reinvention of the city’s downtown. Gilbert tapped Fairey to create an 18-story mural for the One Campus Martius building, home to the mogul’s Bedrock Real Estate Services company. Some observers noted the irony of Gilbert inviting a street artist to decorate his property, when he has been aggressive in pursuing and punishing people who tag his holdings.

Fairey, for his part, may not have been willing to color entirely within the lines. When he came to Detroit to do the job, several other works in his signature style showed up wheat-pasted around town. These had not been commissioned, solicited, or sanctioned by the owners of those buildings, many of which were abandoned. Now the city is prosecuting the artist on felony charges of malicious destruction of property, claiming that he caused as much as $30,000 in damage. The rap could earn him 10 years behind bars.

To access the full story, click here.

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9. 40+ Sources of Funding for Walking and Biking Improvements As communities look to build networks of safe places for people to walk and bike, funding is a central question.

The Oregon Transportation and Growth Management program has compiled a resource page listing over 40 possible sources of local, state, federal and private funding for such projects, with links to much more information. To access this listing of resources, click here.

To access an eight-page PDF overview, click here.

10. 24 Commentaries on Race in Food System Work It is no secret that despite the best intentions of many, the food movement manifests levels of whiteness and privilege that tend to exclude significant parts of society, and thus does not address the needs of those who are excluded. To be effective in addressing issues like food insecurity, urban agriculture, food policy, small and new farmer expansion, and access to farmland, markets, and capital, organizations need to address lack of racial equity and lack of diversity in organizational leadership.

The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development (JAFSCD) has just posted a compilation of 24 commentaries on race and ethnicity in food systems work. This is available without a subscription HERE. This set could make good reading for students, nonprofit board members, food policy council members, and others working to "bring good food to others" (Guthman, 2008). We also hope the collection stimulates research into this understudied topic.

JAFSCD is published in partnership with The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future; the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia; the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University; and the Food Systems Initiative at the University of Vermont.

11. Sage Grouse Listing Decision: What Oregon, National Leaders are Saying Federal fish and wildlife officials announced Tuesday the greater sage grouse will not be protected under the Endangered Species Act. The news was met with cheers from Oregon lawmakers and ranchers, who had pushed hard to preemptively conserve the bird in hopes of staving off a listing.

Meanwhile, some environmental groups condemned the decision as a move that shields industry from new regulations while failing to adequately protect the bird.

Here's what they had to say: Oregon Gov. Kate Brown "Oregonians have reason to be very proud of the work done by partners supporting healthy Oregon ecosystems, rural communities, and economies. The work of the SageCon partnership and our action plan helps our wildlife and its habitat while also addressing threats to the vitality of our farms and ranches, outdoor recreation, energy development, and other sectors."

To access the full story, click here.

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