Monday Mailing
Year 21 • Issue 9 3 November 2014 1. Astoria Tops West Coast Ports With $50 Million in Fish Landed in 2013 2. PSU's Transportation Group Gets New Name as it Continues National and Local Tasks 3. The American Planning Association's Community Planning Assistance Teams (CPAT) Program 4. Request for Proposals for the 2015 PSU Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop 5. Oregon Mileage Tax: ODOT Wants 5,000 Volunteer Drivers; 7 Things to Know About Program 6. America’s Mood Map: An Interactive Guide to the United States of Attitude 7. League of Oregon Cities – November Local Focus Now Online 8. 10 Step Guide to Fundraising 9. Rewriting the Rural Narrative – Recorded Webinar 10. On A New Shared Street In Chicago, There Are No Sidewalks, No Lights, And Almost No Signs 11. Let’s All Fry the Friendly Skies 1. Astoria Tops West Coast Ports With $50 Million in Fish Landed in 2013 A report from NOAA Fisheries Service shows Astoria, Oregon, topped West Coast ports in pounds of fish landed last year. REPORT: Read NOAA's report (PDF)
Quote of the Week: “To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.” --Douglas Adams Oregon Fast Fact: In Oregon it is illegal to use canned corn as fish bait
The report released Wednesday shows 159 million pounds of fish landed at the docks at the mouth of the Columbia River in 2013. The fish were valued at $50 million. Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife statistics show the leading species was Pacific whiting, used to make artificial crab. Other leading species were Pacific sardines, pink shrimp and Dungeness crab. Westport, Washington, was the leading West Coast port for value of fish landed with $65 million. The top fishing ports nationally were Dutch Harbor, Alaska, with 753 million pounds, and New Bedford, Massachusetts, at $379 million. 2. PSU's Transportation Group Gets New Name as it Continues National and Local Tasks Portland State University has renamed a center that addresses transportation issues. The group formerly known as OTREC (for the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium) has dropped the "O" and will go by TREC. The new acronym stands for "transportation research and education center." Page 1 of 4
TREC oversees PSU's work in the U.S. Department of Transportation's University Transportation Centers program, which has awarded PSU $30 million-plus since 2006. To access the full story, click here. 3. The American Planning Association's Community Planning Assistance Teams (CPAT) Program Do you know of a community that needs planning assistance? A place that lacks the resources needed to address specific planning-related challenges? The American Planning Association's Community Planning Assistance Teams (CPAT) program has helped a growing number of communities in recent years address planning needs through free technical assistance. The next application deadline for communities is December 4. Click here for additional information and direct questions to CPAT@planning.org. 4. Request for Proposals for the 2015 PSU Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop The course is intended to give students hands-on experience in conceiving, planning, and implementing a community-based planning project. Past year workshop groups have completed projects for a wide range of public agencies and community organizations. For examples of past projects, click here. If you are interested in having a project considered for the upcoming workshop contact Sy Adler at adlers@pdx.edu for an application by November 14, 2014. 5. Oregon Mileage Tax: ODOT Wants 5,000 Volunteer Drivers; 7 Things to Know About Program After 12 years of talking about replacing the gas tax, experimenting with new technologies and running pilot projects, the Oregon Department of Transportation says it's ready to launch a new payas-you-drive road tax. Check that, they're ready to launch a public trial of the program with 5,000 volunteers. On Monday, ODOT officials stopped in Portland as part of a statewide "listening tour" to gather public input on the first-in-the-nation proposal for a gas tax alternative. To access the full story, click here. 6. America’s Mood Map: An Interactive Guide to the United States of Attitude West Virginia is the most neurotic state, Utah is the most agreeable and the folks of Wisconsin are the country's most extroverted, a new study says. Take TIME's test to find out which state most suits you. For a country that features the word United so prominently in its name, the U.S. is a pretty fractious place. We splinter along fault lines of income, education, religion, race, hyphenated origin, age and politics. Then too there’s temperament. We’re coarse or courtly, traditionalist or rebel, amped up or laid-back. And it’s no secret that a lot of that seems to be determined by — or at least associated with — where we live. To access the full story and interactive mood map, click here.
Page 2 of 4
7. League of Oregon Cities – November Local Focus Now Online The current edition of Local Focus, the League of Oregon Cities monthly magazine, is now available online. This month’s edition focuses on transportation related funding. To access a free copy of Local Focus, click here. 8. 10 Step Guide to Fundraising Even though many dialogue to change efforts rely on volunteers and in-kind assistance to get started, it is essential to think about budgeting and fundraising from the beginning. Raising funds is related to every aspect of your program. Your ability to raise funds will increase as you expand your outreach, involve more people in the program and tell the story of the impact on your community. To access this 10 step guide, click here. 9. Rewriting the Rural Narrative – Recorded Webinar If you missed Ben Winchester's talk on population trends in rural communities, no worries. You can download a recording of the hour-long webinar that focuses on Ben's research on rural migration trends and the impacts they have on social and economic opportunity. While brain drain, the loss of 18- to 29-year-olds, dominates the conversation about rural population change, Ben's research shows a lesser known migration. A majority of rural counties are, in fact, experiencing brain gains as newcomers age 30-49 move in. Ben is a research fellow for the University of Minnesota Extension, Center for Community Vitality. To access the recorded webinar, click here. 10. On A New Shared Street In Chicago, There Are No Sidewalks, No Lights, And Almost No Signs Imagine a street with no sidewalks, no crosswalks, no curbs, no lane markings--basically no real distinctions between pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers at all. At first glance, that might seem like an extraordinarily unsafe street. But the city of Chicago is betting on its success as it redesigns a fourblock stretch of its uptown. The New York Times editorial board recently called the concept of shared streets a “radical experiment” for the city of Chicago, which plans to start construction on its first one on Argyle Street early next year. Yet the philosophy behind them--that by removing common street control features, street users will actually act less recklessly and negotiate space through eye-contact---is actually not all that new. Shared streets have been built and shown to be effective in reducing accidents in London already. In the U.S., shared streets exist in Seattle, Washington and Buffalo, New York. To access the full story, click here. 11. Let’s All Fry the Friendly Skies FinnAir has greased the wheels of the biofuel movement, recently flying an Airbus 330 from Helsinki to New York powered by a blend of recycled cooking oil and jet fuel. The occasion? The United Nations Climate Summit last month, which invited world leaders to push for new climate change initiatives.
Page 3 of 4
“We wanted to send a message to the UN and show that biofuel is a serious and credible alternative that can concretely reduce greenhouse gas emissions,”Kati Ihamaki, Finnair’s vice president of sustainable development, told Forbes.com. (A quick reminder: global air transport accounts for almost 700 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, or 2 percent of total manmade emissions.) As alternative fuel moves beyond its dropout-in-a-retrofitted-jalopy rep, some airlines are jumping on the bandwagon. In 2011, a Boeing 747-8 freighter made passage over the Atlantic on a mix of 15 percent camelina biofuel (camelina oil is a rising star on the sustainable energy scene) and 85 percent kerosene. A year later, Air Canada successfully flew the first-ever, 100 percent biofuel-powered civilian flight over Ottawa; a Lockhead T-33 trailed behind, collecting environmental impact data. To access the full story, click here.
Page 4 of 4