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Monday Mailing

Year 20 • Issue 10 11 November 2013 1. Hollywood in Cascade Locks: Filming For ‘Wild’ Starts in October 2. Columbia River Crossing: Tolling Questions Could Scuttle Bridge Project 3. Largest Civil Disobedience In Walmart History Leads To More Than 50 Arrests 4. These Photos Showcase The Wonders of The World You Can’t See 5. Supporters: Not Enough Votes To Dismantle Damascus 6. Nov 19 Geek Lunch-Performance Architecture 7. Klebes Joins Main Street Effort 8. FREE E-BOOK: Introduction to Permaculture Design and Sustainable Living 9. When Main Street is a State Highway-Webinar 10. These Are Some of the Most Amazing Views of Earth You’ll Ever See 11. Portland Works to Combat 'Distracted Walking 1. Hollywood in Cascade Locks: Filming For ‘Wild’ Starts in October Hollywood will take its place at the popular counter at East Wind Drivein in Cascade Locks.

Reese Witherspoon will be in town next month for filming of “Wild,” a true story that takes place partly in Cascade Locks, including its finale.

Quote of the Week: “The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their own.” ~ Disraeli Oregon Fast Fact: The state of Oregon has one city named Sisters and another called Brothers. Sisters got its name from a nearby trio of peaks in the Cascade Mountains known as the Three Sisters. Brothers was named as a counterpart to Sisters.

Albert Choi, owner of East Wind, confirmed that his restaurant will be a film location starting Oct. 6. The small but busy restaurant is at the heart of WaNaPa Avenue.

“It’s a great opportunity for this small and scenic community,” said Holly Howell, special events coordinator with the Port of Cascade Locks, which is also working with producers. Howell said location scouts have been in the area throughout late summer.

The Fox/Searchlight production is based on Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir of her solo hike the length of Pacific Crest Trail.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Columbia River Crossing: Tolling Questions Could Scuttle Bridge Project When Washington pulled out of the Columbia River Crossing bridge project, Oregon lost not just an equal funding partner, it also lost Washington's experienced toll-collection organization, which was being counted on to generate half the project's $2.6 billion cost.

Oregon needs to get into the toll collection business to fund the Columbia River Crossing bridge project. But Oregon may lack the legal authority to collect tolls from Washington residents.

Columbia River Crossing

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So Oregon is plunging ahead with plans to create its own tolling organization, which the Oregon Department of Transportation estimates could cost as much as $56 million.

But the Oregon tolling plan faces steep hurdles.

It's unclear to what extent Oregon can pursue collections efforts against Washington drivers who don't pay. Under existing Washington law, Oregon's toll enforcers would not be able to reach into Washington and wield their most powerful collection tool – blocking drivers' attempts to renew vehicle registrations.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Largest Civil Disobedience In Walmart History Leads To More Than 50 Arrests Surrounded by about 100 police officers in riot gear and a helicopter circling above, more than 50 Walmart workers and supporters were arrested in downtown Los Angeles Thursday night as they sat in the street protesting what they called the retailer's "poverty wages."

Organizers said it was the largest single act of civil disobedience in Walmart's 50-year history. The 54 arrestees, with about 500 protesting Walmart workers, clergy and supporters, demonstrated outside LA's Chinatown Walmart. Those who refused police orders to clear the street after their permit expired were arrested without incident. Those who fail to post $5,000 bail would be jailed overnight, Detective Gus Villanueva, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, told The Huffington Post.

Their primary demand to Walmart: pay every full-time worker at least $25,000 a year.

One of the protesting Walmart workers, Anthony Goytia, a 31-year-old father of two, said he believes he will make about $12,000 this year. It's a daily struggle, he said, "to make sure my family doesn't go hungry."

"The power went out at my house yesterday because I couldn't afford the bill," Goytia told HuffPost.

"I had to run around and get two payday loans to pay for my rent from the first" of the month.

"Yesterday we went to a food bank."

To access the full story, click here.

4. These Photos Showcase The Wonders of The World You Can’t See When we think of stunning photographs, we tend to picture landscapes on an epic scale. Equally awe-inspiring--and perhaps more difficult to shoot--is the incredibly small. Since 1974, the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition has celebrated vistas that are only visible when magnified hundreds of times. This year's winner is Wim van Egmond, curator of the Micropolitan Museum. (The museum is wonderfully known as "The Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimetre.") Van Egmond took first place with a 250x magnification of Chaetoceros debilis, a marine plankton that forms a helical chain.

To access the photo series, click here.

5. Supporters: Not Enough Votes To Dismantle Damascus Damascus voters were calling for the city to disincorporate by a 2-to-1 margin, according to election results from Clackamas County. But the effort was falling short of the raw vote total it needed.

Disincorporating a city requires getting more than 50-percent of all the registered voters on your side — not just 50 percent of participating voters.

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By Wednesday, the disincorporation effort was falling short of the vote total it needed to meet that threshold.

Supporters in a news release said they didn’t have the votes to dissolve the city.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Nov 19 Geek Lunch-Performance Architecture November's Geek Lunch speaker is GTA Member Stephanie Hartman with Catalyst- Performance Consulting for a talk on "Performance Architecture: A graphic framework to explain human behavior like an Engineering process."

Stephanie will share her framework, called the Performance Architecture, that she recently presented to the Society for Consulting Psychology and the Organization Development Network. Her framework helps problem solvers to describe, explain and address undesirable human behavior as well as identify and influence desirable human behavior. "Undesirable human behavior" can include things such as customers aren't buying enough of your services, employees aren't doing their job effectively or your key supplier is always late. See her video for more: http://youtu.be/CTjTj0M8Lmg Details: Tuesday, November 19 at noon China Gorge, 2680 Old Columbia River Dr., Hood River Free for all to attend; no-host lunch.

7. Klebes Joins Main Street Effort The Dalles Main Street has a new face at the helm; New Hampshire native Matthew Klebes will be serving as the downtown program’s coordinator for the next 11 months.

Klebes is part of the RARE program — Resource Assistance for Rural Environments — that has helped The Dalles build programs and services by bringing in energetic college graduates to help build community capacity. The Dalles currently hosts two other RARE participants, one at MidColumbia Economic Development District and another at Mid-Columbia Housing Authority.

“It’s part of our professional learning experience through RARE to provide services to the community and to give back,” Klebes said.

Klebes has office space at The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce, but the Main Street program is a separate organization charged with developing a lively downtown environment. He and his wife recently returned from serving in the Peace Corps. His wife is a teacher and he worked with children, youth and families.

“Specifically, children in conflict with the law,” Klebes said.

He said his biggest achievement there was to help build a youth rehabilitation center. Previously, youths who committed crimes were either sentenced to the city jail with adults or returned to families that may put them at further risk.

To access the full story, click here.

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8. FREE E-BOOK: Introduction to Permaculture Design and Sustainable Living We're thrilled to announce the availability of our FREE e-book, Introduction to Sustainable Living and Permaculture Design!

For a limited time, you can download the e-book FREE online: http://www.permaculturedesigntraining.com/ebook/ The Regenerative Leadership Institute is committed to taking the wisdom of permaculture mainstream, and we're thrilled to be able to offer this e-book freely to the larger community.

We hope you enjoy and look forward to offering more materials in the months and years to come.

9. When Main Street is a State Highway-Webinar “Main Streets” are iconic features of our western cities and towns. In many places, they serve as the principal corridors for local economics, culture and civic life, and as such are hugely important–not only to economic vitality and quality of life, but to the very identity of the communities they traverse.

But how should we manage the conflicts that emerge when Main Street is also a state highway? This webinar will provide a framework for addressing the conflicts inherent in the various roles we ask our main streets to perform, from carrying regional traffic to serving as parade routes, from handling heavy trucks to providing access to storefront businesses. We will review how main streets have been damaged by “improvements” like stripping on-street parking to provide more lanes, converting main street and a parallel corridor to “one-way pairs,’ or removing street trees and narrowing sidewalks.

Using examples from around the country we will describe potential mitigation and repair strategies.

Are bypasses ever the right answer? Is it possible to convert one-way pairs back to two-way operation? We also will review strategies and techniques for involving the public and state Departments of Transportation in consideration of alternatives that can meet state objectives for regional mobility while at the same time protecting the beating heart of our communities.

Featuring: Jim Charlier, AICP; and Vickie Jacobsen of Charlier Associates When: Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 12-1pm, Mountain Standard Time To register for this webinar, click here.

10. These Are Some of the Most Amazing Views of Earth You’ll Ever See I have looked at a lot of different views of Earth from space — taken by astronauts, satellites and other spacecraft — so I was not expecting to be all that impressed by the images collected into a new book called Earth from Space. But I was very wrong.

There are a few of the familiar shots that even many people who aren’t obsessed with this kind of imagery may recognize, like deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon, the wild growth of urban Las Vegas and the creeping shrink of glaciers. But there are so many more of places I had never seen: mangroves in the Gulf of Bengal, pre-and-post disaster Chernobyl, shrimp farms in Vietnam, an extinct volcano in Algeria, and lots more. The book has 150 images, and it was really hard to choose just 12 to show you (the publisher Abrams was very generous and let me choose the images, but wisely drew the line when I told them I had 40 favorites).

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The author, Yann Arthus-Bertrand (an environmental activist who also published the book Earth from Above), arranged the scenes into themes including pollution, desertification, urban sprawl, farming and natural disasters. Often, trying to support themes with imagery requires including images that may be relevant and descriptive but aren’t also beautiful. Not so here.

I’ll admit I didn’t read much of the text, which includes captions and interviews with activists, scientists and other experts. I was too busy admiring the Earth. If you have read this far, it’s time for you to stop and check out a few of the amazing images in this book.

To access the photo series, click here.

11. Portland Works to Combat 'Distracted Walking’ For years, transportation safety officials have worked to combat distracted driving -- the risky behavior that comes when people try to operate a car and a cell phone simultaneously.

But transit officials in Portland have launched a new effort to focus on an area that's getting increasing attention in traffic safety spheres as well: distracted walking.

This month, TriMet, the transit agency serving the Portland area, will outfit part of its bus fleet with extra devices thanks to a $400,000 Federal Transit Administration grant designed to study technology that can help prevent pedestrians -- often engrossed in their cell phones -- from walking into the path of a moving bus.

A study released by Ohio State University earlier this year estimated that more than 1,500 pedestrians nationwide were treated in the emergency room due to injuries sustained while using a cell phone while walking in 2010. That figure doubled since 2005, and it could double again by 2015, according to the report. Moreover, researchers say the real number of distracted walking accidents is probably much higher, since not every injured person goes to the hospital or admits to having been using a phone.

READ: More stories about transportation Meanwhile, in a separate study from University of Washington, researchers set out to observe distracted pedestrians in the field by monitoring Seattle's 20 most dangerous intersections. They concluded that people who texted while walking were four times more likely than other pedestrians to do something risky while crossing the street, like jaywalking or not looking both ways.

In Portland, the focus on pedestrian safety comes in part because of a tragedy. On a late night in 2010, a TriMet bus made a sweeping left turn and smashed into five pedestrians, killing two of them.

The pedestrians had the right of way, according to a 2011 court ruling, and the transit agency and bus manufacturer ultimately paid a $4 million settlement.

To access the full story, click here.

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