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Monday Mailing

Year 23 • Issue 16 23 January 2017 1. Women's March Crowd Fills Portland Streets: 'This is What Democracy Looks Like' 2. Heart & Soul Talks: Strengthen Your Community through Engagement - Thursday, January 26, 2017 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm 3. Better Bikeways Associated With Higher Home Values 4. Biketown Logs 160,000 Trips in Months Since Launch 5. Government Plan for Klamath Wildlife Refuges Violates Law, Conservation Groups Say 6. The Biggest Step Forward for Oregon’s Historic Places in 20 Years 7. Approaches to Accelerating Restoration: There Is No One Size Fits All 8. Nature Cities: Wellness and Public Space 9. Transportation Seminar: Travel-Time Reliability and Equitable Bike Share - Friday, January 27, 2017 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm.

10. League of Oregon Cites Open Data Portal 11. How Mormon Principles and Grassroots Ideals Saved Utah 1. Women's March Crowd Fills Portland Streets: 'This is What Democracy Looks Like' They came from near and far. They came and they stood and they sang and they strode through the soggy streets of downtown Portland on Saturday.

And they came in unexpected numbers.

Quote of the Week: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” ~Anais Nin

Oregon Fast Fact: In 1905 the largest long cabin in the world was built in Portland to honor the Lewis and Clark expedition.

The gathering, billed as the Women's March and attended by crowds estimated as high as 70,000 to 100,000 -- well beyond the 30,000 that organizers expected as of Thursday -- was not just for women, and it wasn't just for marching. The massive throng that congregated at Tom McCall Waterfront Park on Saturday was no monolith and the causes represented were as diverse as the rally's participants.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Heart & Soul Talks: Strengthen Your Community through Engagement - Thursday, January 26, 2017 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm Deep community engagement gives local leaders the courage to take risks that lead to positive change. The Orton Family Foundation pioneered the community development method Community Heart & Soul based on that premise. On this call, you’ll hear how three leaders went beyond a "check the box" approach to engagement, working with residents to create ambitious plans that have led to dramatic and lasting results in their towns.

Speakers:--Jim Bennett, city manager, Biddeford and past president of the International City/County Management Association (ICMA).

Community engagement led the city to buy and tear down an incinerator in the downtown, spurring major revitalization. Jim has an impressive history of public service in Maine, beginning at the age of 21 Page 1 of 5

as an elected municipal official. Over his 35 years of municipal service, the communities he has served have received a number of recognitions, including All-American City designation. He has been recognized by ICMA for several outstanding programs implemented under his direction as well as award the Manager of the Year by Maine Town and City Managers Association.

--Mike Bestor, former city manager, Golden, Colorado and ICMA member. Empowered by the input of more than 2,000 local residents, city staff revamped development review guidelines to ensure growth aligns with what residents want for their town’s future.

--Kirsten Sackett, community development director, Ellensburg, Washington. Kirsten led a Community Heart & Soul project in Cortez, Colorado that got a diverse group of residents participating in local government and built bridges to underrepresented communities. She liked the results so much she’s doing the same thing in Ellensburg.

Presented in partnership with ICMA. To register for this webinar, click here.

3. Better Bikeways Associated With Higher Home Values Proponents of advanced bikeways will point out a growing body of research on these facilities’ safety and benefits for cycling. They can now add another benefit: higher home values.

Research led by Jenny Liu of Portland State University looked at property around advanced bikeways in Portland, defined as bicycle boulevards, protected bike lanes and buffered bike lanes. She found positive effects on property values close to one of these bikeways and an even stronger effect where the network was denser.

Liu presents her research Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C. Learn more or download the research paper.

For single family home sales, being a quarter mile closer to an advanced bikeway translated to a $686 premium, while increasing the density by a quarter mile represented a $4,039 premium. For multifamily homes, the effect of being close to a bikeway wasn’t statistically significant on sale price, but increasing the density of bikeways translated to $4,712 of value.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Biketown Logs 160,000 Trips in Months Since Launch More than 38,000 people have used Portland's Biketown bike-rental program since it launched in July, taking more than 160,000 trips.

Most of the trips were short hops of less than two miles. Biketown and the Portland Bureau of Transportation released the numbers Wednesday, along with results from a user survey that shed some light on how Portlanders are using the program.

Of the 2,400 users surveyed:  27 percent were from outside the metro area, while 73 percent were locals.  26 percent said they had used the bike-share system instead of driving.  64 percent said they were biking more because of the program.

The bureau also said the program, which was created with a $2 million federal grant but receives no ongoing public funds, was having economic benefits. Of tourists using Biketown, 71 percent said they used the system to reach shopping destinations or restaurants, and 69 percent of local users said they were more likely to patronize businesses near a station.

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To access the full story, click here.

5. Government Plan for Klamath Wildlife Refuges Violates Law, Conservation Groups Say Three conservation groups filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday alleging a management plan for five wildlife refuges in Southern Oregon and Northern California doesn't do enough to restore and protect key habitat for tens of thousands of migrating waterfowl.

The Audubon Society of Portland, Oregon Wild and WaterWatch filed suit in a federal court in Medford challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's comprehensive plan to protect the wetlands in the Klamath Basin.

The government leases some land on two of the five refuges to commercial agriculture companies in the area, and the lawsuit alleges the farmland carved out of the refuges contributes to drought conditions and poses significant issues for migratory birds.

"We are simply asking that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service obey the law," Sean Stevens, Executive Director of Oregon Wild said in a statement. "The agency is legally required to prevent commercial activities, like leasing refuge lands to private agribusiness, from harming fish and wildlife. We simply want them to do their job."

To access the full story, click here.

6. The Biggest Step Forward for Oregon’s Historic Places in 20 Years For the last 22 years, there has been virtually no meaningful statewide protection of historic resources in Oregon. That may now change. Restore Oregon and a committee of preservationists convened by the Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) have proposed new rules establishing an important baseline of protection for historic places in Oregon. This would protect over 11,000 National Register properties and provide new options for local governments to preserve the historic buildings, homes, and neighborhoods that characterize their communities.

The proposed rules would:  Mandate demolition review for all 11,594 properties listed in the National Register of Historic Places.  Enable the option to create local historic districts by clarifying that only a simple majority of property owners need to consent to that designation. This provides a “preservation lite” option in communities like Portland, who apply additional regulation such as design review to National Register districts.  Clarify that taking an inventory of historic buildings is not a form of designation. This frees cities to update their historic resource inventories without requiring owners to consent.  Allow local jurisdictions to apply additional protections to National Register listed properties or districts, but only after a public process. This gives property owners a role in customizing design guidelines or other regulations for their district.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Approaches to Accelerating Restoration: There Is No One Size Fits All The Blue Mountains Restoration Strategy is focused on addressing the overstocked forest conditions on the Ochoco, Umatilla, and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests. Similarly, many other forests are impacted by a confluence of stressors, including uncharacteristic wildfire and outbreaks of insect and disease, which are exacerbated by a changing climate. Restoration of these landscapes is critical to maintaining and enhancing ecological and community benefits provided by productive, resilient Page 3 of 5

forests. If we want to promote a healthy and productive forest, we must consider and experiment with different approaches that address this dilemma while meeting our obligations to be consistent with laws, regulations, and policies.

The Forest Resiliency Project is one attempt to accelerate the pace and scale of restoration planning.

This project is an experiment that tests what is needed for a forest manager to make an informed decision, using the best available science and modeling methods to inform a large landscape-scale analysis that discloses resource impacts from proposed activities. This project was intentionally designed at a large scale, across 1.2 million acres (total) on portions of the Ochoco, Umatilla, and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Nature Cities: Wellness and Public Space The idea of rewilding started out as a movement to conserve, restore, and reconnect natural areas, and has expanded to how we reintegrate ancient practices into our modern lives. From a flat-footed squat to full emersion in nature to structured programs like ReWild Portland, the idea of letting go of some of our domestication to reconnect with nature is compelling. From a city planning perspective, the human rewilding ideas that interest me the most are the inspiration of cities, towns and villages that are making nature more accessible to our everyday habits. And the paybacks for those efforts. When nature is integrated into urbanism, wellness surges.

“Within five minutes in the trees, our heart rate goes down and within 10 minutes our brain re-sets our attention span,” according to Dr. Nooshin Razani. This is increasingly important because of our connected, always-on habits. Our wired lifestyle offers up constant distractions – much of which didn’t exist a scant decade ago. So we have evolved few coping mechanisms to deal with the subsequent hormones: cortisol from stress and adrenaline from our fight-or-flight response to technologies’ constant jolts.

Nature does more than soothe, though. A walk in a park in comparison to beside a congested arterial road decreases the neural activity in the part of our brain that ruminates, “repetitive thought focused on negative aspects of the self, a known risk factor for mental illness.” Today half of earth’s people live in cities, which have been shown to increase mental illness and depression. Integrating nature into cities at every scale – the neighbourhood, district, and corridor – in ways that dare us to live outdoors has never been more essential to our wellbeing.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Transportation Seminar: Travel-Time Reliability and Equitable Bike Share - Friday, January 27, 2017 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm.

Speaker: Travis Glick, Portland State University Civil & Environmental Engineering Estimating Reliability Indices and Confidence Intervals for Transit and Traffic at the Corridor Level As congestion worsens, the importance of rigorous methodologies to estimate travel-time reliability increases. Exploiting fine-granularity transit GPS data, this research proposes a novel method to estimate travel-time percentiles and confidence intervals. Novel transit reliability measures based on travel-time percentiles are proposed to identify and rank low-performance hotspots; the proposed reliability measures can be utilized to distinguish peak-hour low performance from whole-day low performance.... Read More

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Speaker: Steven Howland, Portland State University Urban Studies & Planning - Current Efforts to Make Bike Share More Equitable: A Survey of System Owners and Operators The number of public bike share systems has been increasing rapidly across the United States over the past five to ten years. To date most academic research around bike share in the U.S. has focused on the logistics of planning and operationalizing successful systems. Investigations of system users and impacts on the local community are less common, and studies focused on efforts to engage underserved communities in bike share are rarer still. This paper utilizes a survey of representatives from 55 U.S. bike share systems ... Read More Watch online: Use this link on the day of the seminar Attend in person: Room 204 of the Distance Learning Center Wing of the Urban Center at PSU 10. League of Oregon Cites Open Data Portal Maps, dashboards, charts and other visualizations telling the story of Oregon’s cites… all accessible via one very useful platform. All data is sourced from the American Community Survey.

To access the League’s Open Data Site, click here.

11. How Mormon Principles and Grassroots Ideals Saved Utah Imagine getting 90 municipalities in 10 counties in one of the nation’s fastest growing regions to get on board for a 20-year land use planning effort intended to conserve water use, promote clean air and avoid the destruction of open spaces by slashing housing lot sizes, encouraging higher-density development and imposing new taxes to build a light rail network and commuter rail system from scratch. Imagine that it worked so well the effort expanded statewide.

You might assume it must have started in a liberal bastion like Portland, Oregon or Burlington, Vermont, where people are proud to be tree huggers and planning isn’t a dirty word. But the most ambitious and successful long-term land-use planning effort in American history is happening in ultra-conservative Utah, a state with powerful ranching, mining and energy interests and a reflexive distrust of top-down government solutions. And it was led not by state officials, but by a bipartisan alliance of business, industrial, religious, political and civic leaders, working from plans crowdsourced from tens of thousands of Utah citizens and executed on a completely voluntary basis by their local governments.

To access the full story, click here.

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