Monday Mailing - January 11, 2021

RARE Monday Mailing Year 27 | Issue 17 11 January 2021 1.

Quote of the Week:

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“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”

- Dalai Lama

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Aurora Airport Backers Win Legal Ruling in Battle with Land-Use Foes Ashland Benefits from Buy-Local Campaign Oregon Just Ended Excessive Parking Mandates on Most Urban Lots Oregon Irrigators Gain Access to Willamette Dam Water Keeping It Rural After the Fires: Making Way for Tomorrow’s Healthy Forests Could Agrivoltaics Feed Our Demand for Clean Energy?

Neighbors Influence Coastal Landowners’ Decisions to Armor Shorelines Against Erosion, Rising Seas Why Few Farmworkers Isolate in California’s Free COVID-19 Hotel Rooms Small Towns Provide Fertile Ground for Smart Urbanism PODCAST: Tribal EMS Rescue Serves Rural Eastern Oregon

Aurora Airport Backers Wins Legal Ruling in Battle with Land-Use Foes

Oregon Public Broadcasting Backers of an Aurora State Airport expansion project south of Wilsonville have won a key legal ruling in a battle involving the reach of Oregon’s system for protecting farmland from urban development.

Oregon Fast Fact The only Blockbuster Video store left in the world is in Bend, Oregon.

More info.

The Oregon Board of Land Use Appeals ruled Wednesday that the airport’s master plan – which calls for extending the runway by 1,000 feet – does not need to prove that it meets the state’s land-use goals. The decision was a defeat for 1000 Friends of Oregon, a group dedicated to protecting strict landuse controls, and for the cities of Wilsonville and Aurora.

Bruce Bennett, an aircraft broker at the airport involved in the litigation, said the ruling vindicated the position of airport backers that the project did not raise significant land-use concerns.

Read the full story.

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2. Ashland Benefits from Buy-Local Campaign Oregon Business Drew Gibbs, who runs Winchester Inn, Alchemy Restaurant and Smithfields Restaurant in Ashland, was tired of waiting for the government to step in.

The initial loan from the Paycheck Protection Program was enough to keep his business afloat and pay his employees in the short term. But after the initial loan, no help came.

“We used the loans to pay our people and that was a really great feeling, but the problem was you only had eight weeks to spend the money. The program was designed very poorly,” says Gibbs.

Gibbs reached out to Dana Preston, membership and business development director at the Ashland Chamber of Commerce, with an idea that would eventually become the Love Ashland Local Campaign. The initiative is designed to encourage people to shop at local businesses.

Read the full story.

3. Oregon Just Ended Excessive Parking Mandates on Most Urban Lots Sightline Institute The movement to prioritize housing for people over storage for cars has reached a new high point in the Pacific Northwest.

In the first action of this kind by any US state, Oregon’s state land use board voted unanimously last week to sharply downsize dozens of local parking mandates on duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhomes, and cottages.

Many cities have reduced or eliminated parking mandates in recent years, including Oregon’s largest city, Portland.

But Oregon’s rule, which stems from its landmark 2019 legalization of so-called “middle housing” options statewide, is a much more unusual state-level action, affecting 58 jurisdictions simultaneously. And because middle housing will soon be legal throughout those 58 jurisdictions—the vast majority of the state’s urban lots—it’s arguably the biggest state-level parking reform law in US history.

Read the full story.

4. Oregon Irrigators Gain Access to Willamette Dam Water Capital Press Farmers, under new federal law, have gained access to about 328,000 acre-feet of water stored behind 13 dams in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

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However, they’d be wise to wait until further regulatory processes are finished before installing irrigation structures to take advantage of the newly available water, experts say.

“We’re not going to encourage people to invest money on-the-ground until we have a better sense of what we’re talking about long-term here,” said Mary Anne Cooper, vice president of public policy with the Oregon Farm Bureau.

Congress approved a plan to split nearly 1.6 million acre-feet of water in Willamette Valley reservoirs among irrigators, cities and in-stream flows in a broader, $1.4 trillion spending bill that became law in the final days of 2020.

Read the full story.

5. Keeping It Rural The Other Oregon With its deep blue water and scenic mountain backdrop, Wallowa Lake is one of Eastern Oregon's most beloved and iconic natural places.

That's why residents have spent nearly a decade fighting to protect 1,791 acres of the lake's glacier-formed East Moraine from development.

Earlier this year, a public-private partnership including the Wallowa Land Trust, Wallowa County, Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, Wallowa Resources and the Trust for Public Land successfully purchased the property, which the county intends to preserve as a working forest.

The multi-year effort is just one example of how land conservation projects defend a variety of public values in rural Oregon — from habitat and water quality to agriculture and recreation.

Read the full story.

6. After the Fires: Making Way for Tomorrow’s Healthy Forests The News Guard About 360,000 acres of private forestlands were among the million acres that burned in Oregon during the Labor Day wildfires. Over the next year or so, Oregonians can expect to see trucks carrying scorched timber off private forestlands and bringing tree seedlings and planting crews onto them.

Assessments show the wind-driven fires burned unevenly across the landscape. Some stands were completely incinerated, leaving no merchantable wood. In other places, trunks were scorched but the trees still hold some value.

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Repairing access roads, falling hazard trees, and replanting are expensive costs to landowners. And while post-fire logging captures some remaining timber value on burned lands, the majority of acres burned had not grown trees large enough to go to a mill or produce revenue for landowners.

“Sadly, the Labor Day fires of 2020 laid waste to far too many acres of beautiful and productive forestland that Oregonians prize,” said Mark Kincaid, Vice President of Timber Resources for the family-owned Lone Rock Timber based in Roseburg. “Now that the smoke has cleared, an urgent and robust recovery effort is needed to remove dead trees, which are fuel for future fires, and replant the future generation of forest.”

Read the full story.

7. Could Agrivoltaics Feed Our Demand for Clean Energy? pv magazine Using land for both solar photovoltaic power and agriculture could provide 20% of total electricity generation in the United States, according to a new paper by Oregon State University researchers.

Wide-scale installation of agrivoltaic systems could lead to an annual reduction of 330,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. while “minimally” impacting crop yield, the researchers said.

Agrivoltaics provide a “rare chance for true synergy: more food, more energy, lower water demand, lower carbon emissions, and more prosperous rural communities,” said Chad Higgins, an associate professor in Oregon State’s College of Agricultural Sciences and the senior author of the paper published in the journal Sustainability.

Read the full story.

8. Neighbors Influence Coastal Landowners’ Decisions to Armor Shorelines Against Erosion, Rising Seas The News Guard Neighbors play an influential role in private oceanfront landowners’ decisions to protect their shorelines from erosion and rising sea levels, which could lead to excessive armoring of the coastline, a new analysis from Oregon State University shows.

Researchers studied 25 years of decisions by private coastal property owners in Oregon to better understand what drives landowners’ decisions to armor their shorelines – a process of adding stacks of boulders, or riprap, to slow erosion along beaches, dunes or bluffs.

“Imminent risk of erosion is a driving factor, but we also found that decisions by your neighbors affect your decisions in a big way,” said Steven Dundas an environmental and RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 4 of 6

resource economist in Oregon State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences and the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station in Newport, Oregon.

“If a neighbor takes action, it triggers concern about the risk a property owner faces as well as fear of a spillover effect,” Dundas said. “If my neighbor armors, will that push more waves onto my property and increase my risk? This is the human dimension of those decisions.”

Read the full story.

9. Why Few Farmworkers Isolate in California’s Free COVID-19 Hotel Rooms CalMatters Despite a heavy toll of COVID-19 among California’s farmworkers, who often live in crowded homes, Newsom’s Housing for the Harvest program has made just 81 hotel reservations for isolation or quarantine as of Dec. 16. Given pervasive fear among farmworkers of using governmental programs, are Newsom’s hotel rooms the wrong answer to a persisting problem?

Read the full story.

10. Small Towns Provide Fertile Ground for Smart Urbanism Greater Greater Washington The term "urbanism" brings to mind big cities and major infrastructure projects, but across the United States, small towns are quietly implementing complete streets projects that improve livability, mobility, and safety for their residents. In Hopewell, Virginia, the success of the city's recent push to improve outdoor recreation shows that small towns can practice urbanism too—sometimes more effectively than larger cities where projects get bogged down in bureaucracy and held back by competing interests.

Taking cues from the National Complete Streets Coalition, Wyatt Gordon writes that Hopewell's leaders are developing a complete streets plan for their city that aims to connect residential and commercial districts, increase available pedestrian infrastructure, and foster more active lifestyles. The initiative, stemming from the city council's 2015 passage of the Healthy Eating, Active Living (HEAL) resolution, has dual goals to facilitate healthier lifestyles for Hopewell residents and to stimulate economic development. City Councilmember Johnny Partin sees benefits in putting health and safety at the core of city projects, saying that investment in pedestrian and bike infrastructure is "essential to making sure everyone can enjoy our streets in safety."

Read the full story.

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11. PODCAST – Tribal EMS Rescue Serves Rural Eastern Oregon Oregon Public Broadcasting Before last summer, the nearest ambulance service to the Fort McDermitt PaiuteShoshone Reservation in Malheur County was 74 miles away. That meant if tribal members needed emergency medical care, they’d experience long response times and then have to pay large ambulance bills. But in June 2020, Ron Eagleye Johnny started the Fort McDermitt Tribe EMS Rescue, a government-funded service that is located on the reservation. It also serves people in the surrounding area. Johnny joins us to talk about providing emergency medical services in rural Oregon.

Listen to the full story.

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