Monday Mailing 012720

Monday Mailing

Year 26 • Issue 20 27 January 2020 1. Bayocean: The Lost Resort Town That Oregon Forgot 2. Rural Neighborhood Chooses Off-Grid Microgrids Instead of Paying the Utility (Michael Hoch) 3. Urban-Rural Ambassador Program Bridges The Divide 4. Gov. Brown Task Force Proposes 30 Ways To Improve Oregon's Outdoor Recreation 5. Some West Coast Rural Areas Prefer A Law And Order Approach To Homelessness 6. The Hottest New Thing In Sustainable Building Is, Uh, Wood (Michael Hoch) 7. Oregon Democrats Want To Trim Controversial Tax Break For Investors 8. Native Species or Invasive? The Distinction Blurs as the World Warms 9. Oregon Graduation Rates Hit 80%, An All-Time High. Here’s The Story In 6 Districts.

10. REPORT– Rural Development Hubs: Strengthening America’s Rural Innovation Infrastructure

1. Bayocean: The Lost Resort Town That Oregon Forgot Quote of the Week:

"Fail fast. Fail often... The most talented people in the world have bad ideas. That's a good thing to learn."

- Rashida Jones

Oregon Fast Fact #10

The hazelnut is Oregon's official state nut. Oregon is the only state that has an official state nut. The hazelnut is also known as the filbert.

If you drive to the very edge of Oregon and then get out and walk, you can stand where developers built Bayocean, what they called the “Atlantic City of the West.”

It rose up in the early 1900s on a narrow sand spit that forms the western edge of Tillamook Bay.

Built at a time when the West Coast was clamoring for the refined lifestyle of the Eastern Seaboard, Bayocean had a hotel, a bowling alley, a neighborhood of homes and even a small railroad. But then, in what amounts to a slow-motion disaster, it was swept away.

In the 1950s, the fate of Bayocean was known by just about every Oregonian. The mere mention of the town conjured images of abandoned buildings, thievery, broken dreams and civilization reclaimed by the sea.

But now we’ve mostly forgotten and Bayocean comes as news to many Oregonians.

Take longtime Portland resident Jerry Sutherland. In his free time he hiked the coast, along a pristine spit of land that protects Tillamook Bay from the Pacific Ocean. There was nothing for miles except for dunes, scotch broom and fresh air. Then when he retired from his job installing air-conditioning, Sutherland had time to stop off at the

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nearby Tillamook County Pioneer Museum, where he learned that under that spit, lay the remains of an entire town.

“It was amazing,” said Sutherland, who’s writing a history of Bayocean.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Rural Neighborhood Chooses Off-Grid Microgrids Instead of Paying the Utility

For the Silvies Valley Ranch outside of Burns, Oregon, off-grid microgrids for each of 600 homes under development makes more financial sense than paying the local utility $7 million to run utility lines to the ranch.

The eco-friendly ranch and luxury resort, formerly a dude ranch, is located on 140,000 acres in eastern Oregon where visitors and homeowners won’t be allowed to drive gas-powered cars.

Instead, they’ll park their cars and will be given electric golf carts for transporation, said Eric Lobdell, vice president of sales for Humless, the company providing the equipment for the microgrids.

The ranch chose to work with Humless about seven months ago, after talking to the utility about connecting the new homes to the utility grid.

“They were told that they would have to pay for it, then pay for the power they used, and that the utility company would then own the lines that Silvies paid to have run to their own property,” said Lobdell.

Each home, ranging in size from 2,000 to 6,000 square feet, will have its own solar off-grid microgrid. The systems will consist of solar panels on each home coupled with a Humless Universal System, a battery system of anywhere from 30-70 kWh, depending on the size of the home.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Urban-Rural Ambassador Program Bridges The Divide

College students studying Oregon’s urban-rural divide knew they would find contrasts between Portland and Eastern Oregon. What they didn’t expect was how much the two regions have in common, from high rents and the lack of affordable housing to the popularity of farmers’ markets.

That newfound awareness was a key goal of the 2019 Urban-Rural Ambassadors Summer Institute: Gain a broader understanding of what Oregonians have in common and the challenges they face — regardless of where they live — and develop skills to help Oregonians collaboratively work across the urban-rural divide.

This is the second year of the program, which brought together 14 students from Eastern Oregon and Portland State universities for the intensive 10-day course in September.

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“I think a lot of us were prepared to see differences, but we weren’t necessarily prepared for all the similarities,” PSU student Ashley Heyberger said.

Heyberger moved to Portland about seven years ago from rural central California, so she didn’t feel much of a cultural shock as the class visited La Grande, Joseph and Pendleton. Through the course, she saw parallels between rural California and Oregon. She found even stronger parallels between urban and rural life within Oregon — especially rent prices.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Gov. Brown Task Force Proposes 30 Ways To Improve Oregon's Outdoor Recreation Oregon’s outdoors is already great, but could be a little bit better.

That's according to a group tasked with recommending ways to improve the state’s outdoor recreation in ways big and small.

In a draft report released Thursday, the 33-person task force proposes a broad set of ideas that include funding search and rescue, creating an Oregon Outdoors Pass and getting more diversity in the state’s wild spaces.

“Things are going remarkably well for the most part, but some people and places are being left behind,” said the draft report, created after a series of meetings and open houses convened by the Governor's Task Force on the Outdoors.

The goal is to recommend to Gov. Kate Brown policies, legislation and initiatives that would boost Oregon's recreation economy, improve resources, and boost outdoor participation, especially among youth and underserved communities.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Some West Coast Rural Areas Prefer A Law And Order Approach To Homelessness

hilly winds and hail don’t bother Buckshot Cunningham, who lived outside without a shelter for years until he came across this tiny house village in Southern Oregon.

“This is my umbrella,” he says as he shrugs on the hood of his coat, walking into a late January winter storm.

Hope Village is run by Rogue Retreat, a nonprofit serving low-income people in Medford. It’s a collection of about a dozen small cottages with a communal kitchen, dining area and bathrooms.

It’s what housing advocates call a low-barrier shelter, in that there are few rules and requirements to get in. There are some behavioral rules — you can’t be violent or do drugs on the premises — but you don’t have to be sober when you come in, and you can bring your family, partner, or dog.

“Twelve years of drug and alcohol” is how Cunningham says he got here. But there’s more to his story: a career as a firefighting smokejumper left him with physical disabilities. He lost his son to suicide, then his wife to cancer.

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“And I just went downhill from there,” he says.

Homelessness is often seen as an urban issue, but rural areas along the West Coast are also struggling with large homeless populations. Many of these areas don’t have the resources for shelters like the Hope Village, but even when they do, they’re sometimes reluctant to build them.

To access the full story, click here.

6. The Hottest New Thing In Sustainable Building Is, Uh, Wood

Architects, builders, and sustainability advocates are all abuzz over a new building material they say could substantially reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the building sector, slash the waste, pollution, and costs associated with construction, and create a more physically, psychologically, and aesthetically healthy built environment.

The material is known as, uh, wood.

Trees have been used to build structures since prehistory, but especially after disasters like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, wood came to be seen as unsafe and unstable relative to the two materials that have since become staples of the construction industry worldwide: concrete and steel.

However, a new way of using wood has put the material back in the spotlight. The hype is focused on structural timber or, as it’s more popularly known, “mass timber” (short for “massive timber”). In a nutshell, it involves sticking pieces of soft wood — generally conifers like pine, spruce, or fir, but also sometimes deciduous species such as birch, ash, and beech — together to form larger pieces.

Yes, the hottest thing in architecture this century amounts to “wood, but like Legos.”

Mass timber is a generic term that encompasses products of various sizes and functions, like glue-laminated (glulam) beams, laminated veneer lumber (LVL), nail-laminated timber (NLT), and dowel-laminated timber (DLT). But the most common and most familiar form of mass timber, the one that has opened up the most new architectural possibilities, is cross-laminated timber (CLT).

To access the full story, click here.

7. Oregon Democrats Want To Trim Controversial Tax Break For Investors

Oregon lawmakers will consider trimming a controversial capital gains tax break when they convene in Salem next month, after news reports last year raised questions about it.

At issue is whether the opportunity zone program, part of President Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul, truly incentivizes redevelopment in blighted areas or is gravy for investors in projects that would happen even without the incentive.

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Last year, Bloomberg Businessweek dubbed Oregon “Tax Breaklandia” because state officials designated the entirety of downtown Portland as an opportunity zone.

The Oregonian/OregonLive’s 2019 review of 1,000 pages of public records revealed that state leaders enthusiastically supported the tax break despite lacking answers to two critical questions: How much tax revenue the state could lose and what economic benefits the investments might yield for Oregonians.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Native Species or Invasive? The Distinction Blurs as the World Warms

species is transforming the distribution of biodiversity — and challenging fundamental tenets in conservation policy and science. Are policymakers, land managers, and conservationists prepared?

In recent years, scientists have documented countless species shifting their ranges toward the poles, higher into the mountains, and deeper into the seas in response to the changing climate.

Deciduous shrubs of willow, birch, and alder have spread into the low Arctic tundra. Brightly colored tropical parrotfish and rabbitfish have arrived in the temperate kelp forests of the eastern Mediterranean. Elkhorn corals from the Caribbean now sprout in thickets off the coast of Galveston, Texas.

The trend is expected to continue as the climate crisis deepens, with species that societies rely upon for a wide range of economic, cultural, and recreational value shifting their ranges to survive. “The entire trajectory of natural capital, from aesthetic to economic,” says University of Florida wildlife ecologist Brett Scheffers, “is going to be moving.”

The coming exodus, Scheffers and other scientists say, will require a transformation in the way we think about wildlife management and conservation — and a reevaluation of the traditional native-alien dichotomy that has governed it. For decades, conservation biology has characterized the movement of species into new habitats as potential invasions of alien species with the capacity to threaten local ecosystems and already resident species, leading to the formulation of policies to reflexively repel the newcomers. This approach, and its underlying classification of wild species as either “native” (and thus worthy of protections) or “alien” (and thus likely not) has been the subject of growing controversy in recent years.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Oregon Graduation Rates Hit 80%, An All-Time High. Here’s The Story In 6 Districts.

Oregon’s graduation rate has hit 80%, an all-time high since the state tightened how it tracks the rate more than a decade ago. That represents an increase of 600 students in the Class of 2019 who received a diploma, compared to 2018.

Graduation rates for students of color continue to increase, with almost every race/ethnicity group increasing 2%. Other student groups with a history of struggling to graduate saw rates increase, including a 4-point improvement for migrant students.

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ODE credits a dedicated effort to provide graduation specialists for students in migrant education programs across the state.

It’s all one more step toward the state’s goal of getting 100% of students successfully through high school, by 2025.

And with an infusion of funds later this year via the state’s new Student Success Act, districts hope to offer students more opportunities and support, where those have been lacking or missing.

The stories of each district show how important such targeted, on-the-ground supports can be for helping students learn.

To access the full story, click here.

10. REPORT– Rural Development Hubs: Strengthening America’s Rural Innovation Infrastructure

Rural America has caught the nation’s attention. Our nation is full of questions about it. The media, voters, public officials, investors and neighbors are asking: “What is rural? What is happening there? Who lives there? Why? Why do they think the way they do? How are they doing? What can be done about it?”

“We know a lot about what works. It takes strong leadership and effective intermediaries to pull the paint from the palette and do the work over time.” Justin Maxson, Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation This report addresses questions often asked by caring people who shepherd resources that could be channeled to advance rural people and places — foundation leaders, individual investors and government officials. “We’d like to do more for rural America,” they offer. “But who can we work with? And besides that, what works?”

The research behind this report is motivated by a specific version of that “what works” question: “What actions could shift mindsets, construct or revise systems and policies, and build capacity to advance rural community and economic development in a way that improves equity, health and prosperity for future generations?”

Rural practitioners have answers to these questions. So we looked to them — combining fresh research with what the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group (CSG) continues to learn from development practitioners through our work in rural America. Since 1985, CSG has helped connect, equip and inspire local leaders as they build more prosperous regions and advance those living on the economic margins. More than 75% of our work has been in rural America.

We have worked with rural doers from nearly every state, both on the ground and at peer gatherings that we have organized to help leaders from different places learn from and advise each other. In turn, CSG has gleaned insight from the people doing the best work to build and rebuild our nation’s rural economies.

For access the full report, click here.

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