20 mm 022017

Monday Mailing

Year 23 • Issue 20 20 February 2017 1.

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Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax Under First Trump Budget Chips & Sawdust — Part One State Land Board Inches Forward With Sale of The Elliott State Forest Rural Counties Need a Longterm Solution As Federal Program Expires (Opinion) Supporting Entrepreneurial Economies - Fri Mar 17, 2017, 9:00am 10:30am Toolkits Available for Community Projects Am I Rural? – Tool Riding the Trail to Revitalization: Rural and Small Town Trail-Oriented Development Outdoor Rec Industry Defends Public Lands Free Federal and State Tax Returns for AmeriCorps Members MIT Open Courseware on Urban Studies and Planning

1. Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax Under First Trump Budget WASHINGTON — The White House budget office has drafted a hit list of programs that President Trump could eliminate to trim domestic spending, including longstanding conservative targets like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Legal Services Corporation, AmeriCorps and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.

Quote of the Week: Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence. ~Vince Lombardi Oregon Fast Fact: Oregon was founded on Feb. 14, 1859. It was the 33rd state admitted into the union, and in 1860 was home to over 54,000 residents. Today, around 4 million people call Oregon home. Only 10 Oregonians call the town of Greenhorn home.

Work on the first Trump administration budget has been delayed as the budget office awaited Senate confirmation of former Representative Mick Mulvaney, a spending hard-liner, as budget director. Now that he is in place, his office is ready to move ahead with a list of nine programs to eliminate, an opening salvo in the Trump administration’s effort to reorder the government and increase spending on defense and infrastructure.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Chips & Sawdust — Part One Occasionally, there is a point in the history of a place that creates a before and after moment — an event that, in the aftermath, changes a place so significantly it renders it a totally different place from what it was before, forever. Like what the oil pipeline did to Alaska.

Oregon had such a game-changing event as well, and it was not the spotted owl or the so-called timber wars. The event that created a sea change in Oregon from what it was, to what it became, was the recession of the early 1980s. It was Oregon’s “great recession,” and it changed Oregon forever by triggering a relentless mechanism of change through economic development.

To access the full story, click here.

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3. Don't State Land Board Inches Forward With Sale of The Elliott State Forest SALEM — The sale of the 82,500-acre Elliott State Forest became more of a reality after Tuesday’s State Land Board meeting.

In a 2-1 decision, recently-elected state Treasurer Tobias Read and Secretary of State Dennis Richardson voted against Gov. Kate Brown to move forward with the sale of the state forestland to Roseburg-based Lone Rock Timber Company and the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians.

However, the decision won’t be finalized until the board’s April meeting.

While the Elliott was initially an “informational item” on the agenda, Read made a motion to amend the protocol to allow the state to repurchase up $25 million in acreage for conservation. He suggested that land should be turned into a state park or wildlife management area.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Rural Counties Need a Longterm Solution As Federal Program Expires (Opinion) The Secure Rural Schools program, which provided funding to timber dependent communities hit hard by declining harvests, is often described as a "lifeline" to rural Oregon counties with forest lands under federal ownership. Yet the program expired in October 2015, resulting in a 90 percent revenue reduction to counties struggling to balance budgets and still provide minimum service.

The program's expiration follows years of declining and uncertain payments. And overall, the subsidies have failed to address the underlying economic and social problems facing our counties.

For our federal representatives, the only solution is to create good-paying jobs and generate revenue through science-based forest management.

Sixty percent of Oregon's forests and timber lands are owned by the federal government. Many of our rural counties are dominated by lands that can't be taxed, transferred, nor developed for private industry. Though recreation and tourism jobs have been created since the 1990's, those jobs have not replaced the income that was earned in the woods and in the mills and generate little or no revenue to support county services. In fact, those jobs cost the government more than they bring in.

Tourism and recreation significantly increase demand for law enforcement, road maintenance, search, rescue and emergency services on or near the federal lands. Because the federal lands are not contributing dollars to rural counties to provide these services, the burden is placed on the backs of county taxpayers.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Supporting Entrepreneurial Economies - Fri Mar 17, 2017, 9:00am - 10:30am Rural America was front and center in the 2016 national election. Media headlines focused attention on our nation’s acute rural challenges – the decline of critical sectors like mining and manufacturing, technology-driven worker dislocation in those industries and agriculture, inadequate job opportunities for dislocated workers, infrastructure challenges, community health crises, and more.

But a deeper understanding of rural America reveals a companion picture – one where innovation and collaborative local leadership are turning challenges into opportunities. Rather than wait on solutions from outside, many rural places are building on their existing assets and designing creative economic development approaches that drive toward more broadly shared prosperity while creating and retaining jobs.

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America’s Rural Opportunity is a six-part series of panel conversations that invites policymakers, economic and community development practitioners, and business and philanthropic leaders to engage in real dialogue around advancing a rural opportunity agenda. The series is presented by the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group with the Rural Development Innovation Group. Over the coming year, the series will:   

Uncover the complex reality and diversity of America’s rural places, economies, businesses, development intermediaries – and people.

Raise understanding about what works in Rural America by exploring enterprising economic development approaches that tap a range of opportunities to build wider and more enduring prosperity – and strengthen productive rural/urban connections.

Identify what the private, public and philanthropic sectors can do differently to improve rural prospects.

For more information, click here.

6. Toolkits Available for Community Projects Have an idea for a service project – like getting a group together to volunteer each week at a homeless shelter, or reading to kids at your local library? Learn how to turn your volunteer idea into a successful service project using our do-it-yourself toolkits. Includes projects such as community gardens, Audit Your Home, How to Support Military Families, etc.

To access the toolkits, click here.

7. Am I Rural? – Tool Determine whether your specific location is considered rural based on various definitions of rural, including definitions that are used as eligibility criteria for federal programs.

The Am I Rural? tool was updated in March 2016. For questions about the update or to share feedback, please contact us at 800-270-1898 or info@ruralhealthinfo.org.

To access the Am I Rural site, click here.

8. Riding the Trail to Revitalization: Rural and Small Town Trail-Oriented Development A major challenge facing many rural American communities is strengthening and diversifying the economy. Limited opportunities and resources threaten economic vitality and a community’s quality of life. Often this is perpetuated by a steady decline with low property values creating a low property tax base, impacting schools, services and infrastructure.

Making a place welcoming, beautiful, and usable for the community while also creating an attractive setting for new business investment is a key step in development and ensuring a vibrant future for communities. This is no small task and there are a variety of economic development and revitalization tactics, however creating access to high quality multi-modal recreation trails is one tool that has been shown to be a powerful economic engine for small towns and rural communities.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Outdoor Rec Industry Defends Public Lands While the Bundy family’s exploits in Nevada and Oregon have drawn new attention recently as trials proceed, the Sagebrush Rebellion has been advancing steadily on another front in Utah. Over the past few years, the state’s congressional representatives have spent over $500,000 studying the Page 3 of 5

viability of transferring federal lands to state control, promoted a $14 million lawsuit to try to force transfer, and introduced a slew of bills to gut federal oversight and protections of public lands. Now, a battle is brewing between two of the state’s most powerful forces: its conservative political leadership, which harbors a century-old distrust of federal land agencies, and its massive outdoor recreation industry, which depends on those same public lands for its survival.

In the past six weeks, the Utah delegation has proposed legislation to roll back public-lands protections in unprecedented ways, rattling the conservation community nationwide. On Dec. 29, the day after President Barack Obama announced the designation of Bears Ears National Monument under the 1906 Antiquities Act, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said he would do everything in his power to “undo” the decision. Lee didn’t stop there: “I am then going to do what I can to repeal the Antiquities Act so that future President Obamas can not do this to rural communities ever again,” he wrote in a blog post. In January, Republican state representatives also went after national monuments — Gregory Hughes introduced a resolution to rescind Bears Ears, and Mike Noel proposed shrinking Grand Staircase-Escalante, which former President Bill Clinton created in 1996.

To access the full story, click here.

10. Free Federal and State Tax Returns for AmeriCorps Members Each year, AmeriCorps Alums partners with MyFreeTaxes.com to offer free federal and state tax return filings to alums and current members. Year after year, this free service provides AmeriCorps alums with millions of dollars in tax refunds. This service has proved to be valuable to thousands of alumni who are looking to put a few extra dollars in their pocket around tax time or a free guide to filing taxes on your own online.

Instructions are noted below. It's fast! It's free! It's effective! So start today and get your tax return back at no cost to you.   

STEP 1: Visit bit.ly/FreeTaxesforAlums to get started!

STEP 2: Learn if you’re eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit and other credits.

STEP 3: If you made under $64,000 in 2016, you can file your federal and state income taxes securely online with our exclusive link to tax preparation.

11. MIT Open Courseware on Urban Studies and Planning The Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) is a department within the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. It is comprised of four specialization areas (also referred to as Program Groups): City Design and Development; Environmental Policy and Planning; Housing, Community and Economic Development; and the International Development Group. There are also three cross-cutting areas of study: Transportation Planning and Policy, Urban Information Systems (UIS) and Regional Planning.

Since its inception in 1933, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning has consistently remained one of the top planning schools in the country. Now totaling close to 60 teaching faculty members (more than half of whom are full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty), it has the largest planning faculty in the United States.

The Department is organized around the following core questions of engagement and progressive change: "Can we make a difference in the world? Can we design better cities? Can we help places grow more sustainably? Can we help communities thrive? Can we help advance equitable world development?" Our mission statement is as follows: Page 4 of 5

We are committed to positive social change. Our moral vision is translated into professional education in distinct ways:    

We believe in the abilities of urban and regional institutions to steadily improve the quality of life of citizens.

We emphasize democratic decision-making involving both public and private actors, and acknowledge the necessity of government leadership to ensure greater social and economic equality.

We foster a positive approach to technological innovation as a major force of social change.

We trust that the built environment can meet the needs of diverse populations and serve as a source of meaning in their daily lives.

For more information, click here.

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