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Monday Mailing

Year 22 • Issue 21 15 February 2016 1.

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Financial Planning for Disasters Webinar and Workbook Brown Withdraws Resilience Officer Nominee National Good Food Network Webinars Climate Change Poses Threat to Key Ingredient in Beer, NOAA Warns Oregon LNG’s Final Environmental Review Pushed Back Affordable Housing Bills Encounter Farmer Objections Three Very American Reasons We’re Still So Unhealthy Op-Ed: Is that milk past its 'sell by' date? Drink it anyway.

The Bicycle as a Tool of Social Justice City, County Support Affordable Housing Bill Malheur Refuge Occupation Sparks Fears of Incursion in Neighboring County

1. Financial Planning for Disasters Webinar and Workbook Regions across the United States are faced with preparing for and responding to an increasing number of natural, man-made, and technological disasters. Given recent natural disasters, localities are taking steps to become more physically resilient; however, many are unprepared for how these financial costs will impact long-run sustainability and quality of life.

Quote of the Week: "There is more to life than increasing its speed." ~Mahatma Gandhi Oregon Fast Fact: The Nike "swoosh" logo was designed by University of Oregon student Carolyn Davidson in 1964 -- four years after business undergrad Phil Knight and track coach Bill Bowerman founded the company they originally called Blue Ribbon Sports. Ms. Davidson was paid $35 dollars for her design.

In particular, this webinar helps participants consider their local governments’ financial vulnerability as well as their capacity to respond to future natural disasters based on research and lessons learned responding to tropical natural disasters along the Gulf Coast of the United States. Further, joint financial vulnerabilities between local governments in a region were identified and strategies provided for how individual local governments can increase financial capacity that improves financial resiliency for the overall region.

To access the “Financial Planning for Disasters” webinar and workbook, click here.

2. Brown Withdraws Resilience Officer Nominee Salem - Gov. Kate Brown has withdrawn her nominee for a new state resilience officer position after her office determined there were inadequate votes in the Senate to confirm him.

Legislators created the position in 2015 to oversee and centralize policy guidance of the state’s plan for reducing risks and improving recovery from the next catastrophic Northwest Cascadia subduction zone earthquake and potentially corresponding tsunamis.

Brown’s nominee, Derek Smith, a former CEO of Clean Energy Works, had no experience in disaster response or recovery.

“When I saw that nominee, I scratched my head,” said Rep. Julie Parrish, R-West Linn. “I’m not sure how she chose this name out of a laundry list of people who have the skills to do the job.”

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Parrish is a member of the House Committee on Veterans and Emergency Preparedness that worked on the bill that created the resilience officer.

To access the full story, click here.

3. National Good Food Network Webinars The National Good Food Network offers free monthly interactive webinars that give you the opportunity to learn and connect with on-the-ground practitioners and experts. Their website also offers archives of past webinars available for viewing, and information and registration for upcoming webinars.

Please note: NGFN webinars take place the third Thursday of each month, 3:30-4:45 ET (unless otherwise noted).

To access National Good Food Network Webinars, click here.

4. Climate Change Poses Threat to Key Ingredient in Beer, NOAA Warns As any beer lover knows, hops are a key ingredient in beer. But now, climate change poses a threat to hops production, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The U.S. is the second largest hops-producing country in the world. But almost all of the nation’s commercial hopyards are located in just three states: Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Washington alone produces nearly three-quarters of all the nation’s hops. In 2015, an estimated 71 percent of U.S. hops were grown in Washington, 15 percent in Oregon and 11 percent in Idaho, according to data from Hop Growers of America.

Growers in states across the U.S. are increasingly planting commercial hopyards to meet the craft beer industry’s voracious demand. But all of the other 47 states’ hops acreage make up less than 3 percent of total hops acreage in the U.S. To access the full story, click here.

5. Oregon LNG’s Final Environmental Review Pushed Back Federal government sought more information from company Opponents and supporters of Oregon LNG’s terminal and pipeline project proposed for Warrenton’s Skipanon Peninsula will have to wait at least another few months for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to release the final environmental review of the $6 billion project.

The commission originally planned to release the final environmental impact statement Friday but has pushed back the date to June 3.

In December, the commission’s environmental staff requested additional information from Oregon LNG in response to comments on the draft statement, but the energy company didn’t fully respond until late January To access the full story, click here.

6. Affordable Housing Bills Encounter Farmer Objections SALEM — With advocates for the poor lamenting Oregon’s “affordable housing crisis,” lawmakers are considering altering land use laws to allow more home-building.

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The proposals have encountered resistance from agriculture and conservation groups, which claim cities should focus on building within existing “urban growth boundaries” rather than expanding onto farmland.

Young and beginning farmers face a problem similar to that of urban residents who can’t find affordable housing, as farmland ownership is often financially out of reach, said Peter Kenagy, a farmer from Benton County.

“We also have an affordable farmland issue,” Kenagy said during a Feb. 8 hearing on Senate Bill 1575.

Among other provisions, SB 1575 would “expedite” the process of expanding urban growth boundaries to create more affordable housing, which critics say would create communities without readily accessible services and transportation.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Three Very American Reasons We’re Still So Unhealthy Guns, drugs and motor vehicle crashes account for half of the life-expectancy gap between men in the United States and other high-income countries, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

For years, it's been known that U.S. life expectancy trails that of people in other high-income countries, despite the fact that we spend more on health care per person than anyone else in the world. American men die at 76 years of age and American women at 81, about 2.2 years earlier than their counterparts in a dozen other high-income countries, according to 2012 data. Efforts to understand why have often focused on chronic disease, obesity, smoking or access to health care -traditional health issues that might trim years off Americans' lives compared with others.

But Andrew Fenelon, a researcher with the National Center for Health Statistics, decided to look at the role that factors other than chronic diseases could play in the disparity, reasoning that a person whose life is cut short in their 30s from a drug overdose or a gunshot wound would have a bigger effect on average life expectancy than someone who dies in their early 70s of a heart attack.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Op-Ed: Is that milk past its 'sell by' date? Drink it anyway.

My father used to keep food in the refrigerator for days, even weeks after the “best by” date, so long as it looked and smelled OK. My mom, by contrast, went out to buy a new carton of milk as soon as the date passed. Often there would be two containers of milk in our refrigerator: the half-empty one my dad was committed to finishing, and the new one my mom had purchased, out of fear that she might get sick if she drank my dad's past-date milk.

Scenes such as this play out in households across the country. One person dutifully follows best-by, sell-by and use-by date labels on packaged and processed food while another jeers at them.

According to one study, more than 90% of consumers report throwing away past-date food because of food safety fears. But the truth is that these dates are not intended to communicate safety information. Instead, they signal a manufacturer's estimate of how long food will taste its best.

Sometimes the dates are set based on consumer taste tests, but often they're just a guess.

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In 2013, the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Natural Resources Defense Council published a report, “The Dating Game,” that tied food waste to date labels, and revealed that the dates are not federally regulated and do not indicate food safety. The Food and Drug Administration, which has the power to regulate date labels, has chosen not to, precisely because they are not related to safety. Food scientists say that not a single food safety outbreak in the U.S. has been traced to a food being consumed past date. (What are outbreaks traced to? Generally, to pathogens that may have contaminated the food during processing, or to “temperature abuse” such as leaving raw chicken in a hot car, or to air exposure that encourages mold. These are not problems that date labels currently address.)

To access the full story, click here.

9. The Bicycle as a Tool of Social Justice International Winter Bike to Work Day goes down this Friday, February 12. Picture high-fiving, Spandex, and pancakes and you’ll get the gist of the event. Happenings of this ilk will be dropping throughout the year to celebrate the bicycle-commuter-life as the healthier-mode-of-transportationlife. But the two-wheeler can be articulated to be more than just a vehicle. It can be a tool to spread social justice in our cities. The avenues of opening up justice are numerous; I'll focus here on the necessity to marginalize the automobile.

Philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich was fascinated by technology. Forty years ago he was arguing that the automobile, rather than a tool of freedom, contributed to entrenching mobility hierarchies.

The car is at the sharp tip of the pyramid; all other transportation modes can get sucked under its tires. Where we've continued to allow the design of our cities to worship the automobile, Illich might have seen a monopoly, or worse, a dictatorship. He saw cities as subservient to this machine rather than an expression of people.

Illich couldn't have forecasted that motor vehicle crashes are one of the leading cause of death for those aged one to 34. Nor could he have fathomed that the use of a technology while driving could become such an epidemic. Distracted driving is the number one leading cause of car accidents in America. Drivers who use a hand-held device are four times more likely to get into a car accident than those who don't, and individuals who text are 23 times more likely to get into an accident.

To access the full story, click here.

10. City, County Support Affordable Housing Bill Hood River City and County have penned support for an inclusionary zoning Senate bill, which targets affordable housing development.

Inclusionary zoning — a land use policy that allows local governments to require affordable housing units to be built alongside market-rate housing — has been illegal in Oregon since 1999, but many Hood River elected officials want to change that.

City Council sent out a letter supporting SB 1533 on Jan. 27, and the Hood River County Board of Commissioners agreed on Friday to take the same track.

The proposed bill would allow municipalities, counties and metropolitan service districts to “designate” the sale or rental price for up to 30 percent of new housing units, according to an early staff report on the Oregon Legislative Information System.

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The County’s Feb. 5 letter to the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Michael Dembrow (D-Portland), vouched for inclusionary zoning as a “policy tool to increase the production of affordable housing.”

To access the full story, click here.

11. Malheur Refuge Occupation Sparks Fears of Incursion in Neighboring County JOHN DAY -- Part therapy session and part history lesson, a Grant County commission meeting drew dozens of people Wednesday – some crying and others shouting -- to weigh in on a resolution calling for an end to the armed militant occupation almost 100 miles away.

With less than a foot of space between the front row and the commissioners' tables, the small room overflowed with more than 30 residents who spent almost two hours talking about the proposal.

The draft resolution states that the county supports a "peaceful resolution" to the protest at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge that began Jan. 2 in neighboring Harney County.

It signals that the county wants to see out-of-state and out-of-county militants go home. It also endorses efforts to give rural communities more of a voice in decisions affecting them and notes that the county "supports" state and federal laws.

The commission's three members indicated they back the decree, but delayed a vote until next week, pending some minor changes to the language.

To access the full story, click here.

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