Monday Mailing
Year 24 • Issue 21 26 February 2018 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
Financial Planning for Disasters Webinar and Workbook Leaders: Labor Shortage Due to Lack of Training, State Benefits National Good Food Network Webinars 97% of Sidewalk Ramps Along Oregon Highways Violate ADA Standards, Survey Finds AARP Walk Audit Tool Kit (and Leader Guide) The Case Against Sidewalks And How Cities Can Create New Avenues for Pedestrians Low-Cost Pop-up Shops Create Big Value in Muskegon, Michigan In Oregon, a Peculiar Case for Protecting the Beaver Twelve Steps of Sprawl Recovery This Map Shows What Climate Change Could Mean for Your Region To Fund Affordable Housing, Oregon Cities Turn to Construction Excise Tax
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. Leaders: Labor Shortage Due to Lack of Training, State Benefits ONTARIO — Lack of workers was one of the common themes of an assortment of presentations made to the Eastern Oregon Border Economic Development Region Board on Thursday, as members discussed what issues to put their initial focus on in the near-and longterm. The exclusive region — the Eastern Oregon Border Economic Development Region — was created by the 2017 Oregon Legislature in House Bill 2012. It is designed to help Malheur County be more competitive with its neighbors in Idaho, and includes the valley area of the northern part of the county, taking in Ontario, Nyssa and Vale.
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Board members appointed by the governor include chairwoman Shawna Peterson, Ralph Poole, Bill Johnson, Dana Young, Priscilla Valero, Stuart Reitz and Tiffany Cruickshank. Other concerns mentioned during the meeting at Treasure Valley Community College, were land use, lack of affordable and available housing, reciprocity of licenses for crafts – such as electricians and plumbers, and power cost differences. 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. 97% of Sidewalk Ramps Along Oregon Highways Violate ADA Standards, Survey Finds The vast majority of sidewalk ramps along Oregon highways violate standards outlined under the Americans with Disabilities Act, a survey found. The Oregon Department of Transportation conducted the audit as part of a settlement with Disability Rights Oregon, which sued the state last year over inadequate curb ramps and crossings. The survey found 97 percent of 26,000 curb ramps inspected weren't ADA-compliant, and 10 Oregon counties didn't have a single compliant ramp. The preliminary results of the study were released by Disability Rights Oregon. State transportation officials said they are still checking the results for accuracy. The plaintiffs, in their February compliant, alleged that the Oregon Department of Transportation had failed to install adequate curb ramps as part of its highway construction and maintenance projects as required under the ADA. To access the full story, click here. 5. AARP Walk Audit Tool Kit (and Leader Guide) After driving, walking is the most popular mode of transportation in the United States. However, in many towns, cities and neighborhoods, the only way to get around is by car because walking is just too dangerous. The AARP Walk Audit Tool Kit has been created to help individuals, groups and local leaders assess the walkability of the sidewalks and streets in their community. The walk audit download provides step-by-step instructions and checklists for examining intersections, sidewalks, driver behavior, public safety and more. Since the survey is user-directed, the walk audit can take as little or as much time as desired by, say, spending 15 minutes at one busy corner or devoting several hours to documenting several roadways in a neighborhood. Page 2 of 5
The documented results can be shared with elected officials and other local leaders when advocating for such safe streets features as sidewalks, crosswalks and properly timed traffic lights. The AARP Walk Audit Tool Kit Leader Guide shown below describes how to plan for and manage a larger-scale community walk audit and workshop event. To access the toolkit, click here. 6. The Case Against Sidewalks And How Cities Can Create New Avenues for Pedestrians On a fall Saturday at Panorama High School, deep in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, an arborist fields questions about which street trees produce the most shade with the least amount of water. A rep from a local street furniture vendor explains the difference between a bus bench and more protective transit shelter. Just outside the school’s gates, a group moves slowly along busy Van Nuys Boulevard performing a walk audit, noting details like missing curb cuts, sign poles planted in a way that a wheelchair can’t pass, and signals that aren’t long enough to allow everyone to cross the daunting six-lane roadway. For the past year, the nonprofit Investing in Place has been holding these summits all over Los Angeles as part of an effort to train an army of sidewalk advocates, teaching neighborhood and community groups how to petition the city to fix broken pavement, improve bus stops, and plant more trees. Attendees range from environmental scientists to housing activists, from high school students to new moms. “Someone in City Hall told me there’s no constituency for sidewalks and that’s why it wasn’t a priority for them,” says Investing in Place’s director, Jessica Meaney, who wears a magenta shirt that says “Stop Trippin’.” “They said no one is knocking on their door asking to fix sidewalks.” To access the full story, click here. 7. Low-Cost Pop-up Shops Create Big Value in Muskegon, Michigan Sometimes, all it takes is a little push to get a big thing rolling. That's what Muskegon, Michigan learned when they invested in low-cost, small-scale business spaces in their downtown. Like many American cities, Muskegon (population 38,000) chose to bulldoze much of its historic downtown to build a mall in the 1970s. Then in 2001, a new mall was constructed on the outskirts of the city, which led to the closure of the downtown mall. It's a dark story of waste and decline, but one piece of good came out of that: downtown Muskegon is coming back. The farmers market is booming and local businesses are coming up in the town center. One small but very impactful way that the city of Muskegon has helped to make this happen is by constructing low-cost "chalets" on a vacant strip of land in the downtown dubbed, Western Market, and renting them to local businesses. To access the full story, click here. 8. In Oregon, a Peculiar Case for Protecting the Beaver For three decades, Susan Sherosick has lived on 32 acres deep in the southwest Oregon woods, in a peaceful hollow bracketed by streams that flow into the Umpqua River. Out here, raccoons and black bears weave through the willows, and a resident cougar deposits twisted scat behind her house. Every Thanksgiving, salmon swim into her front yard to spawn.
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Sherosick, like many Westerners, also lives in uneasy detente with another, more challenging species. Beavers routinely fell her cottonwoods and convert her creeks to wetlands. Twice, she has asked the county to send a trapper, though she tries to leave the animals alone. But when new dams flooded her house this winter, she drew the line. “Pretty soon I couldn’t flush the toilet,” she recalls. “It was like living in a marsh.” When Sherosick called for a trapper this time, though, she never heard back. She isn’t sure why her pleas went unanswered. But it’s likely she’d become caught in the middle of an unusual legal battle, one that could upend how the West’s wildlife agencies manage the region’s most influential rodent. To access the full story, click here. 9. Twelve Steps of Sprawl Recovery The storm clouds of sprawl addiction had been gathering for years, but it took the Meltdown and the ensuing Great Recession to make it clear just how damaging that addiction had been to the health of cities across the US and abroad. Sprawl has two really big things going for it, but three even bigger things now going against it which are poised to turn the tide against the pattern of sprawl. Sprawl’s two enablers Sprawl development is, at its foundation, an industrial system, developed in the 1940s on the shiny and new mentality of the assembly line. The first enablers of sprawl are the core manufacturing systems that produces the subdivisions, strip malls, office parks, mega-stores, mega-churches, and mega-schools, and the mega-highways necessary to serve them all. The second enabler is the collection of support industries built around the core of sprawl: market surveys, zoning, infrastructure engineering, design, and their sprawl based standards, codes, and regulations, development lending and sprawl-based development practices, appraisals and home mortgages and mortgage bundling, “site-adapt” cookie-cutter building design, square-feet-bells-and-whistles real estate sales, plus all of the financial, design, development, and sales industry organizations, and the shelter publications and shows to support this behemoth. Because the parts were industrially designed to interact seamlessly with each other, and preclude any other way of building, it looked like an immovable rock for decades. Until the cracks in the infrastructure began to show. To access the full story, click here. 10. This Map Shows What Climate Change Could Mean for Your Region Scientists warn that the effects of climate change will lead to an increasing number of extreme weather events. Economists, in turn, warn that those changes will have a huge financial cost. Already, storms, floods, wildfires and droughts over the last decade have cost the federal government roughly $350 billion, according to the Office of Management and Budget. (That number doesn’t include the damage caused by California’s wildfires or this past year’s hurricanes in Florida, Puerto Rico and Texas.) But as governments look to prepare for more extreme weather and its costs, they’re finding there’s no reliable way to measure the fiscal impact. Still, scientists and statisticians have continued to look for one. Most recently, a study published in June in the journal Science calculated the costs of climate change county by county. It linked climate projections with economic effects like mortality, labor productivity, energy demand and crop yields. 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 Page 4 of 5
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. 11. To Fund Affordable Housing, Oregon Cities Turn to Construction Excise Tax Housing is so tight in the city of Medford, Oregon, that the municipal government sometimes has trouble recruiting employees. Residential vacancy is low, says Matt Brinkley, planning director for the city of 80,000, which is nestled along Interstate 5 about halfway between Portland and Sacramento. Local construction industry reports put the rate somewhere between 1 and 2 percent, he says. There’s just not that much room for people to live, let alone at rates that civil servants can afford. So last week, Medford did what a growing number of Oregon cities have been doing over the last two years: It adopted an excise tax on new construction to help fund new affordable housing. In Medford, the tax will be equal to one third of 1 percent of building permit fees on major residential, commercial, and industrial development projects. Brinkley says the city estimates it could generate around $500,000 a year to be reinvested in affordable housing. To access the full story, click here.
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