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Monday Mailing

Year 23 • Issue 21 27 February 2017 1. Cormac Russell on Change That Starts with Communities 2. Bill Seeks to Boost Malheur County Economy 3. Oregon Treasurer Tobias Read Defends Vote to Sell Elliott State Forest 4. Two New Tools for Planning a Healthy Urban Canopy 5. Anatomy of a NIMBY 6. Oregon Coast Scientists Warn Warming Ocean Temps May Create Chaos 7. Alliance for Response 8. Online Seminar: Big Data and the Future of Travel Modeling – Friday, March 3, 2017 from 12:00pm – 1:00pm 9. Dam Straight - Recent Events Highlight the Need to Get the Nation’s Dams In Line 10. Transit Chief: Build Light-Rail Line, Three Highway Projects 11. Of Sawdust & Chips — Part II 1. Cormac Russell on Change That Starts with Communities Cormac Russell was raised on the west coast of Ireland, and now lives in Dublin, although he spends much of his time travelling. He promotes the idea of Asset-Based Community Driven Efforts, and while some of his work is based in universities, mostly it is based in communities. We recently came across his TEDx Exeter talk (see below), and thought it might be good to have a chat…

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.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Bill Seeks to Boost Malheur County Economy SALEM — What can a collapsed onion shed tell you about Malheur County's economy?

It may illustrate the tough competition the border county faces with southwestern Idaho, a problem that two legislators are trying to address with a proposed economic development region.

Heavy snow hit the southeastern region of Oregon hard earlier this winter, resulting in the collapse of key buildings, including storage sheds for one of the area's signature crops.

Some onion purveyors have already taken their insurance money and set up shop in Idaho, where certain policies can make enterprise more attractive, according to Rep. Cliff Bentz, R-Ontario.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Oregon Treasurer Tobias Read Defends Vote to Sell Elliott State Forest When Oregon State Treasurer Tobias Read voted to move forward with the sale of Elliott State Forest, he instantly became a villain for Oregon’s conservation community.

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The Democrat was the swing vote in the State Land Board’s 2-1 decision to approve selling the 82,500-acre forest to a Roseburg-based timber company. He joined Republican Secretary of State Dennis Richardson and split with Democratic Gov. Kate Brown.

Oregon’s environmental groups loudly denounced Read, demanding he reverse course on a decision that will ultimately be made April 11. Five environmental groups and around 120 people plan to visit the Capitol on Thursday to urge Read to change his mind.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Two New Tools for Planning a Healthy Urban Canopy Trees are a vital part of urban communities, providing social, environmental, and economic benefits.

However, the urban environment is a difficult one for most trees due to the added stresses of soil compaction and lack of available soil, among many other challenges. Once established, their success is often further complicated by infrastructure conflicts and maintenance concerns on the part of planners, developers, and owners. Fortunately, the U.S. Forest Service has developed two new tools to help plan for and manage a healthy urban forest: one that guides designers and tree managers to select tree species likely to survive in the built environment, and another to monitor tree health to ensure trees become an asset instead of a liability.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Anatomy of a NIMBY Next week, Los Angeles will vote on Measure S, a ballot initiative that proposes a two-year moratorium on developments that required changes to land use.

The law could potentially limit both new developments and affordable housing. Even with an exception for affordable housing developments written into the law, critics say it could still further restrict affordability in the region.

For a growing chorus of urbanists, NIMBYism and land use restrictions are the culprit behind everything from growing income inequality to shrinking affordable housing, productivity, and innovation. A 2015 study estimated that land use restrictions costs the United States upwards of $1.5 trillion in lost productivity. The 2016 Economic Report of the President called for sweeping reform of zoning and land use restrictions to overcome these costly economic rents, build more housing, and stimulate the U.S. economy.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Oregon Coast Scientists Warn Warming Ocean Temps May Create Chaos (Newport, Oregon) – 20 of the world's leading oceanographic researchers today released new evidence indicating how warming ocean temperatures around the globe will create some chaotic changes in that habitat by the year 2100. The deep ocean floor may see starvation and devastating ecological changes by the end of this century, and this will in turn have difficult implications for the rest of the planet.

Among those researchers who were part of the study were Andrew Thurber, an Oregon State University marine ecologist and co-author. This facility does much of its work through the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, on the central Oregon coast. The study's findings were published this week in the journal Elementa.

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Thurber said warming ocean temperatures result in the increase of acidification and the spread of low-oxygen zones – something the Oregon coast has already dealt with in the last decade with the notorious “dead zones” that appeared periodically. But it's the biodiversity of all the ocean's deeper depths that are at stake, from 200 to 6,000 meters below the surface.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Alliance for Response Bringing together cultural heritage and emergency management professionals at the local level – where virtually all initial disaster response occurs – is the purpose of Heritage Preservation's Alliance for Response initiative.

Launched in 2003, Alliance for Response is a series of one-day forums designed to link key cultural heritage and emergency response representatives, leading to new partnerships and local projects.

Alliance for Response fosters cooperation among cultural organizations, influences local planning efforts, and enhances the protection of cultural and historic resources.

Several cooperative disaster networks have formed in the regions where Alliance for Response forums have been held. Now in its second decade, the Alliance for Response initiative has reached several thousand individuals from more than 800 museums, libraries, archives, and other collecting institutions in 23 regions across the country. Alliance for Response is generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For more information, click here.

8. Online Seminar: Big Data and the Future of Travel Modeling – Friday, March 3, 2017 from 12:00pm – 1:00pm New technologies such as smart phones and web applications constantly collect data on individuals' trip-making and travel patterns. Efforts at using these "Big data" products, to date, have focused on using them to expand or inform traditional travel demand modeling frameworks; however, it is worth considering if a new framework built to maximize the strengths of big data would be more useful to policy makers and planners.

In this presentation Greg Macfarlane will present a discussion on elements of travel models that could quickly benefit from big data and concurrent machine learning techniques, and results from a preliminary application of a prototype framework in Asheville, North Carolina.

Dr. Macfarlane is an analyst in the Systems Analysis Group of WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff, developing and applying advanced travel demand models. His research and expertise includes tripbased models, activity-based models, integrated land-use/transport models, and micro-simulation of both travel demand and supply. He is an advocate of using open and robust software design principles in public projects, and is developing a pattern-based demand model as an associate with Transport Foundry. Greg is an alumnus of BYU and received graduate degrees from Georgia Tech Follow this link on the day of the seminar to stream it live.

If you are live streaming and want to ask a question, send an email to psuseminar@yahoo.com during the broadcast.

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9. Dam Straight - Recent Events Highlight the Need to Get the Nation’s Dams In Line Most often talk of infrastructure investments focus on aspects firmly in the public eye—roads, bridges, transit, energy, and the like. Lower on the list is the wide-ranging and complex network of our nation’s dams; a system that could cost up to $65 billion to bring up to par.

That changed recently when extreme weather in the western United States created several big events that brought dam safety into the spotlight. Among them were the failure of the Twentyone Mile Dam in Nevada, the need to open the spillway of California’s Don Pedro Dam, and most notably, the evacuation of nearly 200,000 residents below the Oroville Dam. With so many eyes glued to the predicament of dams in the West, now is the perfect time to discuss the investment needed in dams across the United States.

To access the full story, click here.

10. Transit Chief: Build Light-Rail Line, Three Highway Projects TriMet's general manager says four big projects — only one of them a light-rail line — must be built if the Portland region is to avert traffic gridlock in the next two decades.

Neil McFarlane said it might be considered unusual for the regional transit agency to promote highway projects in addition to the Southwest Corridor line proposed from downtown Portland to Bridgeport Village in Tualatin.

But he told an audience Monday, Feb. 20, at the Washington County Public Affairs Forum that many of the region's leaders agree.

"There are three big bottlenecks in this region it would be nice to make some progress on," McFarlane said. "These are projects we've known we need to do for some time. They are necessary to keep our region moving and our arterials flowing. But they are very big and expensive projects."

To access the full story, click here.

11. Of Sawdust & Chips — Part II It’s almost impossible to overstate how devastating the 1980s recession was for Oregon.

The early 1980s had the largest percentage of job loss since World War II. For Oregon, this truly was the "Great Recession,” hitting the state harder than the more recent recession of 2008, and it would change Oregon forever.

This recession would result in making economic development a permanent part of the Oregon political landscape, changing the state and fueling economic growth, for good and for bad, in ways that were almost unimaginable prior to that crisis.

It started with the overthrow of the shah of Iran in 1979. In the chaos that followed, the price of oil skyrocketed, fueling an already escalating inflation rate in the U.S. The Federal Reserve increased interest rates in a series of sharp blows aimed at reducing inflation. The increased interest rates had a devastating effect on home building.

To access the remainder of this segment (Part Two) of the story, click here.

To access the first half (Part One) of the story, click here.

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