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Monday Mailing

Year 24 • Issue 22 05 March 2018 1.

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County Signals Support for Energy Plan League of Oregon Cities Regional Meetings Oregon Cities Levy Construction Tax to Fund Affordable Housing American Planning Association Autonomous Vehicles Resources This is Not Your Average Jungle Gym Smart Growth America is The New Home for Expertise in FormBased Codes TED Radio Hour – Nudge Travel Oregon Matching Grants Program Oregon Tourism Listening Sessions Rewards Program Encourages SNAP Recipients To Make Healthy Choices FEMA PrepTalks

1. County Signals Support for Energy Plan A renewable energy plan got a thumbs up from the Hood River County Board of Commissioners at last Tuesday’s general meeting.

The board passed a resolution demonstrating an organizational commitment to “promote a Hood River County Energy Plan.” Their action included minor changes to its text.

Quote of the Week: "Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most." ~Siddhārtha Gautama

The non-binding energy plan creates a blueprint to help the community increase investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, achieve energy generation control, stability and price security, and provide emergency services.

It aims to help the region save on energy costs, become more resilient to rising prices and natural disasters, and create environmental and public health benefits.

To access the full story, click here.

Oregon Fast Fact: The world’s tallest barber shop pole stands in Forest Grove, Oregon.

2. League of Oregon Cities Regional Meetings One quarter each year, the League integrates its Regional Meetings with the Small Cities Network to provide an update on League happenings, and an opportunity for city officials to network and discuss common issues and solutions.

For registration and to see a full list of meeting locations, click here.

3. Oregon Cities Levy Construction Tax to Fund Affordable Housing “Since 2016, at least eight Oregon cities have adopted construction excise taxes to fund affordable housing,” reports Jared Brey in Next City. The latest Oregon city to join this trend is Medford, a city of 80,000 people located midway between Portland and Sacramento, California. Brey writes that high housing prices, which had been making

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it difficult for Medford to recruit city civil service employees, were one leading cause of the city’s policy decision.

Earlier this month, Medford city council voted unanimously to adopt the tax, setting the rate at onethird of one percent of building permit fees on major residential, commercial, and industrial development projects. The city estimates that the tax will generate $500,000 a year to support affordable housing.

To access the full story, click here.

4. American Planning Association Autonomous Vehicles Resources Planners are committed to looking at how future technology can influence and shape the fabric of our communities. Planning professionals are uniquely able to address the impacts of today's actions on tomorrow's communities in a comprehensive way and over the long term.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) will impact communities on a variety of fronts — land use, transportation planning, social equity, and the economy. APA is committed to helping members navigate AVs by providing resources, materials, guidance, and ongoing research.

To access a list of curated resources, including APA’s newly released report and policy principles, click here.

5. This is Not Your Average Jungle Gym Sixty years ago, the activist Jane Jacobs was writing in part about San Francisco when she warned, “We are becoming too solemn about downtown.” Jacobs, whose Death and Life of Great American Cities is required reading for urban planners, once sized up San Francisco’s Civic Center—a few square blocks of grand government buildings and cultural institutions, neatly arrayed around spacious, orderly plazas in the heart of the city—and found the whole thing “ponderous” and “dull.”

But the scene at Civic Center last Friday afternoon was anything but boring. Workers strolled through on their way to grab lunch at nearby delis, couples lolled in the grass, tourists snapped selfies in front of City Hall, and the plaza was swarming with kids and parents who’d come to climb, swing, and slide all over the brand new Helen Diller Civic Center Playgrounds.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Smart Growth America is The New Home for Expertise in Form-Based Codes The Boards of Directors of the Form-Based Codes Institute (FBCI) and Smart Growth America are pleased to announce a new strategic partnership between the two organizations that will expand Smart Growth America’s expertise on the smart growth strategies that can improve lives by improving communities.

What are form-based codes?

Simply put, form-based codes are municipal zoning codes that shape development by defining characteristics of building form, streets, and open space as opposed to relying on use as an organizing principle. Or, put another way, they’re a tool for defining the kind of place you want to create, rather than what happens inside the building. They allow a community to implement their vision for what kind of place they want to be and create a more predictable environment for development.

While a form-based code isn’t necessary in every community or a silver bullet for the challenges of building a truly great place, they can be a vital mechanism for making those plans a reality.

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“Form-based codes often serve as the regulatory framework for smart growth in communities across the country,” Scot Spencer, Smart Growth America’s board chair and Associate Director of Advocacy and Influence at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, noted in the official press release announcing the merger.

This new partnership will expand Smart Growth America’s knowledge and offerings, helping the organization provide more practical expertise to local communities that are eager for a new way of doing business and building walkable, connected, vibrant neighborhoods and places.

FBCI joins Smart Growth America’s roster of programs and Marta Goldsmith, FBCI Executive Director, has joined the SGA staff and will continue in her role as director of the program.

For more information, click here.

7. TED Radio Hour – Nudge It's hard to change habits, but a gentle push can move us in the right direction. This episode, TED speakers offer deceptively simple "nudges" for managing our kids, our health, and our aspirations.

To access this TED Radio Hour episode, click here.

8. What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?

This new book, a collaboration between Eggers and the artist Tucker Nichols, who created the deceptively simple paper cutout illustrations, is a love letter to infrastructure. Eggers’s proclamation that the Golden Gate is beloved because it’s outrageous and weird may fly in the face of just about everyone’s attitude about infrastructure, but it also gets at exactly what we should be feeling about bridges and tunnels.

Awe. American infrastructure is deferred home maintenance on a massive scale. We just keep putting it off until something major — and often catastrophic — happens, and then it ends up costing twice as much as it would have had we taken care of it proactively. This is a bad strategy — yet it’s the strategy that seems to define United States infrastructure.

There is no awe. There are issues of structural integrity. There are mind-blowing cost overruns.

Accidents. Sinkholes. Problems with bolts.

For more information, click here.

9. Oregon Tourism Listening Sessions Travel Oregon, in partnership with Oregon’s 7 regional destination management organizations (RDMOs), invites you to join one of 10 Oregon Tourism listening sessions across the state this spring. We want to hear from anyone who touches the tourism industry, including business owners, land managers, volunteers, nonprofits, policymakers and more, as we value all perspectives and opinions.

Your input is very important! Listening sessions’ findings will help shape the future of tourism in Oregon through Travel Oregon’s statewide strategic plan, as well as each of the 7 RDMOs’ regional plans.

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Session attendees will have the chance to meet their RDMO representative and Travel Oregon employees, learn about and provide ample input on your region's 2017-2019 plans and as well as for statewide 2019-21 strategic plan.

All sessions are interactive, and attendees will be invited to partake in small group table exercises, provide input and share opinions in a respectful and productive manner.

Sessions are 3 hours; food and beverages provided. Registration is requested.

For registration and to see a full list of meeting locations, click here.

10. Rewards Program Encourages SNAP Recipients To Make Healthy Choices Cities and states are trying new ways to entice food stamp recipients to eat their fruits and vegetables.

One approach that’s gaining popularity: offering rebates to low-income families when they buy fresh produce. A program in Massachusetts was so popular that it ran out of rebate money and had to be suspended.

By rewarding food stamp recipients for making healthy choices, advocates hope to encourage lowincome people to eat more fruits and vegetables.

Buying fresh fruits and vegetables can be expensive — especially for families trying to live on $126 a person, the average monthly food stamp benefit in 2017. That’s $1.40 for a meal.

But even as food advocates are trying to make these programs work, they worry that efforts underway in Washington could eliminate them.

To access the full story, click here.

11. FEMA PrepTalks PrepTalks are given by subject-matter experts and thoughts leaders to spread new ideas, spark conversation, and promote innovative leadership for the issues confronting emergency managers now and over the next 20 years.

Each PrepTalk release will include videos of the presentations and the question-and-answer (Q&A) sessions, a Discussion Guide related to the topic, and additional resources. PrepTalks Discussion Guides are companion documents to the PrepTalk videos. When used together, these guides help translate the research and expertise showcased in each presentation into action steps to improve disaster preparedness.

We encourage emergency managers to bring together relevant partners for each PrepTalk topic to watch the presentation and Q&A videos together. You can also include a PrepTalk discussion as part of a pre-established whole community meeting. You can choose to watch specific segments of the video and then pause to discuss how to apply that segment to your community, or you may choose to watch the whole program with time for discussion at the end.

For more information, click here.

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