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Monday Mailing

Year 21 • Issue 23 February 23, 2015 1. Bill Takes Aim At Aerial Pesticide Spraying On Oregon Forests 2. Every City Should Have Something Like San Francisco's Mass Transit Access Map 3. Roadmap to Develop Cross-Jurisdictional Sharing Initiatives 4. Historic Preservation Funding Sources 5. Great American Adaptation Road Trip 6. Disaster Learning Webinars 7. Meet the Smart Farm You Can Control With a Smartphone 8. TREC - Transportation Seminar: Active Transportation Research at Northern Arizona University: Friday, February 27, 2015 9. Health, Environment and Animal Welfare Groups Applaud U.S. Dietary Guidelines’ New Sustainability Focus 10. Portland is the Most Gentrified City of the Century

Quote of the Week: "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." ~Laozi

Oregon Fast Fact: Up until the 1970s it was illegal to show movies or attend car races on Sundays in Eugene, Oregon.

1. Bill Takes Aim At Aerial Pesticide Spraying On Oregon Forests An Oregon Senate bill introduced Tuesday would tighten rules for aerial pesticide spraying on forest land and overhaul how the state responds to complaints of drift and exposure.

The bill has been in the works since 2013, when 16 Curry County residents filed complaints with the state that they became ill after an herbicide application. Dubbed The Public Health and Water Resources Protection Act, the bill would:   

establish more timely notification about spraying and controlled burns for nearby residents and more robust and public record keeping; create protected areas where pesticide application is prohibited; and grant Oregon Health Authority the ability to investigate and issue penalties in cases of human exposure.

“We’ve heard widespread concern that Oregon isn’t doing enough to protect the health of rural citizens from aerial herbicide sprays,” Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, said in a statement. Dembrow is one of the bill’s chief sponsors along with Rep. Ann Lininger, D-Lake Oswego. “It’s time to change these outdated policies.”

To access the full story, click here.

2. Every City Should Have Something Like San Francisco's Mass Transit Access Map Transportation planner Chris Pangilinan likes to think of a public transit agency as a manufacturer that sells a product, and that product is access.

Not rides; sure, we can enjoy the physical act of traveling, but that's not our primary motivation when we swipe our fare cards. Access: getting to work, getting home, getting to the store, getting somewhere.

"We're not selling 10 seconds of travel time," says Pangilinan, who recently joined the New York City Transit Authority after five years at the San

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Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. "What we're actually providing to the public is access to the city."

San Francisco straphangers now have a phenomenal interactive access map at their disposal thanks to the work Pangilinan did at Muni with then-UC Berkeley grad student Dan Howard. The guide shows transit riders just how much of the city they can reach on trains and buses in a given time window.

Though primarily meant for internal agency use—and therefore not yet as user-friendly as it might be—the result is still a transit tool far more useful than most trip planners or apps out there.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Roadmap to Develop Cross-Jurisdictional Sharing Initiatives The Center for Sharing Public Health Services has created A Roadmap to Develop CrossJurisdictional Sharing Initiatives to help guide jurisdictions through the process of considering or establishing cross-jurisdictional sharing (CJS) arrangements.

There are three distinct phases on the roadmap: • • •

Phase One: Explore Phase Two: Prepare and Plan Phase Three: Implement and Improve

Each phase contains a set of areas to explore. Resources and tools are linked to each area. Areas are further broken down into issues to consider, which are phrased as questions.

While the progression of phases should take place in the order presented, the areas and issues within each phase do not necessarily have to follow the same order as listed on the Roadmap.

If it becomes apparent during the process that some key areas or issues from an earlier phase were overlooked, it is important to go back to that phase and resolve them before moving forward.

Keep in mind, this roadmap is intended to be more of a guide than a set of specific directions for those working on or considering CJS for their jurisdictions.

To access this resource, click here.

4. Historic Preservation Funding Sources The Preservation Directory has been working to expand the Grants and Funding Sources section of their website. The directory originally intended to create a pdf for distribution, but this method would be too bulky and wouldn't be user-friendly. Currently, users are able to search the new funding database by keyword and location (State, region).

To view the current "Grants & Funding Sources" directory, click here.

5. Great American Adaptation Road Trip Authors Allie Goldstein and Kirsten Howard took to the roads to experience adaptation first hand across the country. They met with farmers in Georgia, planners on Cape Cod, utility executives in Denver, volunteers in New Orleans, and a host of other Americans struggling to cope with the effects of climate change. And they came back with vivid and compelling tales of ingenuity, resilience, and daunting challenges as people face the changes climate change is bringing to our land, communities, wildlife, and people. They found some surprises along the way. For instance, out of the

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tragedy and destruction from Superstorm Sandy has come at least one unanticipated benefit—a boom on solar power that’s cutting carbon emissions.

To access the report, click here.

For additional information, click here.

6. Disaster Learning Webinars This free webinar series features public health and disaster medicine professionals sharing their expertise on a variety of topics. Past events have included school disasters, disaster health competencies, and socioeconomic determinants of post-disaster health outcomes. Visit the series Web site for upcoming offering or to view past webinars in video or presentation formats.

For more information, click here.

7. Meet the Smart Farm You Can Control With a Smartphone Repurposed shipping containers have long enjoyed a place in the spotlight of sustainable development and eco-dream-home Pinterest porn. They’ve even started to appear as heralds for the local food economy — as grocery stores for food deserts and trendy pop-up restaurants. So it only makes sense that next up on the docket for urban agriculture and food independence are Freight Farms: hydroponic farms in shipping containers.

A Freight Farm is more than just a garden in a box. Each 325 square-foot unit comes equipped with high-efficiency red and blue LEDs to simulate night and day, a climate-controlled temperature system for optimal growth conditions, and vertical growing troughs. Translation: Farmers can enjoy a year-round growing season regardless of weather. Freight Farms are also sealable (no need for pesticides and herbicides), stackable, and (because of their closed loop hydroponic system) use 90 percent less water than conventional farming. And the fun part: Growth settings can even be controlled by a smartphone app.

Founder Jon Friedman calls his inventions “vessels for the next generation of food production.” And the irony isn’t lost on him that these vessels may have once been clocking food miles for the global shipping industry. “It’s one of those things, like, the weapon turns into the thing that saves everybody.”

To access the full story, click here.

8. TREC - Transportation Seminar: Active Transportation Research at Northern Arizona University: Friday, February 27, 2015 Speaker: Edward J Smaglik, Associate Professor, Northern Arizona University Dr. Smaglik is currently working on three separate transportation research projects at Northern Arizona University. This talk will touch briefly on each of the three projects, the concepts behind them, workplans, and expected deliverables. The projects include work with the Oregon DOT on the impact of less than optimal vehicle detection on adaptive control algorithms, development of a ped priority algorithm through a NITC project (as a Portland State subcontractor), and internally funded work on a power harvesting traffic sensor. Read more Watch online: Use this link on the day of the seminar Attend in person: Room 204 of the Distance Learning Center Wing of the Urban Center at PSU

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9. Health, Environment and Animal Welfare Groups Applaud U.S. Dietary Guidelines’ New Sustainability Focus A broad coalition of 49 health, environment and animal welfare groups urged the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to embrace the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s sustainability recommendations that were submitted to the agency today.

According to the Scientific Report’s executive summary, “the major findings regarding sustainable diets were that a diet higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and lower in calories and animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current U.S. diet."

In a letter, the groups asked Secretary Vilsack and Secretary Burwell “to show a strong commitment to keeping Americans, and our shared environment, healthier by developing clear dietary recommendations on the need for reduced consumption of animal products and more plant-based foods.” Signatories of the letter include Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, Friends of the Earth, Healthy Food Action, Center for Biological Diversity, American Public Health Association, Yale University Prevention Research Center and Compassion in World Farming.

For more information, click here.

10. Portland is the Most Gentrified City of the Century New data compiled by Governing Magazine shows Portland, Ore. has experienced more gentrification than any other city in America over the past 13 years.

The Governing team, led by data editor Michael Maciag, compared eligible Census tracts in America’s 50 largest cities between 2000 and 2013. The main eligibility criteria was whether, in 2000, its median household income and median home value were both in the bottom 40th percentile of all tracts within a metro area. The tract was considered gentrified if by 2013 both measures fell in the top third percentile when compared to all other tracts in a metro area.

They found that 58 percent of Portland’s lower-priced neighborhoods had gentrified since 2000.

To access the full story, click here.

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