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Monday Mailing

Year 24 • Issue 23 12 March 2018

12. Extreme

1. Facing Contention: 21 Tips to Detox Public Engagement 2. Barack Obama on Gentrification 3. The Salvation Army Just Opened the Country's First Nonprofit Grocery Store 4. Widespread Drought Across U.S. Stokes Fears About A Repeat Of 2012's Wrath 5. Food by Local Farmers. Distribution System by Ants 6. After Decades of Pushing Bachelor’s Degrees, U.S. Needs More Tradespeople 7. Is the Hyperloop Taking Cities for a Ride?

8. The Local Movement to Curb Big Brother 9. Your Next Car Might be a Subscription 10. More than 50,000 EVs expected on Oregon’s roads by 2020 11. Mobile Tele-Hospitals Get Care Where it’s Needed Most 1. Facing Contention: 21 Tips to Detox Public Engagement If you feel like you’re facing increasing tensions in your public engagement processes, you are not alone. Across the country, the climate of public discourse has been shifting dramatically. Planners and public engagement practitioners, particularly those working for government agencies, increasingly find themselves on the front lines of highly polarized debates. Thankfully there are proven ways to detoxify public engagement and designing public participation processes to find common ground.

Quote of the Week: "Fortune favors the prepared mind." ~Louis Pasteur Oregon Fast Fact: The largest concentration of wintering bald eagles can be found in the Klamath Basin National Wild Life Refuge.

In the fall of 2017, MetroQuest conducted a workshop at the International Association for Public Participation Annual Conference to identify strategies and best practices when designing public engagement processes for projects facing contention. The results of this workshop, which brought together 100 public engagement practitioners, are now available as a free eBook: Facing Contention: 21 Tips to Detox Public Engagement.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Barack Obama on Gentrification On February 27, former President Barack Obama appeared at a community forum in Chicago to answer public questions about the proposed Presidential Center to be built in Jackson Park. One part of the conversation dealt with gentrification. You can watch the President’s answer here. We’ve also transcribed his remarks for your reference.

To access the full story, click here.

3. The Salvation Army Just Opened the Country's First Nonprofit Grocery Store The newest grocery store to keep an eye on isn't trying to woo you with bottles of rosé or free two-hour delivery. Instead, DMG Foods, a brand-new concept from The Salvation Army that just opened in Baltimore, is the country's first-ever nonprofit grocery chain.

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Named after the charity organization's motto (Doing the Most Good), the store's aim is to "present a sustainable model that engages the community in order for them to eat healthier, smarter, cheaper and all of that," Gene Hogg, The Salvation Army's area commander for Baltimore, tells The Shelby Report.

Located in a 7,000-square-foot warehouse, DMG Foods is no different than any other supermarket, with on-site butchers, deli counters and areas where shoppers can pick up premade meals. The store is open to all community members, regardless of their income level, with those on SNAP benefits eligible to receive additional coupons. (According to GrubStreet, DMG Foods aims to double the amount of food people on SNAP can buy.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Widespread Drought Across U.S. Stokes Fears About A Repeat Of 2012's Wrath Western Illinois might be close to the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, but it's the driest part of the state this year.

"We really haven't really had any measurable rain since the middle of October," says Ken Schafer, who farms winter wheat, corn and soybeans in Jerseyville. "I dug some post-holes this winter, and it's just dust."

His farm is in an area that the U.S. Drought Monitor considers "severe." Some of the nation's worst areas of drought are in southwest Kansas, much of Oklahoma and a slice of Missouri. But several states are in some sort of drought, from Illinois to California, the Dakotas to Texas. 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.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Food by Local Farmers. Distribution System by Ants Driving down U.S. 20 toward Cleveland, Cullen Naumoff knew something had to change.

Naumoff, director of sustainable enterprise for the Oberlin Project in Oberlin, Ohio, had recently launched a food hub with colleague Heather Adelman. Food hubs bring together what small farmers produce into quantities needed by big buyers like schools, restaurants and supermarkets. The problem? The Oberlin Food Hub was so successful that demand was outstripping the ability of participating farmers to meet it. Naumoff turned to other regional food hubs — and soon found herself driving all around the region to pick up and deliver lone bushels of produce — encumbering the expenses of big food companies without benefiting from the economies of scale they enjoy.

“All we had done with the food hub was shrink their model,” she says, “so local produce would never be able to compete.”

To access the full story, click here.

6. After Decades of Pushing Bachelor’s Degrees, U.S. Needs More Tradespeople FONTANA, Calif. — At a steel factory dwarfed by the adjacent Auto Club Speedway, Fernando Esparza is working toward his next promotion.

Esparza is a 46-year-old mechanic for Evolution Fresh, a subsidiary of Starbucks that makes juices and smoothies. He’s taking a class in industrial computing taught by a community college at a local manufacturing plant in the hope it will bump up his wages.

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It’s a pretty safe bet. The skills being taught here are in high demand. That’s in part because so much effort has been put into encouraging high school graduates to go to college for academic degrees rather than for training in industrial and other trades that many fields like his face worker shortages.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Is the Hyperloop Taking Cities for a Ride?

The Hyperloop and Silicon Valley are going to save the rust belt.

That’s the message in a slick marketing video dropped by Hyperloop TT after a big announcement in Cleveland Monday. Civic leaders in Northeast Ohio, including Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and Congressional reps Marcy Kaptur and Tim Ryan, were on hand for the signing of a $1.2 million grant, funded in part with $200,000 from the Cleveland Foundation, that kicks off a six-month study of Chicago to Cleveland Hyperloop service.

Grace Gallucci, director of NOACA, the local regional planning organization, told NPR that Clevelanders could look forward to an operational Hyperloop offering 30-minute trips to Chicago in three to five years. That’s a wildly optimistic timeline for a 340-mile project of any type, much less one that hinges on unproven technology.

To access the full story, click here.

8. The Local Movement to Curb Big Brother A local government. A powerful private entity with controversial technology. A secret deal. This time, in New Orleans.

On Tuesday, The Verge revealed that Peter Thiel’s software company, Palantir, has been piloting a predictive policing technology in New Orleans for the past six years. Until The Verge’s story, the program was completely unknown not only to the public, but also to city council members.

The program, like a similar program in Chicago, pulls information from a variety of law enforcement databases and social media networks, and draws up a list of people most likely to be involved in violent crime. The stated purpose of programs like this is to better predict and prevent violent crimes.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Your Next Car Might Be a Subscription Four-figure down payments, cumbersome lease lengths, and skyrocketing insurance costs: it’s enough to send a would-be car shopper running for an Uber or Lyft.

That’s why more automakers are rolling out flat-fee programs that aim to make leasing a car as simple as buying a smartphone. In a bid to keep potential customers from defecting to ride-hailing services and foregoing personal car ownership, brands like Volvo, Cadillac, and Porsche are upending the traditional retail model by developing app-based monthly subscription services that provide vehicles on demand.

To access the full story, click here.

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10. More than 50,000 EVs expected on Oregon’s roads by 2020 More than 50,000 electric vehicles (EVs) are estimated to be on Oregon roadways by 2020, according to utility company Pacific Power.

The Public Utility Commission of Oregon recently approved three pilot projects that are part of a series of a Pacific Power $3.5 billion Energy Vision 2020 plan to prepare the energy grid for the future.

The utility will clean energy portfolio by installing adding more than 1,300 megawatts of new wind generation and upgrade existing wind generation facilities. It also will install smart meters throughout the state.

These efforts get Oregon closer to meeting the benchmarks set in the 2016 Clean Electricity and Coal Transition Act. The state legislation sets the goal of more than 80 percent of electricity coming from renewable and clean sources by 2040 To access the full story, click here.

11. Mobile Tele-Hospitals Get Care Where it’s Needed Most The increasing severity of hurricanes and tornadoes, coupled with raging forest fires and the omnipresent threat of earthquakes, keeps some public safety folks awake at night. But a perfect storm of technology could make tending to the injured after a natural disaster more efficient and and more effective.

Two companies joined forces to put a new twist on the old idea of a MASH unit. MASH is more than the name of a long-running television sitcom. It’s a military acronym that means Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. MASH units were comprised of prefab tents, surgeons, nurses, and a truckload of medical supplies. They were designed to get experienced medical personnel closer to the frontlines so the wounded could be treated sooner and with greater success. Today, add telemedicine and community broadband support, and what you have is MAST. AMD Global Telemedicine and Jenysis Global partnered to create MAST units to help in a variety of settings: disaster recovery, medically underserved communities, military installations, and remote work environments. These self-sufficient units can handle the medical issues that arise from disasters. The units get an extra punch when they are deployed with community fiber networks and gigabit horsepower.

To access the full story, click here.

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