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Monday Mailing Quote of the Week: "They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." ~Andy Warhol Oregon Fast Fact: The total elevation, in feet, of the Three Sisters is 30,490 feet. Each of the three peaks is over 10,000 feet in elevation. The South Sister is the tallest at 10,358 feet, while the Middle and North Sisters are 10,047 and 10,085 feet respectively.

Year 21 • Issue 27 23 March 2015 1. Oregon Will Focus on Current State Parks, Not New Ones 2. Building Leadership for the Long Haul with Milan Wall of the Heartland Center for Leadership Development –Webinar 3. Senate Oks Bill That Would Give Tax Break to Rural Data Centers 4. Headwaters Economic Profile System-Human Dimensions Toolkit 5. Who Controls Our Food?

6. Bill to Spur Economic Development in Oregon’s Historic Downtowns Moves Forward to Committee Hearing 7. Of Oregon's 31 Water Bottlers, None as Controversial as Nestle 8. Lakeview Biofuels Plan Could be Running by End of 2016 9. Urban Land Institute Releases New Toolkit on Strategies to Enhance Health Outcomes Through the Built Environment 10. The World Changing Ideas Of 2015 11. What’s the Impact of the Alternative Economy? Researchers Find Out 1. Oregon Will Focus on Current State Parks, Not New Ones After more than a decade of expansion, the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department is planning to scale back its creation of new state parks and instead focus on improving the current system.

The department has opened nine new parks since 2004 — it will open a 10th by the end of 2015 — and has stretched its footprint into every corner of the state.

But with the main sources of funding either flat or declining heading into the 2015-17 budget period and costs increasing, OPRD will slash its allowance for acquiring new property to cut more than $4 million from the overall budget.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Building Leadership for the Long Haul with Milan Wall of the Heartland Center for Leadership Development – Webinar Join Milan Wall from the Heartland Center for Leadership Development to learn about their research on keys to thriving communities and effective leadership. Milan will describe characteristics of effective local leaders, roles and responsibilities to guide community action, and tips for recruiting new leaders in a changing world.

To access this webinar, click here.

3. Senate Oks Bill That Would Give Tax Break to Rural Data Centers Data centers in rural areas would get a tax break, and telecommunications companies would have their property taxes clarified, under a bill that has cleared the Oregon Senate.

The 27-3 vote Monday sent Senate Bill 611 to the Oregon House.

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The bill has several aims.

It would exempt data centers from central assessment by the state. Such centers include those Google opened in The Dalles in 2006, Facebook opened in Prineville in 2011, and Apple has completed in Prineville. Amazon, the electronic retailer, also has data centers near Boardman.

But Apple and Amazon, among others, delayed plans for more data centers because of uncertainty over future tax policy. Lawmakers had passed a temporary fix for data centers in 2012.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Headwaters Economic Profile System-Human Dimensions Toolkit Economic Profile System-Human Dimensions Toolkit which allows users to produce free, detailed socioeconomic profiles at a variety of geographic scales. Free, easy-to-use software that produces 14 different detailed socioeconomic reports of counties, states, and regions, including custom aggregations.

Updates to the new demographics report use the latest available data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. New pages have been added that describe employment by occupation and industry, labor, commuting patterns, components of household earnings, and housing characteristics.

To access this toolkit, click here.

5. Who Controls Our Food?

Sympathy with organic food production is at an all-time high. Perhaps ‘It’s a nice idea, when you can afford it’ sums up the approach of many people. But extending these principles of production to the whole food system? It just doesn’t seem practical. There are an awful lot of people to feed in the world and, if you’re hungry, you don’t care much about the niceties of how the food was produced.

A new report from Global Justice Now, From The Roots Up, shows that not only can small-scale organically produced food feed the world, but it can do so better than intensive, corporate-controlled agriculture. As a matter of fact, it already is feeding millions of people.

In Tigray, Ethiopia, farmers have seen grain yields double, with increased biodiversity and fertility, not to mention less debt. In Senegal, agroecological pest management techniques have allowed farmers to produce 25 per cent more rice than conventional farmers. In southern Africa, more than 50,000 farmers practising agroecology have increased maize yields by 3-4 metric tons per hectare.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Bill to Spur Economic Development in Oregon’s Historic Downtowns Moves Forward to Committee Hearing Key legislation designed to spur much-needed economic development in Oregon’s historic downtowns and restore their iconic storefronts, hotels, theaters, apartments, and warehouses is now scheduled for a public hearing before the Senate Finance Committee next Wednesday, March 4th at the State Capitol.

Members of the public are invited to testify.

Championed by Restore Oregon, a statewide non-profit, The Revitalize Main Street Act (SB 565) would create a state Historic Rehabilitation Fund to provide a 25% rebate on the cost of restoring a historic commercial building and putting it back into service.

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This help is necessary to offset the high cost of repair, restoration, seismic retrofitting, and code upgrades which often cannot be covered through traditional financing alone.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Of Oregon's 31 Water Bottlers, None as Controversial as Nestle Oregon is home to 31 bottled water companies, and only Nestlé is controversial enough to flood state officials' inboxes with protest emails.

Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Director Curt Melcher received so many in the wake of the Cascade Locks City Council's vote to fast-track the approval process for a proposed Nestlé bottling plant in the town, he filtered them into a special folder.

Nestlé's six-year battle to build a $50 million plant in the Columbia River Gorge town has sparked protests at every step, despite local leaders' near-unanimous endorsement of the plant and state officials' cooperation.

It's nothing new for Nestlé.

Nearly everywhere the world's largest food and beverage company eyes a water source, controversy follows. Bottled water's biggest player has become poster child for the industry's environmental and social ills.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Lakeview Biofuels Plan Could be Running by End of 2016 A long-discussed biofuels plant — where woodland scraps would be turned into jet fuel — is closer to being built in Lakeview.

Red Rock Biofuels, based in Fort Collins, Colorado, hopes to start building this summer or fall, depending on when the company secures financing for the $200 million project and receives local, state and federal permits, the company’s CEO, Terry Kulesa, said Thursday.

“It is about an 18-month schedule so we are looking (at finishing construction) at the end of 2016,” he said.

The company received a $70 million federal grant in September to help fund the building of the plant.

That same month it also made an agreement to eventually sell Southwest Airlines 3 million gallons of renewable jet fuel a year. Red Rock Biofuels held a public meeting about the plans for the plant earlier this week in Lakeview.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Urban Land Institute Releases New Toolkit on Strategies to Enhance Health Outcomes Through the Built Environment The Urban Land Institute has released a new toolkit, Building Healthy Places Toolkit: Strategies for Enhancing Health in the Built Environment, that outlines 21 practical, evidence-based recommendations that the development community can use to promote health at the building or project scale. The recommendations, based on the latest documentation of the need for and impact of building for health, were formulated to help developers, owners, property managers, designers, and investors understand opportunities to integrate health promoting practices into real estate development.

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The release of the report is in response to declining health trends in the United States and other countries around the world, with many of the conditions linked to past land use decisions that limited options for healthy, active living environments.

Click here to download the report.

Click here to download a poster with a summary of the 21 recommendations.

10. The World Changing Ideas Of 2015 All ideas change the world in some small way, but not all ideas are "world changing." At Co.Exist, we like to consider the ideas that are tackling the big problems that face our society and the planet—a better term might be "world-fixing ideas"—at the moment they're sitting somewhere between science fiction and the possible. We work to look at the brave thinkers, inventors, and entrepreneurs who are slowly, painfully proving their value. The ideas that work, catch on, and take off might very well improve the way everyone on the planet lives—or help ensure that we get to keep living on the planet at all.

So here we've collected 14 of the most audacious, most potentially transformative ideas that are starting to reshape the world today. They range from better treatment of low-wage workers to a guaranteed income for every person; from programmable physical objects to a doctor's office in your pocket; from design that intentionally makes you uncomfortable to satellite detective agencies.

To access the full story, click here.

11. What’s the Impact of the Alternative Economy? Researchers Find Out It is increasingly apparent that today’s economy is not working for most of us. Growing inequality of wealth and income is putting the famous American middle class in danger of becoming a distant memory.

Most American children now face economic prospects worse than their parents enjoyed. We suffer from more frequent financial shocks and linger in recession far longer than in the past.Our education and health care systems don’t stack up to those of other countries with similar living standards. And if all this were not enough, environmental destruction continues to escalate as we stand on the verge of triggering irreversible, and perhaps cataclysmic, climate change.

Yet, beneath the radar of the mainstream media, a diverse and energetic new generation of business models has cropped up in response to urgent, unmet needs. We’re talking about innovations like worker-owned cooperatives, credit unions,community-supported agriculture, sharing platforms and businesses, and community energy enterprises. (You may have seen organizations like this in the “new economy” section of the YES! website. But in this project we are calling them part of a “future” rather than a “new” economy because some initiatives, such as cooperatives, have been with us for centuries.)

How important are these innovations? Doing something differently isn’t inherently “good”—despite Americans’ perennial love of the next new thing. How well do these models really perform when it comes to providing prosperity for their workers and others who depend on them? Do they really deliver on their promise of distributing social and financial benefits broadly while restoring the environment?

To access the full story, click here.

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