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Monday Mailing

Year 22 • Issue 27 28 March 2016 1. Battle Over Columbia Gorge Nestlé Water Plant Heats Up As Election Nears 2. Catherine Creek Restoration Enters Final Phase 3. After Oregon Standoff, Birding Is Back 4. Evaluating Affordable Housing Development Strategies 5. The Beat Goes On: More Misleading Congestion Rankings From TomTom 6. Strategic Economic and Community Development (SECD) Webinar 7. Eleven Signs A City Will Succeed 8. These 27 Solutions Could Help The U.S. Slash Food Waste 9. Change Food Video Library Launches 10. Story Of Cities #4: Beijing And The Earliest Planning Document In History 11. Placemaking: Person, Place or Thing?

1. Battle Over Columbia Gorge Nestlé Water Plant Heats Up As Election Nears The years-long war of words over Oxbow Springs has just grown louder.

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.

Backers and opponents of a proposed Nestlé water bottling plant in the Columbia River Gorge town of Cascade Locks have taken to the airwaves, to the phone lines, and to Salem to plead their case in advance of a May election that could decide the plant's fate.

A Hood River County ballot measure seeks to block the Nestlé plant by banning any water bottling operation that produces 1,000 gallons or more a day. Nestlé expects to package 11 times that amount from Oxbow Springs in an average hour.

"We don't want to set the precedent of being a water-exporting county," said Aurora del Val, campaign director for the Local Water Alliance, which is backing the charter amendment.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Catherine Creek Restoration Enters Final Phase Restoration work is entering the final phase along Catherine Creek in Union County, with a big hand from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

A century of ranching has taken its toll on Catherine Creek in the Grande Ronde Valley.

The creek is home to three different species of threatened or endangered fish — including chinook salmon, steelhead and bull trout — while at the same time providing irrigation for hay fields and cattle pastures. Over the years, portions of middle Catherine Creek were pinched off from its natural floodplain to make room for farms, Page 1 of 5

resulting in a loss of habitat and increased erosion along the stream bank.

It’s a familiar refrain in Eastern Oregon, where the needs of agriculture tend to overlap with the needs of fish and wildlife. Faced with chronic flooding caused by erosion, several private landowners on Catherine Creek brought their concerns in 2010 to the Union County Soil and Water Conservation District.

Together, they launched a collaborative restoration project to address longstanding issues on roughly four miles of creekside property upstream of Union.

To access the full story, click here.

3. After Oregon Standoff, Birding Is Back In a lifetime of offbeat travel experiences, searching for mating sage grouse in a snow squall may rank as one of my oddest pursuits.

My guidebook suggested that in March “lucky early morning visitors” might experience the sage grouse’s unique mating ritual while hiking on the Sagehen Hill Nature Trail in Harney County, Ore. But the wind was howling, a passing flurry was coating my glasses in a film of wet snow, and on a brisk walk I saw nothing but miles of the arid, melancholy High Desert landscape.

It was almost 9 a.m. and the sage grouse were apparently either (very sensibly) courting in a more discreet place or enjoying a post-coital smoke somewhere. Birding, I was to learn, is a pastime that requires patience and a sense of humor.

For the third time in seven weeks, I was on my way to Burns, and ultimately the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge — site of an armed, 41-day occupation that sparked a national conversation about the use of federal lands. The occupiers, many of whom split off from a peaceful protest over the reimprisonment of a pair of ranchers convicted of setting fires, said that the federal government had no right to control lands, like Malheur, and should turn them over to local control.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Evaluating Affordable Housing Development Strategies Housing and transportation are most household's two largest expenditure categories, and are a major financial burden for many lower-income households. As a result, increasing housing and transportation affordability is an important planning objective. In recent years, planners have developed a better understanding of what this means and how to evaluate affordable housing development strategies.

What is Affordability?

Affordability refers to households' ability to purchase essential goods and services, and so depends on their ability to control costs, for example, to reduce housing and transport expenditures so more money is available for food, healthcare and education. Although all households want to save money—even wealthy households enjoy cheaper limousine fuel and discounted first-class airfares—affordability applies primarily to lower-income households that have difficulty purchasing basic goods. Not every household will take advantage of all money-saving opportunities, some may choose more expensive homes or vehicles than absolutely necessary for practical purposes, but the ability to save money increases affordability and economic security.

Households often make trade-offs between housing and transport costs, so it is important to consider them together: a cheap house is not truly affordable if its isolated location leads to high transportation costs, and a more costly house may be most affordable overall if located in an accessible, multi-modal Page 2 of 5

neighborhood where transport costs are minimized. In the past, housing experts often defined affordability as households spending less than 30 percent of their budget on housing, including rents or mortgages, property taxes, maintenance and repairs, and basic utilities, but the newer approach defines affordability as households spending less than 45 percent of their budget on housing and transportation combined.

To access the full story, click here.

5. The Beat Goes On: More Misleading Congestion Rankings From TomTom Yesterday, TomTom released its annual rankings of the levels of congestion in world and US cities.

Predictably, they generated the horrified, self-pitying headlines about how awful congestion is in the topranked cities. Cue the telephoto lens shots of bumper-to-bumper traffic, and tales of gridlock.

As we’ve long pointed out, there are big problems with the travel time index TomTom and others use to compare congestion levels between cities. Most importantly, some cities have much shorter commute distances than others—meaning that even if traffic moves slower at the peak hour, people spend less time commuting. For example, Houston has an average commute distance of 12.2 miles, while Portland has an average commute distance of 7.1 miles, according to the Brookings Institution. So even if Portland’s “congestion index number” is slightly higher (26 percent) than Houston’s (25 percent)—at least according to TomTom—average commute times are much shorter in Portland because of its more compact land use patterns. In effect, the travel time index, expressed as a percentage of total commute times, discounts the pain of traffic congestion in sprawling, car-dependent cities. That’s why its a lousy guide for talking about how well transportation systems work. The same problems plague the rankings released by Inrix two weeks earlier.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Strategic Economic and Community Development (SECD) Webinar Established under the 2014 Farm Bill (P.L. 113-79), the SECD program allows USDA-RD to reserve up to 10 percent of funding appropriated to specific programs until June 30 of each fiscal year to fund projects that support the implementation of strategic economic and community development plans across multi-jurisdictional areas. The four Rural Development programs with SECD set-aside funds include: Community Facilities, Water and Environmental Programs, Rural Business Development Grants, and Business and Industry Guaranteed Loans. The goal of SECD is to support rural communities who are working collaboratively across jurisdictions and capitalizing on their regional strengths to help create a larger impact.

This webinar will provide an overview of the SECD and the Rural Development Programs mentioned above. Please join us in this opportunity to learn more about SECD and how it can benefit rural communities. Speakers for the webinar are:  Sam Rikkers, Administrator, Rural Business-Cooperative Service, U.S. Department of AgricultureRural Development  Farah Ahmad, Program Manager, Strategic Economic and Community Development, U.S. Department of Agriculture-Rural Development  Gregory Dale, Southern Region Community Economic Development Coordinator, U.S. Department of Agriculture-Rural Development When - Thursday, March 31, 2016 from 11am – 12pm - Add to Calendar To register for this webinar, click here.

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7. Eleven Signs A City Will Succeed By the time we had been to half a dozen cities, we had developed an informal checklist of the traits that distinguished a place where things seemed to work. These items are obviously different in nature, most of them are subjective, and some of them overlap. But if you tell us how a town measures up based on these standards, we can guess a lot of other things about it. In our experiences, these things were true of the cities, large or small, that were working best: 1. Divisive national politics seem a distant concern. We first traveled during the run-up to the bitter midterm elections of 2014, then while the Supreme Court was ruling on same-sex marriage and Obamacare, and then as the 2016 presidential campaign was gathering steam. Given the places we were visiting, I imagine that many of the people we interviewed were Donald Trump supporters.

But the presidential race just didn’t come up. Cable TV was often playing in the background, most frequently Fox News; if people had stopped to talk about what was on, they might have disagreed with one another and with us. But overwhelmingly the focus in successful towns was not on national divisions but on practical problems that a community could address. The more often national politics came into local discussions, the worse shape the town was in.

To access the full story, click here.

8. These 27 Solutions Could Help The U.S. Slash Food Waste By now, you probably know that Americans waste a lot of food.

Each year, an estimated 133 billion pounds of food that farmers grow never makes it to our plates. That's enough to fill 44 skyscrapers. And tons of it ends up in landfills, where it emits methane, a greenhouse gas.

The Obama administration has set a goal of reducing food waste by 50 percent by 2030. And, as we've reported, there are lots of efforts underway — from sales of ugly produce to the EPA's Food Recovery Challenge, aimed at diverting excess food from landfills to hungry mouths and other uses, like composting. Even religious groups are joining the battle against food waste.

But, what's been lacking is a comprehensive plan to identify the most cost-effective approaches.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Change Food Video Library Launches Change Food is pleased to announce the official launch of The Change Food Video Library. The Library consists of a growing database of the best short-length videos on various topics in food and farming, including talks from Change Food, The Real Food Media Project, TED, TEDxManhattan and other TEDx events. Videos from other organizations are currently being evaluated. Topics include antibiotics, food waste, food justice, local food, food policy, farmers and much, much more.

Select videos are supplemented with online educational information such as links to other sites, discussion materials, actions and campaigns, and reading suggestions. Eventually, all videos will feature these materials. The Library has also developed an online event guide to help anyone around the world organize and host their own video event, whether it be a lunch time video club or an all day extravaganza.

Online videos are becoming an increasingly influential form of education and advocacy. As reported by comScore’s Video Metrix service, in December of 2013, 188.2 million Americans watched 52.4 billion online content videos, compared to 38.7 billion videos in December 2012.

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The growing problem with online video is the vast amount of content spread all over the Internet. In 2014, YouTube reported that 300 hours of new videos were uploaded to the site every minute, three times more than the year before. This is leading to confusion over where to find quality content that is accurate and up to date.

The Change Food Video Library is clearing up this confusion and brings a valuable new resource to the food movement. Visit today!

For more information, click here.

10. Story Of Cities #4: Beijing And The Earliest Planning Document In History In the depths of Beijing’s Planning Exhibition Hall, a big grey hangar that squats in the corner of Tiananmen Square, stands a scale model of the city. It is an endless field of tiny wooden and perspex blocks, low-rise courtyards huddled cheek by jowl with a motley jumble of towers, expanding ever outwards in concentric rings.

To attempt to build a model of China’s 22-million strong capital is a Sisyphean endeavour. This carpet of miniature rooftops is hopelessly incapable of keeping up with the city’s relentless pace of change, the exhibition hall too small to ever contain a megalopolis so sprawling that it is currently building its seventh ring road, an orbital loop that will run for almost 1,000km in circumference.

But the model’s bird’s-eye view exposes something that is illegible from the ground: the rigid order that underlies the rambling sprawl. A rhythm of axes, grids and symmetrical walled compounds emerges from the chaos, pointing to the fact that this seemingly incoherent metropolis is in fact the carefully structured product of one of the earliest planning documents in history.

To access the full story, click here.

11. Placemaking: Person, Place or Thing?

Placemaking. You might have heard the word — maybe at a redevelopment conference or tossed around at a marketing mixer. You might have seen it in a neighborhood newsletter about new housing downtown, or read about it in an article shared by that cool architect friend who was just inspired with a vision for how to make Sacramento “the place to be.” But no matter what you’ve heard or how you feel about placemaking, the concept likely won’t be disappearing in the near future.

What is the concept? Ask 10 different people and you’ll probably get 10 different definitions. Basically, it’s urban intervention — the idea of pumping life into neglected city pockets through collaborative projects that spark life in and speak to the community. If that sounds abstract, it’s because every project is different.

“Placemaking can be as complex as building a sports arena or as simple as organizing street performances,” says Wendy Saunders, executive director of the Capitol Area Development Authority.

“It’s all about creating a space where people want to go and congregate and smile.”

To access the full story, click here.

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