Monday Mailing
Year 25 • Issue 28 1 April 2019 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Quote of the Week:
“Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts.” - Barbara Kingsolver
Oregon Fast Fact #22
Darlingtonia Wayside is Oregon's only rare plant sanctuary.
Need A Trowel But Don’t Want To Buy One? (Corum Ketchum) Oregon Cap And Trade Bill Sees Big Changes (Michael Hoch) Oregon Campaign Finance Reformers Focus On ‘Dark Money’ (Michael Walker) Boston Has Boom Year For Creating Affordable Housing (Corum Ketchum) Climate Change Is Already Reshaping How We Farm (Patrick Lynch) A Guide To Successful Place-Based Economic Policies (Corum Ketchum) Three Decades After The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Alaska’s Coast Faces An Even Bigger Threat The Other Oregon – Spring 2019 (Bayoán Ware) Revealed: The States Where The Poor Pay Higher Tax Rates Than The Rich – And Those Where The Wealthy Bear The Biggest Burden (Corum Ketchum) WEBINAR – Equitable Development: Back To Basics (Equitable Development Training Part 1) (Bayoán Ware)
1. Need A Trowel But Don’t Want To Buy One? When a group of neighbors got together to start a beautification project in the Lents neighborhood in southeast Portland, Oregon, they needed shovels, rakes, leaf blowers and hedge trimmers, and the list went on. No problem, they thought. They’d borrow tools from one of the tool libraries scattered throughout the city. (Yes, Portland has lending libraries for tools.) Problem was, their neighborhood fell outside the boundaries of those libraries. So the handy ladies and gents of Lents created one. The Green Lents Community Tool Library is part of Green Lents, a nonprofit whose mission is to “engage our community to develop a more livable, thriving place.” Residents in and around Lents can check out a tool in the same way they would a library book. (A state-issued ID and a piece of official mail, like a utility bill, for address verification are needed to become a member.) The tool is the borrower’s for a week with the option to renew. The $1 a day late fees are used for library upkeep. To access the full story, click here. 2. Oregon Cap And Trade Bill Sees Big Changes The “Intel exemption” is out, low-income drivers are in and a mess of freebies are on the table for some of Oregon’s largest polluters. Page 1 of 5
Those are a few key takeaways from a massive set of amendments state lawmakers unveiled Monday, as they work to adopt a cap-and-trade system to curb Oregon’s greenhouse gas emissions. Long awaited by interested parties on both sides of the debate over cap and trade, the 130-page amendment package would largely replace a first draft of House Bill 2020 released in January. Since that release, lawmakers have toured the state, sitting through hours of testimony from people who alternately pleaded with them to urgently address climate change and begged them to hold off on the hefty regulatory scheme. “One of the things we heard in all of these public hearings was a lot of fear,” said state Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, a co-chair of the legislative committee working up the bill. “Fear about the consequences of climate change … but we also heard fear from employees that are concerned about the possibility of losing their jobs.” To access the full story, click here.
3. Oregon Campaign Finance Reformers Focus On ‘Dark Money’
A group called Priority Oregon ran more than a million dollars in TV ads criticizing Gov. Kate Brown last year, all while keeping its donors secret. The most controversial ad featured a woman reading young kids a book titled “Kate Brown’s Oregon.” As she reads, she says there are “homeless camps everywhere, foster care children don’t get enough to eat [and] seniors are abused in nursing homes.” Brown’s campaign unsuccessfully sought to get the ad off the air and the governor recently said that “people were horrified by those ads. I think Oregonians deserve better and they need to know who is funding those campaigns.”
Now, as Brown and other lawmakers move toward tightening lax campaign finance laws, there’s also a move to bring the spending of so-called “dark money” groups like Priority Oregon into the daylight. To access the full story, click here. 4. Boston Has Boom Year For Creating Affordable Housing In 2018, Boston had one of its best years for creating or preserving affordable housing, with 546 new units completed, according to its 2018 Inclusionary Development Policy (IDP) annual report. That's about 21% of all the units created since the IDP program began in 2000. An additional 834 units are under construction or have been permitted, and 1,285 units are in projects that have received approval but have not yet been permitted. Even with the significant gains, the city has proposed changes to strengthen the IDP this year. It has brought a consultant on board to help figure out the appropriate amount of affordable housing to require, reports The Boston Globe. Meetings and community hearings on IDP Page 2 of 5
changes are expected this spring and summer, with a final revamped plan anticipated later this year. The current IDP requires that developers who have new buildings of 10 or more units make 13% of the units affordable or contribute to Boston's affordable housing fund. To access the full story, click here.
5. Climate Change Is Already Reshaping How We Farm
Our climate is changing, and our approaches to politics and activism have to change with it. That’s why The Nation, in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, has launched “Taking Heat,” a series of dispatches from the front lines of the climate-justice movement, by journalist Audrea Lim.
In “Taking Heat,” Lim explores the ways in which the communities that stand to lose the most from climate change are also becoming leaders in the climate resistance. From the farms of Puerto Rico to the tar sands of Canada, from the streets of Los Angeles to Kentucky’s coal country, communities are coming together to fight for a just transition to a greener and more equitable economy. At a time when extreme-weather events and climate-policy impasse are increasingly dominating environmental news, “Taking Heat” focuses on the intersection of climate change with other social and political issues, showcasing the ingenious and inventive ways in which people are already reworking our economy and society. There will be new dispatches every few weeks (follow along here). Ramón Barba Torres had been working in the fields of Delano, California, for more than a decade when he decided to head north. The summer heat, which he recalls approaching 100 degrees nearly every day, was forcing employers to stop field work after about five hours, and he simply wasn’t making enough money. Torres had migrated from Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2003, at age 16, to help support his mother after his father died, and now he had a family of his own to support. He’d heard rumors that field work paid better, and the weather was more hospitable, in Washington State. So in 2012, he migrated for the season to pick strawberries and blueberries on the Sakuma Brothers farm near Bellingham. To access the full story, click here.
6. A Guide To Successful Place-Based Economic Policies
The field of urban economic development is in the midst of a big and much-needed rethink. After decades of focusing on companies—either handing out incentives or building clusters of startups—economic development is finally dealing with people. There are two key reasons for this: First, the deepening backlash to handing over billions in incentives, of which Amazon’s HQ2 may have been the tipping point. The second is the growing divide between the haves and havenots, both within and across places.
The new focus is on place-based policies and inclusive development. In the past, economists and economic policy emphasized so-called people-based policies. Invest in people, encourage their mobility, and good things will come. But the rise in spatial inequality—the growing inequality across regions and the political backlash it has engendered in the form of populism—has Page 3 of 5
convinced many economists of the need to embrace place-based policies to bolster the economic conditions of declining places. While the current generation of cluster-based and talent-oriented urban development strategies has been successful at helping to rebuild and revitalize many urban economics—not just established tech hubs but “rise of the rest” cities like Pittsburgh and Nashville—they have done little to mitigate the growing class divides in these places. To access the full story, click here.
7. Three Decades After The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Alaska’s Coast Faces An Even Bigger Threat With the blustery wind of an overnight storm still blowing, our helicopter bucked and lurched above rows of froth on Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Swift-marching ranks of waves were driving oil away from the Exxon Valdez, the supertanker still held by a rock it had hit three days earlier.
For those three days in March 1989, the oil — at least 11 million gallons of it, though some say much more — had lain like a still pool around the ship, virtually untouched by cleanup efforts. Now the storm clawed the oil across the sound’s tracery of rocky islands, into their infinite crevices, and ultimately over more than 1,000 miles of rich coastal wilderness. We landed on the first rocky beach we reached. Oil was ankle-deep. Our pilot pulled a dead cormorant out of the black muck. I stuck my hand into the oil, and my colleague, a photographer at the newspaper where I was a young reporter, took a picture. As the 30th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill clicks by, I had the disquieting experience of seeing that photograph again. This time, it was displayed as a historic icon. Like a piece of the Berlin Wall, which fell the same year, it belongs now to the story of the past. To access the full story, click here.
8. The Other Oregon – Spring 2019
Publisher’s Note - Welcome to our third issue. Whether you live in urban or rural Oregon, or have a foot in both places, you’ve probably heard of the urban-rural divide. It was a major theme in our 2018 gubernatorial election, and has been recognized as an issue since before “Toward One Oregon” was written a decade ago. It’s the reason this magazine exists, as we strive to connect urban and rural in a mutually beneficial way for all Oregonians. Business Oregon – the state’s economic development agency – has five major priorities. One of them Is t “Cultivate Rural Economic Stability” – and one strategy to achieve this goal is to “connect rural communities to urban markets through targeted infrastructure investments.” Our cover story about The Redd shows how Ecotrust has created infrastructure to do just that: connect rural food producers with urban consumers. When farmers, ranchers, fishers and specialty food processors are freed from the challenges of storage and “last mile” distribution to their customers in Portland, they are able to spend more time on their land and scale up their operations. Helping rural business grow while feeding urban dwellers is good for everyone. Page 4 of 5
We hope that the stories told in The Other Oregon spark your interest and inspire you to start thinking about how to reach across the divide and create One Oregon. To access the full story, click here. 9. Revealed: The States Where The Poor Pay Higher Tax Rates Than The Rich – And
Those Where The Wealthy Bear The Biggest Burden
Poor Americans pay out a higher share of their income toward taxes than their wealthy counterparts in 45 states, according to a new report. However, rich Americans typically pay a higher dollar amount in taxes compared to their lowincome counterparts. Tax season is here – and the state where you live could determine whether you may expect a refund or a bill from the government – but how much you make also figures into the equation, according to the report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Researchers analyzed state and local tax rates – including property, sales, and state and local taxes – which is important because different states have very different ways of collecting revenue. To access the full story, click here.
10. WEBINAR – Equitable Development: Back To Basics (Equitable Development Training Part 1) (April 29, 11am Pacific)
America Walks engages and empowers communities across the US to create safe, accessible, and enjoyable places to walk and move. Increasingly the infrastructure changes that make places more walkable are creating rapid change and potentially contribute to the displacement and disenfranchisement of some community members. To ensure that community improvements can allow residents to stay and thrive in place, a deliberate, inclusive plan that reflects community priorities and safe-guards local culture and affordability is required. This is the first in a three-part training in partnership with the 11th St Bridge Park Project that will explore the practice of Equitable Development and hear from experts on the ground who are on the path to creating communities for all. Attendees of this part will: • Learn about what equitable development is and how to get started developing an Equitable Development Plan. • Hear from experts as to why equitable development is needed. • Explore the benefits of equitable development for communities. Following this first session, registration will be made available for the second session, Equitable Development: Starting on the Path (May 20, 2019), and the third session, Equitable Development: Who’s at the Table? (June 17, 2019). To sign up for the webinar, click here. Page 5 of 5