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Monday Mailing

Year 20 • Issue 29 14 April 2014

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Oregon Heritage Conference-April 23-25 in Albany 6 Lessons the Tech Sector Must Learn from Main Street Business 3rd Annual NIFTI Farm Incubator Field School-October 2-3 in Portland Watch 220 Years Of U.S. Population Expansion Smaller Places Summit Resource Guide Plan for Public Access to Willamette Falls Moves Ahead; $4 Million Needed for Design, Engineering Ten Things You Should Know About How the Public Feels About Development Vast Oil Trove Trapped in Monterey Shale Formation NGFN Webinar - Net Value: An Innovative Approach to the Seafood Supply ChainThursday, April 17 12:30-1:45 La Grande’s Grand Staircase Like Some Dust Bowl With Your Grain Belt?

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Oregon Heritage Conference-April 23-25 in Albany

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Quote of the Week: "May you live every day of your life." ~ Jonathan Swift Oregon Fast Fact: Throughout a year, on average, Timberline Lodge receives about 540 inches of snow. The average peak snowpack in a year is typically over 150 inches, with variation. Some years have had well over 240 inches packed, while others have had less than 100 inches of snowpack.

People who live in historic homes, support heritage areas in their community, operate a business or own a historic building will find numerous sessions of interest at the Oregon Heritage Conference April 2325 in Albany.

Redeveloping commercial spaces and upper floors in downtown buildings can be challenging, but not impossible. Meet with building officials from the City of Albany, the State of Oregon, and professional architects, historic preservation consultants, and urban planners during this day-long “Commercial Redevelopment: 2nd Floors, Feasibility and Financing” workshop on April 23 to learn what you need to know for commercial redevelopment. Through tours of several downtown Albany buildings, group discussions and talks from local developers and consultants, you'll learn about how to meet applicable building codes, preservation treatments for historic buildings, and the nuts and bolts of feasibility studies and financing for your next project.

Three experienced panelists will describe how business, government and historic preservation tradespersons can work together to create businesses which embrace heritage. They will talk about how businesses have adopted heritage places, events or names, how old buildings have been fixed up for places of business, and how businesses have used their embrace of heritage successfully.

John Goodenberger and Lucien Swerdloff of Clatsop Community College’s historic preservation program will explore concepts and technologies for improving the energy efficiency of small commercial buildings through preservation. Participants will engage in a process to "upgrade" an existing building to improve its energy efficiency while preserving its historic character.

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Other sessions include the handling historic district regulation, historic barn re-use and preserving historic landscapes. In addition, the nonprofit Restore Oregon has organized a preservation pub around preserving the diminishing number of pre-1865 buildings in Oregon.

For more information about the Oregon Heritage Conference and to register for these sessions, click here.

The conference is organized by Oregon Heritage, a division of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, along with the Albany Downtown Association, the Albany Visitors Association and the City of Albany.

2. 6 Lessons the Tech Sector Must Learn from Main Street Business It's been my job for some time now to help other people build better businesses around their passions, skills, and talents. I did most of this work online, using the likes of social media, content marketing, and email to find leads, nurture relationships, and make sales. And I was really good at it.

Then I opened a main street business. My whole perspective on effective marketing, relationshipbuilding, and business growth changed.

It's easy to think that our new generation of business--all digital, all mobile, all-the-time--is a more effective way of doing business. But tech companies, digital entrepreneurs, and even freelancers working remotely have a lot to learn from the way main street businesses grow and thrive.

To access the full story, click here.

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3rd Annual NIFTI Farm Incubator Field School-October 2-3 in Portland This annual event brings together practitioners in the field of land-based beginning farmer training from all over the U.S. to share best practices, learn from each other, and develop collective solutions to our unique challenges. This year’s field school will feature presentations from experts on a variety of relevant topics, as well as opportunities for collaborative learning and networking. Click here for pictures from our 2013 Field School at the Minnesota Food Association!

Registration will open in July.

Learn more about The National Incubator Farm Training Initiative, brought to you by the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project.

Where: The Headwaters Farm Incubator Program and Mercy Corps Northwest outside of Portland, Oregon.

When: Wednesday, October 1st – Friday, October 3rd, 2014

4. Watch 220 Years Of U.S. Population Expansion Movoto used SocialExplorer to generate population density maps from the 1790 to 2000 decennial censuses at the county level. Movoto broke the data down into deciles for each year with each color representing a decile of population density. The blues are the bottom deciles and the oranges are the upper deciles.

To acesss the full story (and map), click here.

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5. Smaller Places Summit Resource Guide Smaller Places Summit Resource Guide includes case studies on promising practices in sustainable economic development; lists of useful resources, organized topically. This Resource Guide complements the Smaller Places Summit, an intensive peer-learning workshop for teams of senior government officials and their key partners from 16 communities and regions across the country that have received grants through the Sustainable Communities Initiative of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

To access the Small Places Summit Resource Guide, click here 6. Plan for Public Access to Willamette Falls Moves Ahead; $4 Million Needed for Design, Engineering An ambitious and expensive plan to open Willamette Falls to the public is gathering speed.

A consortium of state and local officials working on the project agreed Monday to identify how they might fund the $4 million design phase of an esplanade that would give the public a vantage point at the falls. Representatives from Oregon City, Clackamas County, Metro, state parks and the governor's office will report back in 30 days with how much money each might contribute to the project, Construction may cost $30 million, according to a preliminary estimate.

Developing the public portion of the former Blue Heron paper mill is no easy task and, financing aside, there are many unknowns -- such as who will end up owning the 23-acre site.

The riverfront project requires the participation of the property owner. Currently, a bankruptcy court trustee controls the property. Efforts to sell the land have failed as three buyers made offers then quickly backed out. A fourth offer was submitted last week and calls for a completed sale by May 7.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Ten Things You Should Know About How the Public Feels About Development 1. Stop all development anywhere near me. 79% of Americans want no new development projects in their communities. Now that does not mean they are against development. They are not. They just do not want it anywhere near them. They want new jobs, local tax dollars and new shopping opportunities, but it should be over there and not right here.

2. All development is political. 84% of American say a candidate’s position on development is important when they decide for whom they will vote, so development takes an increasingly prominent role in local politics.

It is now far easier for a local politician to stand with the passionate, active and angry opponents than to support development. The politics of development now favors opposition. Good projects die every day because they lack political support in the face of active and motivated opposition.

To access the full list, click here.

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8. Vast Oil Trove Trapped in Monterey Shale Formation SHAFTER, Calif. — A bustling city is sprouting on five acres here, carved out of a vast almond grove. Tanker trucks and heavy equipment come and go, a row of office trailers runs the length of the site and an imposing 150-foot drilling rig illuminated by football-field-like lights rises over the trees.

It's all been hustled into service to solve a tantalizing riddle: how to tap into the largest oil shale reservoir in the United States.

Across the southern San Joaquin Valley, oil exploration sites have popped up in agricultural fields and on government land, driven by the hope that technological advances in oil extraction — primarily hydraulic fracturing and acidization — can help provide access to deep and lucrative oil reserves.

To access the full story, click here.

9. NGFN Webinar - Net Value: An Innovative Approach to the Seafood Supply Chain Thursday, April 17 12:30-1:45 As a fisherman, business as usual means heading out to sea, battling the elements, catching as much as you can, and heading back inland to sell what you caught on auction. You do not know what will sell, and you do not know what price it will fetch.

As an institutional, retail or other mid-scale buyer you are also at the mercy of the auction. Budgeting is difficult, and there is generally no means to assure that the fish you are buying has the attributes you value, such as being sustainably caught, allowable bycatch, etc.

Open Ocean Trading created an innovative online marketplace, called FYSH-X, that allows buyers and sellers to trade commercially harvested and farmed seafood products in forward time. This value chain approach means that fishermen can leave the docks secure in the profitability of their trips by locking into a price and selling all or a portion of a catch in advance. And buyers are empowered by having prices they can budget for, and by being able to negotiate directly with vessels for any attributes that are important to them.

In this webinar we'll hear the history and context of the fish trading business, and how the Open Ocean Trading marketplace works. We'll also have a fisherman and a buyer speak from their perspectives about how FYSH-X has changed their businesses. And as always, we'll have lots of time for your questions to be answered.

To register for this event, click here.

10. La Grande’s Grand Staircase Off a quiet residential street in the northeast Oregon town of La Grande lies what is possibly the most architecturally outstanding outdoor staircase in Oregon. The Italian Renaissance Revival Grand Staircase rises five tiers up a hillside on the campus of Eastern Oregon University. Unfortunately, it is forgotten and deteriorating, the victim of ground movement, La Grande’s harsh winters, and the budget woes of Oregon’s higher education system.The agency — the second-largest food bank in Oregon — contracted with five local farmers to grow 100 acres of lentils for use in a high-protein

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soup mix. “We see this as a way to address the root causes,” Detwiler said. “It’s more of a solution than just a Band-Aid fix.”

Eastern, as it is known locally, was established in 1929 as Eastern Oregon Normal School, a teacher’s college. Inlow Hall, Eastern’s Italianate administration building, and the View Terrace and Grand Staircase on its north side were completed the same year. In 1980, all were listed on the National Register of Historic Places. They were designed by John Bennes, the architect who designed the Hollywood Theater in Portland and numerous other Oregon public buildings.

To access the full story, click here.

11. Like Some Dust Bowl With Your Grain Belt?

I once visited one of the last scraps of prairie in Ames, Iowa. It was about the size of a football field, at most, and surrounded by corn in all directions. To me it didn’t look like much. But I had arrived there with a group of entomologists who squealed with delight and immediately scattered into the grasses, emerging periodically to show off the especially fetching bugs they had found.

This field, we were told, remained grassland for one reason only: No one could grow corn on it. It was too wet, too rocky, too much clay. The agricultural flaws of the prairie were rattled off in a sort of familiar, affectionate way, like it was a sullen teenager with a terrible work ethic. But those flaws were also why it had been left to its own devices in one of the hardest-working agricultural landscapes in the country.

I thought about that plot when I read Jocelyn Zuckerman’s recent article for The American Prospect on the plowing of the northern U.S. prairie. It’s a long piece, but it can be summarized in two words: Prairie Doom.

To access the full story, click here.

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