RARE Monday Mailing-Issue 30

Monday Mailing

Year 19 • Issue 30 22 April 2013 1.

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Quote of the Week: "Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most." ~Siddhārtha Gautama Oregon Fast Fact #246:

In Beaverton, you are required to buy a $10 permit before installing a burglar alarm.

Artists Revitalize Rural Manufacturing Pendleton Area Makes a Play for Drone Makers Gov. Kitzhaber Declares Drought Emergency in Klamath County Portland Parklets Program Gets Kicked to the Curb Distillers' Spirited Debate Letter from MIT: An Urban Planning Student On the Boston Marathon Bombing and a City on Lockdown The Displacement Decathlon How the Heirs of a Multi-Billion Dollar Oil Dynasty are Taking Over the Food Supply, and No One Is Noticing Active Travelers are Competitive Customers, Research Report Indicates Funding Opportunities

1. Artists Revitalize Rural Manufacturing Like many rural communities, Siler City, North Carolina (population 7,887), retells its stories, honoring its tradition of manufacturing and its history of agriculture in contemporary terms. The town’s residents also recognize the value and necessity of strong public-private leadership and initiative, enabling local prosperity. Located in Chatham County in the Central Piedmont of North Carolina, Siler City has since the late 1990s experienced a dramatic increase in its Hispanic population (now almost 50%). In this same period, the town has benefitted from the North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center’s financial support and from partnerships with the Chatham County Economic Development Corporation.

But setting it apart from most other rural communities its size, Siler City is in the midst of a turn-around, one propelled by the arts, where redevelopment of its historic downtown has put artists and artisans at the core of local enterprise.

Because of the town’s commitment to creative individuals, the ability of its municipal leadership to accomplish community goals, and county and state resources that have been able to provide support and expertise, Art-Force’s Artist + Manufacturer Strengthening Place Program elected to work in Siler City.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Pendleton Area Makes a Play for Drone Makers Pendleton officials trying to lure manufacturers of drone aircraft to their industrial park say a slowdown in commercial flights and sparse population make their Eastern Oregon site area prime for testing unmanned aircraft.

“There’s not much to hit in the air, there’s not much to hit on the ground,” economic development consultant Steve Chrisman told the East Oregonian.

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Chrisman said he and the leader of the local convention center plan a conference in Pendleton in October for drone manufacturers, and they hope to recruit participants at a similar conference in Seattle this week.

Drones have attracted the attention of economic development officials over much of Oregon, and especially in the open areas east of the Cascade Range.

“For dramatic industrial development, it’s probably our best bet at this point,” Chrisman said.

The local airport is underused, he said. The only commercial airline, SeaPort Air, has seen passenger numbers fall by more than half since 2001.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Gov. Kitzhaber Declares Drought Emergency in Klamath County Gov. John Kitzhaber declared a drought emergency for Klamath County Thursday, noting snowpack is well below normal and the chances of more snow "are diminishing with every passing day."

The Klamath Basin has long had one of the state's tightest water supplies, with farmers, fish and wildlife refuges competing for water.

It drew national attention in 2001, when fish got water during a dry summer and fall instead of farmers. In 2002, farmers got more water, but salmon died en masse in the Klamath River.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Portland Parklets Program Gets Kicked to the Curb After a successful pilot program last summer, the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) recently announced an update of their Street Seats program. While the newly proposed guidelines show the scope of the program has broadened, a group that represents downtown businesses successfully lobbied to prevent the conversion of parking spots in the downtown core.

The Streets Seats program allows business owners and non-profits to convert public parking spaces into seating and patio space. For restaurants this means more dining tables, and for non-food establishments the program is an opportunity to use space for something other than private vehicle storage. In a PBOT survey published in January, 90% of businesses said Street Seats were good for their business and 80% of survey respondents said the program has a positive impact on street vitality.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Distillers' Spirited Debate In the past two years, Portland’s Distillery Row — the collective of small distillers within a 1.5-mile swath of the now-hip Lower Eastside Industrial District — has been featured by local and national media almost more times than than the city’s food carts.

The boon in craft distilleries is seen as yet another wave of small entrepreneurship, artisan innovation, economic growth and trendiness, Portland-style.

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But what’s missing from the buzz is a dirty little secret in the distilling industry that no one likes to talk about: A large share of Oregon’s spirits are not made here.

In other words, the gin, vodka, whiskey or bourbon may be bottled and “produced” in Oregon but not necessarily distilled here — unless its label explicitly says so.

“There’s a difference between a local brand and a local product,” says Steve McCarthy, owner and founder of Clear Creek Distillery in Northwest Portland, one of the many distillers contacted by the Tribune this week.

For example, he says: “Nike’s a local brand, but those shoes are not a local product,” which certainly hasn’t deterred the millions of loyal Nike fans worldwide.

McCarthy is a granddaddy in the industry, one of the first three to spring up in the United States when he opened in 1985.

Now, Oregon is home to 35 distilleries that have spirits on the shelf, 23 of which are members of the Oregon Distillers Guild. Another 15 distilleries have submitted their application for licensure, which could soon bring the total number of distilleries to 50.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Letter from MIT: An Urban Planning Student On the Boston Marathon Bombing and a City on Lockdown Amid all the other news Friday morning was a likely overlooked story from space. Apparently, NASA has spotted three potentially life-supporting planets in a solar system 1,200 light-years away.

They most likely contain water and are about the temperature of Earth on a warm spring day.

Friday was the first genuinely warm spring day in Boston this year. It was also the first time since another mild-weathered day in 2001 that I was told to stay inside, to “shelter in place.” By now, we all know the story: My city was on lockdown. Still, life and caffeine addiction go on, and I was out of coffee. So I took a walk to our nearest corner store, down a mostly empty street.

It was a strange walk studded with realizations of what my neighborhood looks like without the faces that usually draw my attention. There were things I pass everyday that I had never seen before. A cluster of low-slung row houses that had been standing for the last 100 years. Another home being built across the street — how had I missed the gap that must have been there before? There were flowers, of course, everywhere, and the cashier that sold me a jar of ground coffee gave me the sweetest, saddest smile I’ve seen in a long time. The only sound I heard as I walked home was wind in the trees, and my own footsteps. My neighborhood was peaceful.

To access the full story, click here.

7. The Displacement Decathlon The world is urbanizing, but neither easily nor evenly. Modern cities are being shaped by top-down, forward-looking, skyline-transforming, neighborhood-renewing, tourism-enhancing, creativelydestroying, global-investment-enticing forces of change. Yet these same forces exert conflicting pressures on the poorest urban neighborhoods, and so cities are being shaped as well by bottom-up, self-organizing, citizen-activist movements that are struggling to oppose the displacement that so often accompanies real estate development. It is this interplay between the dominant narrative of progress and prosperity and the counter-narratives of protest and resistance that gives early 21stPage 3 of 5

century cities their distinct dynamism. These struggles are especially magnified when cities become the setting for mega-events that attract both frenzied local development and global scrutiny — none more so than the Summer Olympic Games.

But what really matters here is not so much the Olympics themselves but rather the ambitious planning and intensive development they put in motion. With each Olympiad, city officials become ever more preoccupied with the physical “legacy” of the Games, the indelible mark they might leave on housing stock and transportation infrastructure, on recreational and cultural amenities, on the reputation of the city as “world class.” [1] The Olympics and Paralympics last a couple of weeks but they catalyze projects that can define a metropolis and its image for decades.

To access the full story, click here.

8. How the Heirs of a Multi-Billion Dollar Oil Dynasty are Taking Over the Food Supply, and No One Is Noticing N-P-K, these letters are quite familiar to anyone with a little experience gardening; standing for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the three main fertilizer nutrients we focus on almost exclusively today. Phosphorus and potassium are basically rocks and have some of their own issues due to overmining and a few other problems, but today the concentration will be on everyone’s favorite fertilizer, nitrogen.

Nitrogen is found in the breakdown of organic matter and as a metabolic byproduct (interesting hint: your own pee is actually a very potent fertilizer and is sterile). Since we nowadays toss out such a huge portion of our organic waste to break down in toxic garbage dumps, we are not living sustainably in regards to this very important resource and instead have chosen to go the quick fix route and rely on decayed dinosaurs to provide us with a source. Thanks to the advent of fracking (hydrofracturing), natural gas is now the #1 source for ammonia (which is used to supply the nitrogen portion of most fertilizers) in the world. People all over are in an uproar about the contamination of water supplies and the release of so much methane into the atmosphere that the burnoff plumes can be seen from space, but then they turn around and buy fertilizer supplied from this same supplier to green up their lawns and gardens. You might also want to note that our countries top processed food ingredient, corn and corn products, is one of the most fertilizer intensive crops in the world.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Active Travelers are Competitive Customers, Research Report Indicates Efforts to promote active transportation often come up against concerns, from business owners, that any shift away from automobile use will mean fewer customers or less revenue.

In fact, this research indicates that, for the most part, how much people spend has little to do with what transportation mode they use.

Lead researcher Kelly Clifton of Portland State University, in a recent project, "Consumer Behavior and Travel Mode Choices," does highlight some key differences between transportation modes.

People arriving by bus, bike or on foot average more trips per month to convenience stores, supermarkets, drinking establishments and restaurants than do people arriving by car. They also spend more per month at all types of establishments except supermarkets, where the auto users’ greater spending per trip more than makes up for their fewer trips.

To access the full story, click here.

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10. Funding Opportunities Princess Grace Foundation-USA Seeks Nominations for 2013 JustFilms Documentary Awards Priority will be given to social justice films by Native/Indigenous peoples of the Americas, with grant amounts contingent on the size of the project budget.... Deadline: June 1, 2013 National Storytelling Network Seeks Applications for Brimstone Award for Applied Storytelling Grants of $5,000 will support model storytelling projects that are service-oriented, based in a community or organization, and replicable in other places and situations.... Deadline: April 30, 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Invites Applications for 2014 Artists Fellowships - The foundation will award grants of $20,000 to exceptional Native artists who have had significant impact in their respective disciplines, earned the respect of their colleagues, and achieved recognition in the field....Deadline: May 3, 2013 Open Society Foundations' Youth Initiative Seeks Proposals to Curate Web Pages at Youthpolicy.org Grants of up to $10,000 will be awarded to qualified nonprofit organizations and NGOs to develop and curate thematic pages related to youth policies around the world on the Youthpolicy.org site....

Deadline: Rolling Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation Invites Applications for Music Donation Program - Through its Keeping Music Alive program, the foundation will donate musical instruments to music programs that serve low-income communities and have little or no budget for musical instruments.... Deadline: August 1, 2013 (Pre-qualification) USA Funds Accepting Applications for Key Transitions in Postsecondary Education Initiative Grants of between $400,000 to $800,000 will be awarded to three organizations working to provide education support services that help students and adult learners complete college.... Deadline: May 24, 2013

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