Monday Mailing
Year 22 • Issue 33 09 May 2016 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
Oregon Farmers Dissolve Depression-Era Co-Op Oregon Town Considers Seizing Abandon Foreclosures to Fight Blight Transit Latest O&C Forest Plan Gathers Critics Columbia River Gorge's Top 10 Trails for Spring, Summer Hiking What Happened to Google Maps? 6 Trends in Online Community Engagement: the Good and the Bad The Death of a Unique Oregon lake (OPINION) EPA Releases EnviroAtlas Ecosystem Mapping Tool Lean Code Tool How Jane Jacobs Changed the Way We Look at Cities Is It Working? Are the Region's and City's Transportation Policies and Actions Moving Us in Their Desired Directions? - Transportation Seminar: Friday, May 13, 2016
1. Oregon Farmers Dissolve Depression-Era Co-Op PENDLETON, Ore. — It's the end of an era for Eastern Oregon agriculture. Pendleton Grain Growers, the longtime farmers' co-op that formed out of the Great Depression, is finished. Members voted overwhelmingly to dissolve PGG at a special meeting Monday night, authorizing the board of directors to sell off all property and assets.
Quote of the Week: “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” ~Confucius Oregon Fast Fact: The nation's most photographed lighthouse is the Heceta Head Lighthouse located in Lane County.
That process could take several years before any leftover equity is returned to the co-op's 1,850 members. About 200 members attended Monday's meeting, and 186 cast their votes, about 95 percent, in favor of dissolution. At least 50 members were required for a quorum and two-thirds majority to pass the resolution. To access the full story, click here. 2. Oregon Town Considers Seizing Abandon Foreclosures to Fight Blight An Oregon town is considering a unique method to flight blight by using a “little-known” state law that would allow the city to seize abandoned foreclosures that the city deems a threat to public health. Oregon’s Mail Tribune has the story of Medford, Oregon, which is discussing the use of a stipulation of Oregon state law that would allow it to take back some of the 415 vacant properties that reside within the city limits. To access the full story, click here.
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3. Transit Latest O&C Forest Plan Gathers Critics Federal land managers labored long and hard on their latest plan for the 2.6 million acres in western Oregon known as the O&C lands. And they admit it was crafted, at least in part, to avoid protracted legal battles. But the plan hadn’t even been officially released yet when it began gathering threats of lawsuits from all sides. Jim Whittington, with the Medford District of the Bureau of Land Management, says the agency’s fouryear effort to update its management plan for the O&C lands hits the sweet spot. To access the full story, click here. 4. Columbia River Gorge's Top 10 Trails for Spring, Summer Hiking With so many great trails, the Columbia River Gorge overwhelms hikers with choices. Here are my favorites in spring and summer. Try these hikes out, then build your own list. Best in spring Finding sun is the name of the game, so head east of Hood River into the rain shadow of the Cascades. Catherine Creek: On the Washington side of the gorge, much of the land between Coyote Wall and Major Creek is part of the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area. As trails are developed, most hiking above State Route 14 follows boot and bike tire tracks. You can hike for a week across this three-milewide landscape that is dotted with ponderosa pines, crowned with Oregon white oak and sprinkled with grassy wildflower meadows. Begin at Catherine Creek, between Bingen and Lyle. Drive S.R. 14 to Old Highway 8 at milepost 70.9 (as measured from the Interstate Bridge in Vancouver). Turn left, then drive north and east around Rowland Lake for 1.4 miles to the Catherine Creek trailhead. Also check out Coyote Wall/Syncline on the west edge of the public land in the Catherine Creek area. To access the full story, click here. 5. What Happened to Google Maps? Browsing Google Maps over the past year or so, I've often thought that there are fewer labels than there used to be. Google's cartography was revamped three years ago – but surely this didn't include a reduction in labels? Rather, the sparser maps appear to be a recent development. A few days ago, I was looking at some screenshots I used for a post in April 2010. Comparing the screenshots above, the majority of the missing labels are city labels. Just how many fewer cities are labeled on today's map? Let's count: 2010 - 46 Cities 2016 - 8 Cities — an 83% reduction in city labels. To access the full story, click here. Page 2 of 5
6. 6 Trends in Online Community Engagement: the Good and the Bad Civic tech, and particularly online community engagement, has grown dramatically over the past few years. For years the field was in it's infancy with only a few players and early adopters experimenting with new approaches. We're now in the teenage years, with rapid growth in the number of vendors and agencies taking the leap. As every teenager knows, every growth spurt comes with both positives and negatives, and today's world of online community engagement has its share of both. The Positive 1. A Maturing Field of Vendors In the early days a great deal of online engagement tools were not yet fully developed platforms. Most of them were developed for one particular project and then an attempt was made to commercialize the technology to offer the same functionality to other projects. This product development pathway often resulted in products not designed for the needs of the broader market, making it time-consuming and labor intensive to customize for new projects. Nearly all of these early platforms, if they are still around, have matured into fully templated products that can be configured quickly to meet the needs of new projects. The newest platforms, for the most part, have been designed from the ground up with the latest "software as a service" capabilities. To access the full story, click here. 7. The Death of a Unique Oregon lake (OPINION) Until recently, Lake Abert, Oregon's only saltwater lake, supplied habitat for some 3 million migratory shorebirds and supported a commercial brine shrimp fishery. Now the desert lake, located about 30 miles north of Lakeview, is dying from a lack of water. The lake's surface area — once 64 square miles — is now less than five square miles, a 90 percent decline, due to drought and water diversions on the Chewaucan River, the saline lake's principal water source. The decline in freshwater inflow has exposed alkali salts, creating a serious source of air pollution, and has also increased the lake's salinity beyond levels tolerable to the lake's shrimp, which have disappeared — along with the migratory birds which fed off them. No one knows where the birds have gone. But Lake Abert was — with California's Mono Lake and Utah's Great Salt Lake — one of the only saltwater lakes on the thousands-of-miles Pacific flyway, so the loss of habitat is significant. Abert Lake's death may be a migratory bird disaster. We don't really know, since neither federal nor state officials have studied where the birds have gone, or what alternative food sources and habitat they are using. Nor has there been any government effort to ascertain or correct the causes of Lake Abert's decline. To access the full story, click here. 8. EnviroAtlas Ecosystem Mapping Tool The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) EnviroAtlas, a web-based interactive tool that integrates over 300 separate data layers, helps decision makers understand the implications of planning and policy decisions on our fragile ecosystems and the communities who depend on goods and services from these ecosystems. EnviroAtlas is designed for people from all levels of government, professionals, researchers, educators, non-governmental organizations, and anyone interested in considering the benefits or impacts of a decision, such as siting a new road or city park. EnviroAtlas can help people learn about ecosystems, and how they provide us with benefits such as clean air and water; opportunities for recreation; and protection from severe weather, such as hurricanes and Page 3 of 5
floods. EnviroAtlas also highlights how ecosystems provide habitats for plants, fish, and wildlife as well as the materials people need to produce food, clothing, shelter, and pharmaceuticals, and provides maps on all of these topics. EnviroAtlas integrates geospatial data from a variety of sources to allow users to visualize and analyze how decisions impact ecosystems and their ability to provide goods and services. Communities are often faced with difficult decisions, such as trade-offs between transportation, residential or commercial development and maintaining local wetlands, urban greenspaces, or urban forests. EnviroAtlas helps communities better understand the potential benefits and drawbacks of their decisions by providing data, maps, information and tools to analyze relationships between nature, health and well-being, and the economy. For more information, click here. 9. Lean Code Tool We believe form-based codes are the most efficient, predictable, and elegant way to assure high levels of walkability and urbanism – even in more rural environments. However, the political and staff capacity of many local governments is not prepared for a full zoning reform effort. CNU is developing an agenda of incremental code reform that blends perfectly with the Lean Urbanism initiative funded by the Knight Foundation and led by the Center for Applied Transect Studies. Along with a number of other tools to implement Lean Urbanism, a Lean Code Tool is under development, and will be unveiled at CNU 24 in Detroit. A plenary on Saturday morning will introduce the tools, an Open Source session on Saturday afternoon will delve into the particulars, and a 202 daylong workshop on Wednesday will test the strategies. For more information, click here. 10. How Jane Jacobs Changed the Way We Look at Cities I first met Jane Jacobs in the early 90s. She was sitting in the front row of a large Toronto auditorium as I delivered a one-hour lecture. I did not know who she was. When I was done, the first hand up – sharply so – belonged to this elderly person. How wonderful, I thought, a citizen who has never stopped being engaged. What came out of her mouth, though, was one of the sharpest critiques of my way of analyzing the city that I’d ever heard – and probably ever will. She pursued a line of questioning quite different from what I usually get. She continuously returned to the issue of “place”, and its importance when considering the implementation of urban policies – notably the loss of neighborhoods and erasure of local residents’ experiences. Her input made me shift my thinking to more “micro” levels; I am still doing quite a bit of work today on the need to relocalise pieces of national and city economies. To access the full story, click here. 11. Is It Working? Are the Region's and City's Transportation Policies and Actions Moving Us in Their Desired Directions? - Transportation Seminar: Friday, May 13, 2016 Speaker: Roger Geller, Bicycle Coordinator, City of Portland, Oregon The City of Portland and the Metropolitan Region have strong policies in place to encourage transportation through means other than the single-occupancy vehicle. Both governments have numeric goals for the proportion of trips to be made by walking, bicycling, transit, shared vehicles, working at Page 4 of 5
home and driving alone. Indeed, the City of Portland desires that by 2035 no more than thirty percent of commute trips be made by people driving alone. Similar policies have driven transportation planning in the city and region for decades.... Read More Watch online: Use this link on the day of the seminar Attend in person: Room 204 of the Distance Learning Center Wing of the Urban Center at PSU
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