Monday Mailing 052019

Monday Mailing

Year 25 • Issue 35 20 May 2019 1.

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U.S. Supreme Court Dismisses Oil Industry Lawsuit Challenging Oregon’s Clean Fuels Standard (Michael Hoch) Reclaiming “Redneck Urbanism”: What Urban Planners Can Learn From Trailer Parks America’s Infrastructure Priorities Need Repair University of Oregon, OHSU Withdraw From Industry Group Opposing Gov. Kate Brown’s Climate Agenda (Michael Hoch) Speak Your Piece: Rural Strength And Possibility The Sounds Of Rural America How To Become A Strategic Leader ‘Things Are Not Going To Get Better For A Long Time’: PG&E’s Bankruptcy Complicates An Already Difficult Recovery For Camp Fire Survivors Portland Banking On Low-Rent SRO Hotels To Ease Housing Problems GRANT: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Invites Proposals For Community-Based Archives

1. U.S. Supreme Court Dismisses Oil Industry Lawsuit

Challenging Oregon’s Clean Fuels Standard

The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to hear a 2015 lawsuit filed by oil industry leaders, which challenged Oregon's authority to enforce the Clean Fuel Standard, a policy aimed at decreasing transportation emissions.

Quote of the Week:

"Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory there would be no civilization, no future."

- Elie Wiesel

Oregon Fast Fact #49

The Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, built in 1880, is currently used as the site of the final resting place of up to 467,000 cremated individuals.

The Clean Fuel Standard was passed by the Oregon Legislature in 2015 and went into effect 2016. It requires out-of-state oil companies to reduce the amount of carbon pollution they emit via diesel and gasoline by 10 percent in 10 years—beginning in 2016.

The policy has already helped reduce transportation fuel pollution by over 2.73 million tons, Oregon Environmental Council said in a statement. That's the equivalent of removing 580,000 cars from the road for a year.

The lawsuit filed four years ago by the American Fuels and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the American Trucking Association and Consumer Energy Alliance argued that the legislation gave Oregon unconstitutional authority to regulate out-of-state commerce.

In September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion dismissing the case. Today, Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court tossed the suit.

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Local environmental advocacy groups Earthjustice, Oregon Environmental Council and Climate Solutions intervened on behalf of the Clean Fuel Standard in court.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Reclaiming “Redneck Urbanism”: What Urban Planners Can Learn From Trailer

Parks

Given that “redneck” and “hillbilly” remain the last acceptable stereotypes among polite society, it isn’t surprising that the stereotypical urban home of poor, recently rural whites remains an object of scorn. The mere mention of a trailer park conjures images of criminals in wifebeaters, moldy mattresses thrown awry, and Confederate flags. As with most social phenomena, there is a much more interesting reality behind this crass cliché. Trailer parks remain one of the last forms of housing in US cities provided by the market explicitly for low-income residents. Better still, they offer a working example of traditional urban design elements and private governance.

Any discussion of trailer parks should start with the fact that most forms of low-income housing have been criminalized in nearly every major US city. Beginning in the 1920s, urban policymakers and planners started banning what they deemed as low-quality housing, including boarding houses, residential hotels, and low-quality apartments.

Meanwhile, on the outer edges of many cities, urban policymakers undertook a policy of “mass eviction and demolition” of low-quality housing. Policymakers established bans on suburban shantytowns and self-built housing. In knocking out the bottom rung of urbanization, this ended the natural “filtering up” of cities as they expanded outward, replaced as we now know, by static subdivisions of middle-class, single-family houses. The Housing Act of 1937 formalized this war on “slums” at the federal level and by the 1960s much of the emergent low-income urbanism in and around many U.S. cities was eliminated.

To access the full story, click here.

3. America’s Infrastructure Priorities Need Repair

States have been neglecting basic road repairs in favor of costly road expansion, resulting in worsening pavement condition while also creating expensive new liabilities. Yet the problem is still framed by some (the “Infrastructure Cult”) as primarily about not having enough money.

There is one magical phrase deployed every single time the conversation turns to infrastructure funding, intended to capture hearts and minds and convince everyone to turn over just a few more of their hard-earned dollars—always spoken with the confidence of knowing that the cause is just: “To fix our crumbling roads and bridges.”

This rhetoric is also step one in a perpetual bait and switch. One look at the condition of our roadways over the last decade shows that the policymakers in Congress who spent the last decade giving state Departments of Transportation ever more flexibility to spend more federal transportation dollars however they want either got hoodwinked, or they were in on the deal.

To access the full story, click here.

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4. University of Oregon, OHSU Withdraw From Industry Group Opposing Gov. Kate

Brown’s Climate Agenda

The University of Oregon and Oregon Health and Science University have withdrawn from an energy industry lobbying group opposing Gov. Kate Brown’s climate change agenda, two days after The Oregonian/OregonLive disclosed the relationship.

The nonprofit Alliance of Western Energy Consumers still counts as members companies including Microsoft and Intel, which have taken prominent public stands on the need to address climate change.

A University of Oregon spokeswoman said UO President Michael Schill “has directed that the University of Oregon withdraw its membership in AWEC on grounds that it does not match our community values with regard to climate change or the institutional goals outlined in the recently updated Climate Action Plan. The withdrawal from AWEC is effective as of May 13.”

A spokeswoman for OHSU said the group had provided useful technical assistance and market analysis for two years, informing the university’s energy budget forecasting.

“Regrettably, AWEC’s information-gathering process can no longer be separated from its advocacy efforts; consequently, OHSU is ending our membership in the alliance, effective immediately,” the spokeswoman said. “AWEC has not and does not represent OHSU. OHSU has not and does not engage the alliance on public policy positioning or advocacy at any level of government.”

To access the full story, click here.

5. Speak Your Piece: Rural Strength And Possibility

Rural America isn’t going to hell in a handbasket. There’s more strength and possibility in rural areas than today’s popular narrative would have us think. I’ve spent much of my career on and around rural development issues, and I believe we can’t just write off 14 percent of the country’s population and 85 percent of its land mass, throw up our hands, and tell people to buy a bus ticket out or be doomed. There is a power to place. We need people in rural America.

Modern American agriculture leads the world in food, fuel, and fiber innovations—there’s a strength here that as a nation we need to encourage. And for the first time this decade, we’re seeing shifts in the trend of rural exodus toward an increase in population in some rural areas, according to the USDA. What is also true of rural America is structural poverty in many areas hasn’t had sufficient attention—85 percent of the nation’s 353 persistently poor counties are rural (defined as counties where 20 percent or more of the population has lived in poverty for the previous 30 years). In too many of these communities, homes are old and unsafe, clean drinking water is unreliable, broadband doesn’t reach, and fundamental services, likes banks and hospitals, are hours away from home.

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This is the rural America we must focus on in community development. And we find strength stories here as well.

In 2019, some of the most forceful, creative, and capable community development practitioners—community development financial institutions (CDFIs)—are fighting in and for highly distressed rural areas. They are proving the fight can be won.

To access the full story, click here.

6. The Sounds Of Rural America An audio project set in Appalachian Ohio expands the idea of “listening to each other” to include natural soundscapes and audio archives. Composer and artist Brian Harnetty says such listening is one way to bridge differences in perspectives, politics, and place.

I spend a lot of time listening to Appalachian Ohio. I listen to its people: bakers and shopkeepers, community organizers and coal miners, farmers and fracking protesters, and they all have a story to tell. I listen to places, too: forest hemlocks and sulphury streams, warblers and spring peepers, oil wells and local industry, as they come together to make the region’s soundscapes. Just as importantly, I listen to sound archives, where I hear voices and songs of everyday people; I am eavesdropping as sound and history collide.

I transform these sound archives into new music. For the past two decades I have worked as a composer and ethnographer to figure out a process and a language to do so. I have worked with archives across Appalachia and the Midwest from Kentucky to Chicago. They have included everything from 90-year old ballad singers to the ruminations of jazz visionary Sun Ra. In this work I am striving toward a new way of listening that involves careful attention to both old recordings and contemporary voices. The projects look back and perform history, but invariably they also lead me to the present moment.

To access the full story, click here.

7. How To Become A Strategic Leader

My career at Facebook started in 2006 as its first intern. Three years later, I became a rookie manager at the age of 25. Today, I manage an organization of hundreds of people. This path has brought countless new challenges, mistakes, and lessons, many of which are laid out in my new book, The Making of a Manager, a field guide for new managers.

One of the key areas of growth for me as a manager was strategy. As I progressed in my career, I knew that there was an expectation that the work I did would become increasingly strategic. But what does that really mean? This is what I used to think it meant: • Setting metric goals.

• Thinking outside the box to come up with new ideas.

• Working harder and motivating others to work harder.

• Writing long documents.

• Creating frameworks.

• Drawing graphs on a whiteboard.

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As a result, I tried to do as many of the above as I could. I brainstormed. I wrote epic, sweeping documents. I familiarized myself with the language of KPIs and measurements. Before each new task, I gave myself a mental check. This, I thought, must be strategizing.

Unfortunately, I was doing the equivalent of strumming a guitar and assuming I was making music. The core problem was that I didn’t really understand what strategy was. Because nobody had ever explained it to me, I figured that being strategic was simply engaging in high-level product and business discussions.

To access the full story, click here.

8. ‘Things Are Not Going To Get Better For A Long Time’: PG&E’s Bankruptcy Complicates An Already Difficult Recovery For Camp Fire Survivors

In early February, John Gillander, an older man with a thick white mustache and wire-rimmed glasses, parked his red Ford Fiesta inside a county park in Mohave County, Arizona. Snow dusted the top of Hualapai Peak, which jutted into the sky. His mobile home burned down during November’s Camp Fire in Paradise, California, and everything Gillander owns fit in the back of his car. His two dogs — an English cocker spaniel named Charlie-Horse and a red border collie called Scarlet — have accompanied him on his wanderings ever since he fled the flames.

When I spoke with Gillander, he was waiting for his insurance company to give him enough money to purchase an RV — a stopgap until he can rebuild permanently in his hometown. “I’ve always wanted to travel,” Gillander told me. “And now I guess I have the time.”

It was while slogging through the claims process with his home insurance agent that Gillander realized that he — like many Camp Fire victims — was underinsured. Retired and living on disability checks, Gillander recently joined one of the many lawsuits against Pacific Gas & Electric, California’s largest utility company, which is suspected of sparking the deadly Camp Fire blaze. Local media have reported that a PG&E transmission tower malfunctioned and sparked just minutes before the fire ignited. Hours before the Camp Fire sparked, Gillander, a customer of PG&E, received an email from the company warning that it was considering cutting power because of high fire danger in the area. PG&E, however, did not follow through with an outage at his home. About 12 hours later, his property was completely destroyed.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Portland Banking On Low-Rent SRO Hotels To Ease Housing Problems Jennifer Carder has lived in the Barbara Maher Apartments building in North Portland for only four months but she already feels more at home than she has in years.

Every wall of her tiny room is covered in photos, crafts and other belongings. She’s got a cat, Bubba T. Boobooface, who greets her at the door.

Sure, she shares the bathroom and kitchen with the building’s 33 other women. But her room is the first place Carder, 37, has had to herself since she became homeless while in the grip of addiction to alcohol and opiates.

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Now with a new job at Little Big Burger and eight months of sobriety, she’s confident her recovery is going to stick — in no small part because of the roof over her head, modest though it might be.

“If I was to relapse,” she said, “I’d lose all of this.”

Carder is exactly the kind of Portlander that the city is trying to help with a renewed push toward a type of housing that fell out of favor decades ago.

Single-room-occupancy hotels, or SROs, were once ubiquitous in the central city, an affordable haven for people who otherwise would land on the street. For the last 50 years, though, the landlords who owned SROs retired or sold the decaying buildings to developers who put up expensive homes, offices or upscale hotels in their place.

To access the full story, click here.

10. GRANT: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Invites Proposals For Community-Based

Archives

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and the well-being of diverse and democratic societies.

Since 2013, the foundation's Scholarly Communications program has been making a series of grants designed to support and strengthen a body of archival practice called community-based archiving with the goal of helping to diversify the body of primary source evidence available to activists, artists, and researchers in humanities fields, community historians, genealogists, teachers, and students.

Through the program, the foundation will award grants ranging between $25,000 and $100,000 in support of community-based archives that represent and serve communities marginalized due to oppression based on race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, class, sexuality, religion, ability, and/or geographic location.

Grant funds may be used for operational support, including general support for staff, space, and utilities; collections care, including storage, cataloging, description, and preservation; and programming and outreach activities, including the collection of new materials, exhibitions, publications, or other uses of the collections.

For the purposes of this Request for Proposals, community-based archives must demonstrate that the community members being served and represented actively participate in their archival processes and make key decisions about what to collect and how.

To be eligible, organizations must be located in the United States or one of its territories; be tax exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code or have an organization with 501(c)(3) status serving as a fiscal sponsor; and have an annual operating budget of no more than $1 million.

To access the complete RFP, click here.

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