Monday Mailing - May 25, 2020

Monday Mailing Quote of the Week:

“May we never forget our fallen comrades. Freedom isn't free.”

- Sgt. Major Bill Paxton

Memorial Day Fact

Originally known as Decoration Day, a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers (first held three years after the end of the Civil War), the date is believed to have been chosen because flowers would be in bloom across the country.

Year 26 • Issue 37 25 May 2020 1. A Coronavirus Turf War in Klickitat County (Hannah Fuller) 2. The Sickness in Our Food Supply (Lydia Ivanovic) 3. Oregon Emergency Orders Remain Valid for Now, State Supreme Court Rules 4. Travel Message: Stay Local and Spend Money 5. Social-Gatherings Ban Tests Small Wineries 6. COVID-19 Has Made Expanded National Service More Important Than Ever (William Sullivan) 7. In California, A Push Grows to Turn Dead Trees into Biomass Energy 8. One Oregon County Has Widespread COVID-19 Testing. Others Aren’t So Lucky. (Willliam Sullivan) 9. RESOURCE – Economic Development Research Partners’ Leader Series: Reopening 10. PODCAST – Airbnb Hosts Built Mini-Empires. Now They’re Crumbling. (Emily Bradley) 11. PODCAST – Foundations’ Role in Resilience and Recovery 1. A Coronavirus Turf War in Klickitat County Klickitat County, in south-central Washington, along the border with Oregon, got its first confirmed case of the coronavirus on March 14th.

The seriousness of the virus was still sinking in for many Americans; the N.B.A. had suspended its season just three days before, and few schools had been closed at that point. But Washington State had seen the virus sooner than most: the first U.S. case was diagnosed in suburban Seattle, in late January, and the first U.S. death occurred there, too, on February 29th. Klickitat, which is roughly the size of Rhode Island and home to around twenty thousand people, is a couple hundred miles southeast of Seattle. For many of its residents, covid-19 still seemed far away, and possibly of questionable authenticity. “In the beginning, a lot of people weren’t taking the virus seriously here,” Merrit Monnat, who runs a farm with her husband in the county seat of Goldendale, population three thousand, told me recently. “I heard people say it’s a conspiracy theory.”

To access the full story, click here.

2. The Sickness in Our Food Supply

“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those Page 1 of 5

in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.

The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it.

There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Oregon Emergency Orders Remain Valid for Now, State Supreme Court Rules

Executive orders mandating business closures and enforcing social distancing throughout Oregon will remain in place while the state Supreme Court takes up legal challenges to Gov. Kate Brown’s emergency authority.

Just hours after a Baker County judge invalidated more than 20 executive orders Brown has issued since early March, the Oregon Supreme Court on Monday evening granted an emergency stay on that ruling. In doing so, the court appeared to agree with the state of Oregon’s position that abruptly ending the emergency orders amid a pandemic could have serious health impacts, and should not be taken without a more thorough consideration of the law.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Travel Message: Stay Local and Spend Money

The decline was dramatic and deep. Gov. Kate Brown’s March order barring nonessential travel and the federal ban on international travelers from Europe and Asia shut down an entire tourism industry that had seen strong growth in Oregon over the past several years.

The impact is felt particularly hard at Travel Oregon, the state’s tourism agency. The bureau is almost entirely funded through hotel lodging tax, a revenue source that has plunged over the past two months. It has slashed its budget forecast for the fiscal year by between 40% and 50% and will furlough 30% of staff in June.

Now that the governor has introduced a phased, gradual reopening of the economy, Travel Oregon and regional tourism associations are turning to local residents to help the travel sector Page 2 of 5

recover by encouraging them to visit local parks and spend money in restaurants and cultural institutions when they are allowed to do so.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Social-Gatherings Ban Tests Small Wineries

Before the pandemic brought business to a standstill, Oregon wineries had enjoyed five years of solid growth. Tasting-room visits had more than doubled over that period. Between 24 and 44 new wineries were opening in the state every year, according to the Oregon Wine Board.

Within a matter of days in March, that growth came to a halt as Gov. Kate Brown’s ban on social gatherings forced wineries to close tasting rooms, where most sell the bulk of their wine.

This direct-to-consumer sales model has left Oregon’s wineries scrambling to boost online sales and find creative ways to market themselves through virtual tasting-room visits.

To access the full story, click here.

6. COVID-19 Has Made Expanded National Service More Important Than Ever

National service, a time-honored American tradition, is currently getting some new attention.

In a recent, bipartisan effort, Senators Chris Coons (D-DE), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and other Democratic Senate colleagues, along with Republican colleague Tom Cole (R-OK) and other Democratic House members, introduced the Pandemic Response and Opportunity Through National Service Act on May 6, 2020.

If passed, the act would expand national service programs from 75,000 to 750,000 AmeriCorps opportunities per year, over a 3-year period. The bill calls for a partnership between AmeriCorps and the CDC to provide additional tracing and surge capacity as the country works to respond to and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

To access the full story, click here.

7. In California, A Push Grows to Turn Dead Trees into Biomass Energy

Jonathan Kusel owns three pickups and a 45-foot truck for hauling woodchip bins. He operates a woodchip yard and a 35-kilowatt biomass plant that burns dead trees, and he runs a crew marking trees for loggers working in national forests. Those are a lot of blue-collar credentials for a University of California, Berkeley PhD sociologist known for his documentation of how the decline of the timber industry affects rural communities.

What drove Kusel into a side business — logging small and dead trees and burning them in biomass boilers — is fear of fire. In 2007, the 65,000-acre Moonlight Fire blew flaming embers onto his lawn near Taylorsville, California as he readied his family to evacuate. Last September, the Walker Fire scorched 54,614 acres just up the valley from the offices of the Sierra Institute for Community and Environment, the nonprofit research organization Kusel founded in 1993. In that 12-year span, wildfires burned 690 square miles in the northern Sierra Nevada.

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Drought, a warming climate, and bark-beetle infestations have also killed 147 million California trees since 2013, most of them along the Sierra spine running south from Kusel’s home base past Lake Tahoe and Yosemite National Park to Tehachapi Pass, 75 miles north of Los Angeles.

Scientists say these trees are poised to burn in California’s next round of megafires, threatening the range with blazes so intense they will leave some places unable to establish new forests.

Kusel, 63, is one of a growing number of citizens and officials anxious to put those trees and their thick undergrowth to use before they ignite large-scale wildfires, pollute the air with choking smoke, and release large amounts of CO2. His institute has invested in logging equipment to supply wood chips to community biomass facilities, which burn them to produce heat and electricity. This is low-value vegetation that would have burned in natural fires a century ago, before the U.S. Forest Service began suppressing fire.2.7.

To access the full story, click here.

8. One Oregon County Has Widespread COVID-19 Testing. Others Aren’t So Lucky.

On a cloudy Sunday morning in early May, Oralia Mendez walked up to a house in Corvallis, Oregon, introduced herself to the man at the door, and asked him if he would be willing to swab his nose for the virus that causes COVID-19.

The visit was part of an Oregon State University project meant to help the Benton County Health Department deduce the prevalence of COVID-19 and mitigate its spread. Called TRACE, short for Team-based Rapid Assessment of Community Epidemics, the project sent teams of volunteer OSU students and health workers, including Mendez, to collect swabs at randomly selected Corvallis homes. “We want to help fight this virus,” said Mendez, who, along with her student teammate, Shoshanna McCleary, successfully collected several samples that morning.

TRACE is one of several projects nationwide that are trying to paint a clearer picture of the coronavirus’ quiet circulation within a community. But because many local health departments lack the resources to run this type of study, they must rely on funding from universities and other organizations. In Oregon, that means places like Benton County are able to rigorously track the virus, while other counties can only tackle immediate needs, like responding to current COVID-19 hotspots.

To access the full story, click here.

9. RESOURCE – Economic Development Research Partners’ Leader Series: Reopening

Economic development organizations have been busier than ever since the economy turned upside down in March. How are leading EDOs meeting the challenges covid-19 brings to their businesses, communities, and organizations? This brief is the first in a series featuring responses from members of IEDC's Economic Development Research Partners (EDRP) program.

After two months of social distancing and varying state restrictions on the economy and public life, “reopening” is the topic of the moment. This brief addresses “reopening” in three ways: reopening or restarting a community’s economy; reopening community businesses; and reopening EDO offices To access this resource, click here.

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10. PODCAST – Airbnb Hosts Built Mini-Empires. Now They’re Crumbling.

For years, Airbnb's rental platform offered millions of people the chance to make money on their own terms. Now, with travel near a standstill, those hosts are scrambling to keep their rental properties afloat. WSJ's Tripp Mickle and Preetika Rana explain the rise and sudden collapse of hosting on Airbnb.

To listen to the full story, click here.

11. PODCAST – Foundations’ Role in Resilience and Recovery

As the economic damage of COVID-19 becomes clear, foundations are looking for new ways to support their communities. For many foundations, mission-focused lending to nonprofits is not in their standard playbook, let alone funding small businesses directly. In today’s episode, Deb Markley of LOCUS Impact Investing encourages foundations to find new ways to work. She proposes ways for foundations to promote economic recovery and long-term resilience in their communities through innovative partnerships and flexible PRIs to small businesses and nonprofits alike.

To listen to the full story, click here.

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