Monday Mailing 061019

Monday Mailing

Year 25 • Issue 37 10 June 2019 1.

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Contentious Oregon Climate Plan Takes Lessons From California’s Mistakes (Michael Hoch) New Research Shows SNAP Recipients Are A Benefit To – Not A Drain On – Rural Economies Alder Street Food Cart Pod To Close June 30 (Gabriel Leon) Oregon Joins Popular Vote Movement (Michael Hoch) Why You Want Oysters And A Salt Marsh Between You And A Hurricane Court Throws Book At BLM Over Fracking Chaco Five Reasons ‘Green Growth’ Won’t Save The Planet RESOURCE: Planning For Equity Policy Guide WEBINAR: How Technology Can Improve Urban Design Engagement (Patrick Lynch) WEBINAR: Public Art On Trails (Sarah Abigail)

1. Contentious Oregon Climate Plan Takes Lessons From

California’s Mistakes

Quote of the Week:

"A father is neither an anchor to hold us back nor a sail to take us there, but a guiding light whose love shows us the way."

- Unknown

Oregon Fast Fact #46

The Oregon Trail is the longest of the overland routes used in the westward expansion of the United States.

Oregon is on track to become the second U.S. state to pass an economywide cap-and-trade system to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. But while emulating the first such program (in California), Oregon also hopes to avoid repeating its mistakes.

Oregon's plan, like California's, would set a cap on greenhouse gas emissions that would come down over time. It would also create a market for companies to buy and trade a limited number of pollution permits. Ultimately, it aims to reduce emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

But the bill to create the program is so contentious, it is opposed by both industry and some environmental justice advocates, who have broken ranks with environmental supporters to speak out against it.

While industry groups argue that cap-and-trade will drive up energy costs and put their businesses at risk, opponents with environmental justice groups say too many industry-backed loopholes make cap-and-trade ineffective.

To access the full story, click here.

2. New Research Shows SNAP Recipients Are A Benefit To – Not A Drain On – Rural Economies

Over the last year, the Trump administration has proposed cutting the budget for food assistance, implementing work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents, and denying benefits to parents who don't pay child support.

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For most of these policies, the official line has been that low-income people who rely on publicbenefit programs are a drain on the country's resources. Just last week, the White House published a memo asking states to enforce rules that make it more difficult for immigrants applying for a green card to receive government assistance, claiming that "rampant welfare abuse by non-citizens is straining the social safety net." Other policy announcements have emphasized "self-sufficiency" among the country's poorest citizens.

Aside from the obvious inaccuracies—immigrants use benefits less than native-born citizens; most Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participants are working—there's also new evidence that spending on programs like the ones President Donald Trump wants to cut or restrict can benefit, not harm, the economy.

A report published this week by the United States Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service found that increased spending on SNAP under President Barack Obama created more jobs in rural counties. It's the first county-level analysis of the program's economic effects, and the results are conclusive: After the Obama administration nearly quadrupled SNAP payments, recipients' spending at grocery stores helped boost employment.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Alder Street Food Cart Pod To Close June 30

Vendors from Portland’s biggest food cart pod will scatter at the end of the month, as developers move forward with plans to build a hotel at Southwest 10th Avenue and Alder Street.

The Alder Street food carts were all given notice Thursday that June 30 would be their last day of operation. The news was first reported by the Daily Journal of Commerce.

BPM Real Estate Group of Portland plans to build a 35-story tower on the site. The company applied for a building permit in March and said Thursday that it plans to start construction this summer or early fall.

The building would include a luxury hotel with co-branded condominiums, as well as offices. The developer hasn’t announced the hotel brand. The site is owned by the Goodman family’s Downtown Development Group.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Oregon Joins Popular Vote Movement Oregon is poised to join an agreement that could see its seven electoral votes handed to presidential candidates who win the popular vote nationally — regardless of who Oregonians choose.

In a widely expected outcome, the House on Wednesday voted 37-22 to approve Senate Bill 870, legislation that allows the state to sign on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

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Once the bill is signed by Gov. Kate Brown, Oregon will join 14 other states and the District of Columbia in pledging to send their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote in presidential elections. That agreement wouldn’t kick in until enough states sign on to tally at least 270 electoral votes, the minimum needed to win the presidency.

With Oregon joining up, the compact will include 196 electoral votes, according to the national group pushing the bill.

Wednesday’s vote was all but certain. While Oregon has failed seven times to pass a popular vote bill, many of those failures came because of gridlock in the Senate. The House had passed a bill to join the agreement in four separate sessions.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Why You Want Oysters And A Salt Marsh Between You And A Hurricane

In September 2018, Hurricane Florence slammed into Beaufort, North Carolina, a town on the state’s inner banks that sits just 10 feet above sea level. The hurricane brought a 2.5-foot storm surge and sustained winds of 75 miles an hour that lasted some three days.

Florence was a big test for two different strategies for protecting the coast. While the areas with “hard” solutions — seawalls — sustained damage and significant erosion, a section of coastline with a “soft” solution, called a “living shoreline,” fared much better. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Beaufort Living Shoreline oyster reef and marsh was “intact after the storm, with minimal erosion.”

As the Gulf coast and Eastern seaboard ready for the 2019 Atlantic hurricane season, which began officially on June 1, more communities are trying to stabilize and fortify their coastlines against future storms, flooding, and sea level rise. The more than 120 living shorelines around the country are showing that a combination of oyster reefs, oyster shells, rocks, marsh plants, and other natural materials can be an effective alternative to seawalls. They’re also far less expensive.

While environmental groups like the Nature Conservancy have promoted these soft solutions for years, a new federal law is also propelling living shorelines into the mainstream.

The law, America’s Water Infrastructure Act of 2018, signed by President Trump in late October, requires the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to consider soft solutions such as living shorelines when planning to protect the coast against flooding. The Act is also aimed at improving water quality; marshes are known for their ability to filter and clean polluted water, including herbicides, pesticides, and heavy metals.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Court Throws Book At BLM Over Fracking Chaco When locals in northwestern New Mexico’s Chaco region give directions to places on the maze of roads out in the high desert here, they often refer to “the cornfield,” as in: “Turn left at the cornfield.” While that wouldn’t be much help in a corn-covered place like Iowa, a single field can Page 3 of 6

serve as a landmark here. There are very few since rainfall is scant, irrigation ditches don’t exist, and farming is of the dryland variety.

So it’s disconcerting to see truck after truck pass that same cornfield loaded down with water, bound for newly drilled oil wells that will be hydraulically fractured. Over a few days, the frackers shoot 1 million or more gallons of water — at least twice as much as that cornfield needs in a year — mixed with sand and chemicals into each of the hundreds of horizontal wells here. When the water bubbles back up, it is tainted with hydrocarbons, fracking chemicals and brine.

This water gluttony now has the industry, and the federal agency charged with overseeing it, in trouble. In May, the 10th District U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the Bureau of Land Management had failed to consider cumulative water use when it allowed drilling in the Chaco region, therefore violating federal environmental law. Yet the agency continues to issue new drilling permits, in defiance of the court’s decision.

The court’s ruling concerns the BLM’s Farmington Field Office’s 2003 resource management plan for the San Juan Basin, a 10,000-square-mile geological bowl replete with natural gas, oil and coal. The plan gave the preliminary go-ahead to 9,942 natural gas wells, drilled vertically, primarily in the northeastern corner of the office’s jurisdiction, far from Chaco Culture National Historic Park.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Five Reasons ‘Green Growth’ Won’t Save The Planet

Green growth has emerged as the dominant narrative for tackling contemporary environmental problems. Its supporters, including the likes of the UN, OECD, national governments, businesses and even NGOs, say that sustainability can be achieved through efficiency, technology and market-led environmental action. Green growth suggests we really can have our cake and eat it – both growing the economy and protecting the planet.

But when it comes to tackling the most pressing environmental problems such as climate breakdown, species extinction or resource depletion, green growth might weaken rather than strengthen progress. Here are five reasons why: 1) Growth trumps efficiency

In theory, advances in environmental efficiency can help to “decouple” economic growth from resource use and pollution. But such outcomes remain elusive in the real world. While sectors such as construction, agriculture and transport have managed to create less pollution and use less resources per unit of output, these improvements have struggled to fully offset the scale and speed of economic growth. By outpacing production improvements, economic growth has led to an unhampered rise in resource use, pollution, and waste.

In fact, efficiency may even be fueling further consumption and pollution. This is a paradox first observed in 1865 by the economist William Stanley Jevons, who noticed the introduction of a more efficient steam engine actually coincided with more coal consumption, not less, as new profits were reinvested in extra production, causing prices to fall, demand to rise, and so on.

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Such “rebound effects” exist across the whole economy, so the only real solution is to consume less. At best, efficiency is a half-baked solution, at worst, it stokes the very problem it tries to address.

To access the full story, click here.

8. RESOURCE: Planning For Equity Policy Guide

APA's first-ever Planning for Equity Policy Guide identifies policy recommendations for planners to advocate for policies that support equity in all aspects of planning at local, state, and federal levels.

This historic guide provides specific, actionable policy guidance crafted through an equity-in-allpolicies lens on crossing-cutting topics and areas of planning.

Advocate for an Equity-in-all-Policies Approach Policy Guide Working Group Co-Chairs Lynn Ross, AICP, and Susan Wood, AICP, preview the equity-in-all-policies approach the guide promotes, how the guide can be used to influence work at the local, state, and federal levels, the people behind the guide, and why planners are the right profession to advance this issue.

To access the resource, click here.

9. WEBINAR: How Technology Can Improve Urban Design Engagement

Civic engagement for urban design projects is often difficult to do well. Not everyone can attend a public meeting, and not everyone feels comfortable speaking up at one.

Lou Huang, creator of Streetmix, will lead our next webinar on June 12 at 1 p.m. eastern time to discuss how technology can break down these barriers to participation and make engagement a more collaborative and cooperative process. Join Huang and Next City to learn how cities can make the most of tools like Streetmix and the role of technology in cities.

Streetmix allows users to create a hypothetical street, with options for driving lanes, bus lanes, bike lanes, scooter lanes, streetcars, sidewalks, parking, trees, parklets and benches, wayfinding signs and much more. What’s more, they can do it without any technical knowledge and from the comfort of home, which means that residents can make their voices heard from anywhere.

“Streetmix was a prototype created to test our theory of online civic engagement, but it’s now become an important part of an urban planner or community organizer’s toolkit for communication and ideation around street planning. It’s used by thousands of city planners, engineers, students, activists and hobbyists, has been translated into over ten languages, and have become instrumental in upgrading hundreds of miles of streets around the world,” says Huang.

To sign up for the webinar, click here.

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10. WEBINAR: Public Art On Trails Public art can help elevate a trail from practical infrastructure to an inviting space cherished by the community. A strategic investment in trail art can pay dividends, helping to establish the trail not only as a community asset, but also as a tourist destination. Installing trail art can also do wonders to encourage public engagement and stewardship of any multiuse trail—while at the same time supporting local artists.

In this free webinar, hosted by Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, learn from experts from across the country who have innovatively incorporated public art along their trails: • Geordie Vining, City of Newburyport, representing the Clipper City Rail Trail (Newburyport, MA) • Jim Toia, Lafayette College, representing the Karl Stirner Arts Trail (Easton, PA) • Dr. Darby Trotter, Kansas City River Trails, Inc., representing the Kansas City Riverfront Heritage Trail (Kansas City, MO) • Cheryl Myers and Maria Floren, Charlotte Center City Partners, representing the Charlotte Rail Trail (Charlotte, NC) In addition to highlighting examples of the artwork exhibited, each presenter will also discuss the process and players involved in the funding, installation and maintenance of public art along their trail. They will also speak on the impact of the art on the trail and its use.

To sign up for the webinar, click here.

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