Monday Mailing - July 27

Monday Mailing

Year 26 • Issue 45 27 July 2020 1.

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Quote of the Week:

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”

- David Mitchell

Oregon Fast Fact

The word “Oregon” is derived from a Shoshone expression meaning, The River of the West, originating from two Shosone words, “Ogwa,” River and “Pe-on,” West, or “Ogwa Pe-on”.

More info here.

This Therapy Llama is Helping Vulnerable Populations in Oregon Get Through the Pandemic COVID-19 is Complicating Seattle’s Response to Wildfire Smoke Remembering John Lewis Oregon’s Rural School Districts Focus on In-Person Instruction for Fall (Katie McFall) Can $50 Million in Emergency Funding Make the Arts Equitable in Oregon? (Katie McFall) A Tale of Two Planners: Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses (Emily Bradley) To Fight Racism, Transit Has a Key Role Oregon Sues Federal Agencies Over Protest Enforcement Working from Home and Broadband Access in Oregon The Hunger: COVID-19 Changes How America Feeds Its Hungry The Great American Outdoors Act Passes, Could Mean Big Things for Oregon (William Sullivan) PODCAST – Rural Black Lives Matter Protests Inspire Next Steps RESOURCE – Destination Marketing and COVID-19: Planning for Oregon’s Tourism Recovery

1. This Therapy Llama is Helping Vulnerable Populations in

Oregon Get Through the Pandemic

Caesar the llama has had a busy few months.

He's been "leading" virtual story time with students, recording birthday videos, and even attending protests near his farm in Jefferson, Oregon.

Caesar is part of a growing trend known as llama therapy, which has become a lifeline for some of the most vulnerable populations, especially during the coronavirus pandemic.

Caesar's handler, Larry McCool, brings him to nursing homes near his Mystic Llama Farm in Jefferson on a voluntary basis. Many nursing home residents, like the 48 elderly patients at The Oaks at Sherwood Park, haven't had in-person contact with family or friends for four months.

To access the full story, click here.

2. COVID-19 is Complicating Seattle’s Response to Wildfire Smoke

Before the pandemic, the Rainier Beach Community Center served as a cornerstone of South Seattle civic life, hosting children’s operas, legal clinics and pancake breakfasts. In 2019, after distant wildfires blanketed the city in hazy, unhealthy air for weeks in both August 2017 and August 2018, the Seattle city government designated it and four other public buildings as community refuges from smoke. The shelters were meant Page 1 of 6

to offer a respite for thousands of Seattleites experiencing homelessness or lacking ventilation systems at home.

Luckily, last summer was mild in Seattle, and the smoke shelters were never used. This summer, however, as August approaches, Washington has already seen above-average wildfire activity.

Meanwhile, Seattle has shuttered the community center to curb the spread of COVID-19, and, with cases in the area rising, it may remain closed for some time. Public health officials have been working around-the-clock for months, tracking COVID-19 cases, adapting to new policies, and crafting pandemic messaging for the public, among other things; many air-quality experts have been pulled away from their usual responsibilities to manage the emergency. Now, they’re facing another public health threat on top of the virus: smoke exposure.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Remembering John Lewis

Before he was the “conscience of the U.S. Congress,” representing metropolitan Atlanta for more than three decades, before he was one of the “Big Six” leaders of the American Civil Rights movement participating in the 1963 March on Washington, and even before he was a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organizing sit-ins and marches as a college student in Nashville, John Lewis was a small-town kid from Pike County, Alabama.

Tributes to the late congressman, who passed away on July 17 after a months-long battle with pancreatic cancer, have been pouring in through news reports and social media in recent days.

Many of these remembrances highlight moments from Lewis’s small town upbringing.

He grew up on a farm in Troy, Alabama, the son of a sharecropper. A favorite anecdote tells how, as a child, he dreamed of being a preacher and practiced his craft by offering sermons and services for the family chickens. He’d travel on dirt roads to attend classes at a segregated school. On the radio and in comic books, the young Lewis would learn about activists like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. The latter would come to fondly refer to Lewis as “the Boy from Troy,” when they began working together as leaders in the Civil Rights movement.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Oregon’s Rural School Districts Focus on In-Person Instruction for Fall

While Oregon’s large urban and suburban school districts wrestle with how to manage thousands of students across dozens of school buildings, with the potential for remote classes growing along with the rising COVID-19 case counts, it’s a different dynamic in smaller rural districts in eastern Oregon.

OPB’s “Think Out Loud®” heard from school officials in three rural districts — from the tiny Monument School District in Grant County to larger districts in Baker and Umatilla counties. In all three districts, schools are hoping to teach primarily in-person, with some groups of students learning partly online.

To access the full story, click here.

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5. Can $50 Million in Emergency Funding Make the Arts Equitable in Oregon?

In March, stages across the Pacific Northwest abruptly turned out the lights.

From major institutions to tiny neighborhood music venues and intimate theaters, live dance, music and theater performances vanished as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold.

It’s been catastrophic for Oregon’s arts ecosystem, as venue owners and performance companies have scrambled to determine when — if ever — they could reopen.

Last week, at least some of these organizations finally found relief. The Oregon Legislature’s Emergency Board earmarked $50 million to aid music, culture, and community venues and organizations around the state that have been forced to close because of COVID-19.

To access the full story, click here.

6. A Tale of Two Planners: Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses

If you’re in the mood for a good David and Goliath-type story, take a seat.

It’s the early 1960s in New York City’s West Village. Years earlier, master builder Robert Moses, a formidable urban planner and the longtime New York City Parks Commissioner, had proposed a new highway that would run down Broome Street. The Lower Manhattan Expressway was to be a 10-lane elevated highway that would cut through SoHo and Little Italy, destroying Washington Square Park, demolishing numerous buildings, and displacing thousands of families and businesses. The plans had been delayed for several years but were picking up steam again.

In response, a coalition of council members, business owners, and local activists joined forces to fight the plan. Among the protestors was Jane Jacobs, a journalist, a mother with young children, and a resident of the West Village. She was vehemently opposed to the expressway and organized protests and rallies in her community. She became the chairman of the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway. She was even arrested in 1968, accused of starting a riot at a public hearing.

But she and her fellow protestors were ultimately successful. The plan was scrapped, and the underdog won. David defeated Goliath.

It was an epic battle, and one that crystallizes the wildly different approaches to urban planning taken by two people who became legendary figures in the field.

To access the full story, click here.

7. To Fight Racism, Transit Has a Key Role

One hot day in my hometown of Riverside, California, 25 years ago, I finally discerned the source of the clicking sound I often heard as I walked down the city’s sidewalks — it turned out to be people in nearby cars locking their doors at my approach. The drivers saw their vehicles as a source of freedom and a space of safety; they saw me, a young Black man on a sidewalk, as a threat.

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At that moment, I understood those cars not just as a polluter of my neighborhood, but as a social barrier as well. And I realized we would never see or understand one another in a community geared toward auto-oriented spaces.

More than 50 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. called urban public transportation “a genuine civil rights issue.” But as the recent wave of protests against racial inequality illustrate, the U.S. has so far failed to address the implications of racist transportation investment and policies. The nation’s infrastructure investments have promoted systemic racism, impacting generations of African Americans. King’s comments resonate with me, not only because I’m now the director of policy development and research at the American Public Transit Association, but because my family experienced it firsthand.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Oregon Sues Federal Agencies Over Protest Enforcement

The Oregon Department of Justice is suing several federal agencies for civil rights abuses, and state prosecutors will potentially pursue criminal charges against a federal officer who seriously injured a protester.

The federal lawsuit names the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marshals Service, the United States Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Protective Service, agencies that have had a role in stepped-up force used against protesters since early July. The state filed the lawsuit late Friday night.

When asked for comment, the U.S. Marshals Service told OPB it does not comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit lists defendants specifically as John Does 1-10 because the “identity of the officers is not known, nor is their agency affiliation,” the lawsuit states.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Working from Home and Broadband Access in Oregon

There is considerable speculation about how the pandemic will change the way we live. In particular our office is fielding a lot of questions about working from home and whether households may increasingly choose to live in the suburbs or rural areas as a result.

Solid data on 2020 migration patterns is a long way away. And early indications based on Zillow home searches show Americans are not increasingly looking toward the suburbs. However, time will tell to what extent we do alter our lives as a result of the pandemic.

With that in mind, our office has pulled together and updated some of our previous research on working from home and broadband access here in Oregon.

It is important to keep in mind that to the extent working from home represents a long-run growth opportunity, and it does, many of these changes tend to be incremental. Yes, there is a spike in working from home due to the pandemic. However, when it is safe to do so, most Page 4 of 6

workers will likely be recalled to the office. Permanent massive, wholesale changes to they way we work are unlikely. That said, even incremental changes and evolutions can matter for regional economies, workforce needs, commercial real estate, and the like.

To access the full story, click here.

10. The Hunger: COVID-19 Changes How America Feeds Its Hungry

Half an hour before hunger relief volunteers opened a mobile food distribution site at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Ore., dozens of cars had already lined up to wait.

At 4 p.m., Marion Polk Food Share volunteers started loading boxes into trunks. It was a hot July afternoon. Muscles and faces shone with sweat. Within 20 minutes, volunteers put nearly 180 boxes — 4,500 pounds of farm-fresh food — into people’s cars. They still had an hour and forty minutes to go.

According to Feeding America, more than 54 million people in the U.S. are facing hunger during the pandemic: more than at the peak of the Great Recession, and staggering closer to the Great Depression, when historians estimate 60 million Americans went hungry.

To access the full story, click here.

11. The Great American Outdoors Act Passes, Could Mean Big Things for Oregon

The U.S. House gave final congressional approval Wednesday to the Great American Outdoors Act. The bill, which is being hailed as one of the most important environmental bills to pass in decades, secures permanent funding for the Land Water Conservation Fund. The act now moves to President Trump’s desk, and he’s stated previously that he plans to sign it.

Most people haven’t heard of the Land Water Conservation Fund, but they’ve almost certainly benefited from it. Since 1964, it’s used revenue from the oil and gas industry to finance national parks and federal historic sites. A substantial portion of the fund is also allocated to local and state parks and playgrounds.

“This is a historic victory over 50 years in the making for communities across the country that benefit from the economic, cultural and recreational value of America’s public lands and closeto-home recreation,” said the LWCF coalition, an organization that advocates for the fund, in a statement.

To access the full story, click here.

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12. PODCAST – Rural Black Lives Matter Protests Inspire Next Steps

Black Lives Matter organizers in rural Oregon are figuring out the next steps for their movements. In Bend, Riccardo Waites started the Central Oregon Black Leaders Assembly, a nonprofit aiming to reduce police violence and racial discrimination in the community’s schools.

In Umatilla, Selene Torres-Medrano is organizing to keep School Resource Officers out of school districts. And in Hermiston, John Carbage is pushing local officials to talk about systemic racism and the racial profiling he has experienced from local law enforcement.

To listen to this resource, click here.

13. RESOURCE – Destination Marketing and COVID-19: Planning for Oregon’s Tourism Recovery

On Thursday, July 23, Travel Oregon hosted a webinar, “Destination Marketing and COVID-19: Planning for Oregon’s Tourism Recovery.” The intended outcome of this webinar was to ensure Oregon’s tourism industry has clear understanding of how to leverage Travel Oregon and DMO recovery efforts through destination marketing. Participants learned about trends and forecasts in destination marketing, heard about how Travel Oregon is preparing for recovery, and saw examples of how businesses are working to safely welcome back visitors.

To access this resource, click here.

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