No Harm, No Fowl

Story about Lawrence, Kansas, and the struggle to get zoning codes updated to recognize the value of small fowl as part of an integrated pest-management and food security strategy for the 21st Century.

The old saying in sports is "no harm, no foul." We're stuck with being harmed by Salem's antiquated zoning code that doesn't allow small fowl in residential zones.

Fantastic News - Radio Free Salem (KMUZ)!

Don't know how this slipped past without notice, but Salem's "Radio Free Salem" project has announced that it will get its Low-Power FM license and be able to broadcast community radio in Salem as radio station KMUZ!

The Oregon Cultural Trust has an inquiry about whether gifts to KMUZ will qualify for the OCT tax credit deal (see prior post) -- they certainly should!

Cultural Trust -- a very tasty free lunch

You can support the same arts and culture groups in Salem that you've been supporting but, if you kick in a matching amount to the Oregon Cultural Trust, you can also get the state to give you the money you gave to the Cultural Trust right back in the form of a full tax credit (i.e., it comes off your taxes, it's not just a deduction against income).

That's up to $500 per person, $1000 for a couple, and it doesn't matter if you itemize your federal return or not.

Of course, let's say you and your spouse give $1000 to your favorite arts group--say, The Historic Elsinore Theatre (which would be an excellent choice, by the way) or the Salem Public Library Foundation (another excellent choice). Then you give another $1000 to the Oregon Cultural Trust.

Come tax time, assuming you are itemizing your federal tax return and pay in the 25% bracket, you reduce your federal tax liability by $500 (25% x $2000). THEN, on your Oregon return, you get the full $1000 you gave to the Oregon Cultural Trust back, because it reduces your Oregon tax liability dollar-for-dollar. Thus, for only $500, you managed to direct $2000 worth of benefits to yourself and your community, including supporting your favorite Salem groups.

(Note that the Oregon Garden Foundation is one of the qualifying organizations, so if you want to support that brilliant, innovative place, you can do so as well.)

Holiday Breakfast on Bikes - Dec 12

Tireless bicyclist Eric L sends another newsy update on Salem's bike scene:

Last night Salem City Council held a work session to discuss the proposed bridge connecting Riverfront Park and Minto Island. OBEC Engineers and Todd Klocke with Urban Development gave a presentation on cost estimates, schedule, and four design concepts. Mayor Taylor joked, "When can we start?" Because of environmental mitigation and navigability issues, the project is not simple, but it appears there is significant city support! For more information, including slides of the four design concepts see the city's site - http://www.cityofsalem.net/Departments/UrbanDevelopment/DepartmentProjects/Pages/MintoIslandBridge.aspx

Breakfast on Bikes - Friday, December 12

West Salem commuters! We'll be under the Center Street Bridge, next to the AC Gilbert House from 7am to 9am. We'll have hot coffee and snacky things to fortify you against the cold! Thanks to Cascade Baking Company, Coffee House Cafe, LifeSource Natural Foods, the Salem Bicycle Club, and Willamette University for support! For more see -

http://breakfastonbikes.blogspot.com/2008/11/holiday-schedule-friday-dec-12.html

Keizer Christmas Lights Ride - Wednesday, December 17

The Salem Bicycle Club's annual Christmas Lights Ride. The ride starts at the BiMart in Keizer at 6:30pm.. Decorated bikes are encouraged, but not required. Bring a can of food or other donation for the Marion-Polk Foodbank. There will be a stop for Hot Chocolate!

For more see - http://www.salembicycleclub.org/content.plx?page=rides

Ho Ho Holidays Ride - Thursday, January 1 Start the New Year with the Salem Bicycle Club's New Years Ride. The ride starts from the Red Lot downtown at 10am. See -

http://www.salembicycleclub.org/content.plx?page=rides

Breakfast on Bikes - Friday, January 30 We'll be on the Capitol steps for a special "legislative session" of Breakfast on Bikes!

Union Street Railroad Bridge Opening - Saturday, February 21 (tentative date) Save the date! Join Friends of Two Bridges in celebrating the grand opening of the Union Street Railroad Bridge. (Date to be confirmed; time and exact place TBD.) For more see - http://www.cityofsalem.net/Departments/UrbanDevelopment/DepartmentProjects/UnionStreetRailroadBridge/Pages/default.aspx

At the Vision 2020 Bike/Ped Group earlier this month, Julie Warncke with the City announced they would be completing the pre-application for two Transportation and Growth Management Grants, one focused on downtown circulation for non-auto traffic, the other for a comprehensive update to the Bicycle and Pedestrian Elements in Salem's Transportation System Plan. The Bicycle Element needs to be updated, and this is terrific news! The 2009-11 grant cycle has a special focus on climate change, and improving bicycle traffic in the city will relieve congestion and reduce greenhouse gases. For more see - http://www.oregon.gov/LCD/TGM/grants.shtml

For the TSP see -

http://www.cityofsalem.net/Departments/PublicWorks/TransportationServices/TransporationPlan/Pages/default.aspx

This summer 21 volunteers helped out with Salem's first bicycle count. A big thank you to you all! It will provide a solid baseline with which to evaluate Salem bicycling progress each year. Here's a report with a map of the sites -http://breakfastonbikes.blogspot.com/2008/12/summer-2008-bike-counts.html

Remember the Salem Happy Riders for Friday bikey socializing! See the

google group at -http://groups.google.com/group/salem-happy-riders?hl=en

Finally, a big ol' tip-of-the-cap to 18 year old Salemite Alex Kohan. Early in October, Alex completed the Furnace Creek 508, a 508 milerace through Death Valley, featuring 35,000 feet of elevation gain.

Here's his account of the race - http://www.ohpv.org/albums/alex508-2008/index.htm It's an amazing

accomplishment, a terrific account, and pretty much just leaves me gasping in admiration. Congratulations Alex!

Supporting existing transit: instant economic stimulus

http://is.gd/aTw7

This is a good post as it offers two ways to immediately put money in
the hands of people who will immediately spend it buying things that
create actual value (reduced energy use) while reducing environmental
harm.

Salem's Cherriots, for example, is undergoing a round of budget cuts,
even as demand for its transit service skyrockets. We don't need
years to plan and design investment there; we could invest money
profitably in days by rehiring drivers and mechanics about to be laid
off and by restoring routes and weekend service.

A bill and a tax we should happily pay

Of all the foolishness that we fall prey to, failing to really appreciate -- that is, to truly understand, as well as be thankful for -- the many blessings we enjoy here in Salem is among the worst.

Chief among those unappreciated blessings taken for granted is clean water. Water that doesn't make us sick. Something that, as it turns out, doesn't just magically appear, but requires constant vigilance and disciplined management.

By coincidence, just as I read this story about a small proposed increase in Salem's water and sewer rates (and the many complaints about it), I finished a fascinating book called The Big Necessity: The unmentionable world of human waste and why it matters. Highly recommended. Every person who eats and drinks should read this book.

As the author, Rose George, states in her introduction, sanitation -- keeping poop out of the drinking water -- has done far more to improve human health and social wealth and happiness than all the money spent on health care and all doctors, nurses, and pharmacists combined.

Sadly, we live in a city filled with people who, like most Americans, are happy to throw millions of dollars at useless upgrades to an airport without airlines, big TVs, and acres of "free" parking, but then grumble about a few bucks more a month to upgrade our sewer facilities. In a city where the City Council is eager to blow hundreds of millions of dollars on a third Willamette River bridge, we should be grateful that they recognized the value of good sanitation.

UPDATE: There's a good source of revenue for paying for water/sewer systems that we're overlooking: bottled beverages sold in stores and drinks sold in shops and restaurants.

We should use a small beverage tax devoted entirely to upgrading and maintaining local water and sewer systems. which should be levied on wholesalers of all bottled/canned drinks and on people selling drinks (restaurants, bars, theatre snack bars, coffee shops, etc.).

By getting a tiny fee for each drink sold in Salem --- or, even better, anywhere in Marion County --- we could raise very significant revenue at little or no admin/collection cost and would help account for the fact that a lot of what our sewers handle doesn't start out as tapwater, which was the case many years ago when we tied sewer rates to household/business water use.

Marvelous home gardening site

Rainy-Side Gardeners. Here's a nice example of why this is such a great site*:

Complete Organic Fertilizer

Steve Solomon developed a fertilizer mixture specifically for our maritime climate. It is best to buy each ingredient in bulk, as it is cheaper over time than buying small boxes of fertilizer. Store in metal galvanized garbage cans and keep moisture out.

Four parts seed meal (cottonseed or canola meal is usually readily available here in the Northwest.)

½ part lime in equal amounts of agricultural lime and dolomite. Leave out the lime for acid loving plants such as rhododendrons.

½ part phosphate rock or bone meal (for vegetarians phosphate rock would be the obvious choice).

½ part kelp meal.

You won't need to be precise when measuring this out. The seed meal and lime are the most important ingredients, and as you build your supply of fertilizer, you can add the latter ingredients as you can afford them. You can mix them all at once or store them separately and mix what you need as you use them.

For many of the plants listed in the Plant and Gallery Guide, I recommend using this formula.

Recommended Reading:

I highly recommend the book Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades. The author, Steve Solomon, developed the complete organic fertilizer recipe. Even if you garden strictly with ornamentals, this book will help you understand our climate, cold spring soils, and what our plants need for year round health. Solomon goes into detail about our soil structure as well as the need to fertilize specifically for our unique situation. A must read, in my opinion, for gardeners in the maritime Pacific Northwest.

Book Description: Here's a fully revised edition of this regional bestseller- considered to be the definitive food gardening manual for the Pacific Northwest. This is the bible of vegetable gardening for anyone turning the soil west of the Cascade Mountains-from Western British Columbia to Northern California. It includes the basics of soil, when best to plant, the art of composting, what varieties grow well here, which seed companies are reliable, information on handling pests, and an extensive section on the cultivation of each vegetable.

* (*Except for plugging Amazon.com (plug deleted from this repost -- support your local bookseller or if you must buy online, shop Powells.com where shipping is free for orders over $50.)

Terrific post on Obama, transport, and climate at Reality-Based Community

Michael O'Hare:

I think Mark is cutting Obama far too much slack on global warming. Habitability of the planet is not a lagniappe that might spiff up an economic stimulus. It's a very big deal, at least if you care about your grandchildren, not to mention the hundreds of millions of Bangla Deshis who will be on the road looking for a place to live in a crowded neighborhood, and sooner than we thought last year or the year before. Think this is bad?: imagine it in Dacca, and not for a day, but permanently.

Surely we can wait on something so big and so slow while we fix the economy, right? Nope; we already did that (wait), since the early eighties. Now it's an emergency. Expensive, though, right? Yup, we spent it for nothing in Iraq and frittered it away in stupid finance tricks, but Obama has to play the hand he was dealt, not the hand he deserves.

I have occasionally worried that for all his many merits, our new president is a senator from a corn state and a senator from a coal state. Not for long, and he didn't grow up there, but unfortunately simply ending the unspeakable irresponsibility of the Bush administration about climate is not enough. In particular, talking about roads and bridges in an infrastructure speech without a mention of transit or land use policy isn't in the ball park: it isn't "could be better"; it's flat-out wrong. We have a lot of bad infrastructure that makes us drive a lot of bad cars too much. We don't need to spend a penny on roads or anything to do with squeezing another few years out of the gasoline commuter lifestyle; we need to spend billions on undoing the damage it's already done, and now. Those unemployed hardhats can lay track and pave bike paths just as well as they can pour lane-miles.

I'm sorry to say, Obama has, on the whole, dropped the ball on climate change; he's not anti-science or anti-environment, but he's failing a big test here. I've wallowed in the pleasure of anticipating leadership from a basically serious person with his heart in the right place up to now, like the rest of us, but I am declaring the honeymoon over. From now on he needs to start saying what we need to hear on the biggest issue of the next couple of decades. "Better than Bush" encompasses a range from A down to D-, and on the environment, we need A- leadership, not a Band-Aid or a headpat. And we especially don't need enabling of a catastrophic carbon addiction, whether implicit or explicit.

All together now, and you too, Barack:

No.More.Roads.
No.More.Parking.
No.More.Sprawl.

See Riverfront Park-Minto Brown bridge design ideas

Bike evangelist Eric sends:

On Monday, Dec 8, at 5:30pm, there will be a brief "work session"before the Salem City Council meeting to unveil 4 designs for the proposed bridge from Riverfront Park to Minto- Brown Island. The work session is not structured for public comment, so it will just be an opportunity to look at the designs. Later the City will solicit comment. In any event, it's a great opportunity to see what could be the next piece in downtown park connections. It's also an opportunity to show City Council that bicyclists care. If you are interested, please consider attending.

http://www.cityofsalem.net/MeetingAgendas/default.aspx

Also, Friends of Two Bridges has established a tentative date for the Union Street RR Bridge opening ceremony. This is contingent on construction being complete, so it's far from definite. Nevertheless,

you should pencil in Saturday, February 21 for the inaugural ride across the river!

Against Turning the Road Gang Loose

A lot of people who always say that more pavement is the solution to any problem have latched onto the current economic meltdown, arguing that more pavement is really a jobs program. Tom Toles does a wonderful depiction of where this leads.

Infrastructure spending is an investment, and there are some jobs available building infrastructure. But the time when you're reeling drunk from the temporary price collapse of oil is not the time to make big, long-term capital investment decisions.

We need to make investment decisions as if oil was still $140 a barrel, because it will be there again soon enough. Then the money invested in infrastructure would truly be invested, because it would make us more capable of coping with that $140/bbl oil, and $200/bbl oil and so on.

Oil is down only because our economies can no longer function on "hallucinated" currency (h/t to James Kunstler for the perfect description of our credit binge). We'll be in a long recession or depression, and as long as daily pumping capacity even slightly exceeds world demand, prices will be low. But that's a big if, and an unpleasant one. In a world of 6.7 billion people and climbing, keeping oil demand below extraction capacity means that the per human usage has to keep going down just to stay still. And that means economic misery is baked in. As soon as "recovery" starts to gain steam, demand will increase. We're at such a tenuous balance around 87 million barrels per day (for all liquid fuels) that the instant demand exceeds supply, prices will leap up again.

President-elect Obama said something that made me feel a lot better about him right after his election: he said that falling oil prices made it even MORE vital that we deal with our energy addiction, because of our history of alternating between hysteria and coma when it comes to thinking about energy. That's an important insight, and for the guy in the White House to recognize that bodes well for us.

All the money that the road gang is lusting after would create just as many jobs if turned onto building a new electric grid and into electrifying heavy rail and building a close, fine-grain network of light rail systems that will enable America to get through its perpetual adolescence of auto addition once and for all. And then, when oil prices shoot up again, we'll be in the catbird seat, instead of on the torture rack.

UPDATE: Oregon Environmental Council adds this.