T-1 until Salem Transition Initiative for Relocalization launch

Hope to see you there.

For more information, see here.

Great idea -- statewide prescription drug take-backs

The problem is discussed here. Turns out, there's a bill here in Salem that would attack the problem at the state level. So do what the lady says: write your legislators.

We are forwarding a bill in the Oregon Legislature that would put a statewide drug take back program in place. The bill is SB 598 (copy attached). A short summary of the bill is attached also.

If you support this type of program, a letter to your State Senator and State Representative would be great!

Let me know if you have any questions…

Janet Gillaspie - Executive Director
Oregon Association of Clean Water Agencies (ACWA)
537 SE Ash Suite 12
Portland, OR 97214
Phone: (503)236-6722
Fax: (503)236-6719
www.oracwa.org

Here's the bill summary:

Oregon Drug Take Back Program – SB 598
Product Stewardship Model for Unwanted and Unused Drugs

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

Avoidable Poisonings

For the Oregon Poison Center, pharmaceuticals represent the most common category of exposure, resulting in 48% of calls, and represent the most serious poisoning incidents. Between 2000 and 2006, the hospitalization rate for Oregon children from unintended poisonings by drugs, medicines and plants increased 60%;
much can be attributed to prescription medications .

Prescription drug abuse, especially in teens

The number of teens abusing prescription drugs exceeds the number of teens using all other drugs combined, except marijuana and alcohol. Compared to the rest of the nation, Oregon ranks among the top ten states for:

Annual abuse of prescription drugs for all ages (228,000 persons per year);
Past year abuse of prescription drugs by youth 12 to 17 (34,000 persons per year); and,
Past year abuse of prescription stimulants (55,000 persons per year).

Teens get their drugs from friends and family –
not the street corner and not the Internet.

Water quality issues

US Geological Survey and Oregon DEQ water quality sampling indicates that trace amounts of various pharmaceuticals are found in Oregon’s surface water; focused studies have found pharmaceuticals in groundwater. The majority of drugs reach water through excretion.

However, a 2007 study by the Teleosis Institute in California reported that consumers did not use nearly 45 percent of what they were prescribed. Standard wastewater treatment methods are not designed to remove pharmaceuticals or other emerging compounds.

About one-third of the unwanted drugs are from hospice and long term care; these facilities generally flush unwanted medicines since no effective alternatives exist.

WHAT IS BEING PROPOSED?

Drug manufacturers and distributors that serve Oregon would be required to plan, implement, and pay for a convenient way for Oregonians to dispose of unwanted and unused medicines in an environmentally safe manner.

WHO DEVELOPED THE PROPOSAL?

A broad stakeholder group: started meeting in the fall of 2006 to examine the problem, including: State agencies (DEQ, Health Division, Oregon State Police, Board of Pharmacy), pharmacy owners, hospital pharmacists, local health officials, environmental public interest groups, local governments, pharmaceutical manufacturers, chain drug store owners, drinking water and wastewater utilities
Convening meeting: held in June, 2008 – over 125 attendees; product stewardship concept endorsed.

Recommendations:

• No additional cost to consumers.
  
  
• Use a product stewardship model: manufacturers and distributors that supply drugs in Oregon craft system to recover and properly dispose of unwanted and unused drugs - consistent with past actions by Oregon Legislature.
  
  
• Continues product stewardship type model similar to electronic waste recycling requirements of SB 737.
  
  
• Drug take back programs are specifically mentioned as one toxic reduction tool that local governments should evaluate
  
  
• Need a convenient system for both rural and urban Oregon.

Hear the C.I.T.Y. presentations to City Council

If you couldn't make the meeting last night, you can still make a HUGE contribution to the cause of making Salem a better place with your support for the Chickens in the Yard proposal.

First, you can hear the presentations by selecting Feb. 23, 2009 recording here. (You don't have to listen to the whole thing --- once you start the session playing, it offers you the option of skipping to any agenda item, in this case Public Comment, item 10).

Next, drop a postcard or letter to your city council member asking that the C.I.T.Y. proposal be turned into action. Someone stopped me at the meeting last night and said that they didn't know who their council member was -- if that's you too, you can find out here. A phone call works well too.

The C.I.T.Y. folks did a fine job --- now it's up to us to get the council to overcome the forces of inertia and help bring hens back into Salem.

Two new chances to weigh in on bus service changes

Salem — Cherriots has added two new public forums to be held in downtown Salem where residents can offer input on how the bus service can better meet the needs of the community.

The two new open houses are 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Feb. 27 and April 24 at Courthouse Square, 555 Court St. NE. (Served by all routes terminating downtown.)

Cherriots' plan to redesign its bus service includes forums where members of the public can offer their suggestions.

The other upcoming open houses, which will be 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., include:

• Feb. 25: Marion County Fire Station, 300 Cordon Road NE

• March 2: Leslie Middle School, 3850 Pringle Road SE (Cherriots Route 22)

• March 3: McNary High School, 595 Chemawa Road N (Cherriots Route 18)

• April 27: South Salem High School, 1910 Church St. SE (Cherriots Routes 15, 22)

• April 28: Marion County Fire Station, 300 Cordon Road NE

• April 30: West Salem Roth's, 1130 Wallace Road NW (Cherriots Routes 10, 12, 19, 23, 24 and 25)

• May 7: Keizer Fire Station, 661 Chemawa Road N (Cherriots Route 18)

People who are unable to attend a meeting can offer input by completing an online questionnaire.

People who need translations or sign language should contact Michelle Ambrosek at (503) 588-2424, Ext. 2066.

[Note the nice addition of Cherriots routes to the information on the meeting locations! Today Cherriots, eventually all public agencies and local governments will be so thoughtful!]

See you at 7:45 tonight or thereabouts!

Chickens in the Yard (CITY) is rounding up people to come to the Salem City Council meeting this Monday, February 23, to speak during the open public comment period (i.e., not limited to agenda topics) that follows the scheduled business on the agenda. (See item 10 here.) A C.I.T.Y. leader sends:

. . . Re: the agenda for the City Council Meeting on Monday. Unfortunately, it is really long (5 pages). We can't speak until item #10; see the very last page. But I spoke with the City Recorder about this and she said some of the items will go very quickly. Her best estimate is that we will be able to start between 8:00 and 8:30. If we are not finished by 10:00, the council will vote to either stay late and keep going, or continue at another time.

Note to Speakers: If you happen to be speaking when/if they decide to wrap things up and cut us off, be sure to immediately request that we be placed ON THE AGENDA for the next meeting. Hopefully, this won't happen, but I wanted to have a plan just in case.

SEE YOU ALL MONDAY NIGHT - City Hall, 555 Liberty, Room 240!

So you probably don't have to be there right at 6:30 p.m. -- 7:45 p.m. is probably fine.

But please do come, and come early enough to make sure you're there to let the city council members know that it's important to you and that, even if you don't plan to keep any laying hens yourself, you want other people in resedential zones to be able to do so, for the benefit of themselves and of the community as a whole.

Note the map of Salem neighborhood associations that have endorsed the C.I.T.Y. campaign! And also note that just because other neighborhoods haven't doesn't mean that they don't have a lot of residents who would love to keep some laying hens -- each neighborhood has its own politics and personalities.

The Great God Auto Threatens Your Children

This is what building a society around cars produces --- note that the typically bureaucratic response suggests that the problem is caused by parents or not giving enough money to the medical-industrial complex. The Sprawl Machine doesn't just produce ugly places that will be impossible to use as energy becomes scarce and expensive -- it also hurts children, who are becoming crippled and debilitated by our development patterns that make walking and biking rare activities instead of everyday acts of a healthy young person.

Initiative Takes Aim At Obesity In Children

A coalition of health groups and insurance companies yesterday unveiled an initiative, billed as the first of its kind, to help battle one of the nation's biggest health problems: childhood obesity.

Officials of the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a joint effort of the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation, said the initiative is designed to give children better access to health care to fight obesity. Participating insurance companies would pay for at least four visits to a dietitian and four visits to a physician each year to provide guidance to children and their parents on how to eat better and take other steps to reduce and control their weight.

More than one-third of children in the United States are overweight or obese, raising fears that they could constitute the first generation in recent history to have shorter life spans than their parents. One of the biggest problems many families face in fighting obesity is getting insurance companies to pay for doctor visits and other care to help deal with the problem. . . .

And to this we say "Amen, brother, Aaaaaamen."

Post-Carbon Oregon has a great post talking about the weird inversion of priorities that makes us do more to guarantee a place for cars in Salem than people.

As an example, in Salem residential zones, you are mandated, by law, to maintain two off-street parking spaces for cars --- even if you don't have a car. This can include garage spaces or driveway spaces, or both. Think about what this says about our priorities and the way that cars have dominated our thinking for the past 60 years:

• You're not required to have a garden, even though it's a certainty that residents must eat. In fact, you are prohibited by law from tearing up your driveway and growing food to feed your family in that space, even if it's the best spot you have for growing food.
  
  
• And no matter how much southern exposure you have, you're not required to have a solar hot water heater, even though it's a certainty that you use hot water.
  
  
• You're not required to have a bike, even though most trips we take are easily walked or biked.
  

Nope, one of the few things you MUST have is two cars full of parking, because the mindset reflected in our city code is that the Great God Auto Must Be Served.

So we're in a situation where the global economy is melting down and hunger is rising all across the state, but if you put a chicken coop on your driveway and an enclosure on the unpaved area next to the driveway to give the hens some room to roam, you are not only going to be fined for the heinous crime of trying to provide your family with safe, affordable food, you're also going to be ordered to remove the coop because you have infringed on Great God Auto's privileged position in Salem society.

Estimates are that, for every car kept overnight in the typical American community, there are fully seven parking spaces distributed around town to serve that car. If anything, that's probably low: Look at the sea of asphalt next to every big box building and strip mall, then add the two spaces per residence, then add the oceans of parking next to most newer churches, then add the acres of parking surrounding our high schools, then add the parking ramps and the big lots for office complexes, and the vast lots designed to serve auto commuters, then add all the on-street parking . . . .

No wonder our economy is so tattered --- we've taken a huge amount of Willamette Valley soil --- some of the finest in the world, in one of the best growing areas in the world --- and paved it over to serve autos. Providing all that parking makes things spread so far apart that people feel that they have to use a car, thus powering the cycle further down the drain.

In return for this weird act of auto worship, we get to deal with the pollution and runoff issues, and we get a distorted tax system because speculators holding valuable prime land off the market pay artificially low taxes on that land because it's not "developed" -- in other words, they throw down some gravel and use the land for parking because we assess property based on current use rather than on the land value if developed appropriately.

This means that people who do develop their land further pay more in taxes, while those who keep land right in the heart of town as parking lots pay very little.

How to get involved with STIR

If you can' t make the initial launch meeting on Wednesday, February 25, but want to be involved with the Salem Transition Initiative for Relocalization (STIR), drop a line with your contact information and your main areas of concern to STIR at Salem.Transition@gmail.com.

What are some of the areas that might be of concern to people as they consider how we can transition to a low-energy/low-waste lifestyle? Things like

• Food -- how can we feed our families if it's no longer possible to use diesel powered trucks to bring in foodstuffs on a continuous basis?
  
  
• Home economy -- how can we afford our shelter if utility bills keep climbing up and unemployment rates keep following along?
  
  
• Climate -- what kind of world will we be passing on to the next generation if we've destabilized the climate that has been fairly stable and benign for all of recorded history?
  
  
• Education -- what will schools look like when massive buildings that require constant heating or cooling are unaffordable, like the fleets of polluting yellow buses? What will secondary (and post-secondary education) need to be when a far greater share of daily life must be devoted to growing food?
  
  
• Transportation -- how are we going to remain connected to friends and family when we no longer enjoy an abundance of cheap energy and most families can no longer afford the family car, while most cities can't keep up with the costs of maintaining roads?
  
  
• Long-term care -- how we will be able to care for elders and people with disabilities if the desires for community-based care runs into the fast-diminishing resource base of families and governments unable to provide for the care of people still working or struggling with subsistence and unemployment?
  
  
• Faith communities -- how will churches, temples, and mosques built during a time of cheap and abundant energy operate when people are no longer able to afford to travel great distances to mega-sized facilities or to heat and cool them?
  
  
• Public safety -- how will police, fire, and ambulance services be provided when energy costs hamstring their vehicles and taxes can't keep up with energy costs? Will Oregon be able to keep spending more and more on prisons when the cost of utilities shoots up?
  
  
• Medical care -- how will we provide access to medical care when energy costs keep shrinking the available resources and undermining the economy that is not even able to keep up with health care expenses now, before the energy pinch really takes hold?
  
  
• Environmental protections -- how will we pay to treat and pump wastewater and maintain waste treatment facilities in a shrinking rather than expanding economy?
  
  
• How will we cope with increasing frequency and severity of crop-destroying severe weather events, both floods and droughts?
  
  
• Etc. etc. etc.
  

You get the idea.

Our society has, since WWII, been organized almost entirely on the implicit assumption that there will always be an abundance of cheap energy, and that fundamental assumption has colored every other public and private decision. We have built a society that appears robust but is actually quite fragile, as the recent fling with $4 gas showed --- a few months of high gas prices brought the world economy to its knees and revealed what a house of cards our real estate/finance system actually was. The price shock is causing so much demand destruction --- a/k/a economic pain --- that oil prices have plummeted, but they will remain low only so long as the economy is tanking.

If any or all of these concerns make you think that it's time that someone took some action to prepare answers to them, then please come to the STIR launch and join in. But if you can't, at least drop a line and note which issues are the top ones for you (especially ones not mentioned above).

An outstanding explanation of our credit collapse

Since the Salem economy is being rocked hard by the real estate meltdown and the resulting wave of bank collapses, it's helpful for us to understand how we got here, and this outstanding short video does a tremendous job simplifying the explanation without leaving out important parts of it. From the site:

"The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California."

Oregon Bike Summit -- be there, aloha!

Watching Salem's mayor and someone from Gov. Ted's office accept two very cool Sanyo "Eneloop" (energy looping) power-assist bikes --- the first two in the US from Sanyo --- today, I saw a flyer for the Oregon Bike Summit, to be held right here in Salem in April. Cool.

Joe at The Bike Peddler reports that he has ridden the very-similar hybrid power-assist bike from Giant and that it's a very nice bike and that he is happy to order it for those interested.

I'm going to ask Joe to get one for me for Mrs. Walker because it's perfect for her needs now that we live real close in here in Salem: she needs a power boost for riding when dressed for work without working up a sweat, but a real bike for riding as a bike the rest of the time (unlike the eGo that we're selling on Salem's Craigslist, which was for commuting only).