How urban renewal zones screw citizens and make developers rich

Salem's bizarre lust to blow half a million bucks trying to prop up an absurdly ill-conceived real estate venture is only partly explained by the tight, almost incestuous circle of friendships between city officials, the Chamber of Commerce/SEDCOR lobbies, and their real estate cronies.

The missing piece is the eternal question that echoes through City Halls all across America: "Where can we find taxpayer money to give to our friends without letting the taxpayers have a say in it, so we can make our friends happy while cutting basic services?"

Answer: urban renewal zones. The pot of gold that just keeps on giving -- if you're in the right circles -- while diverting money away from all the other taxing districts that depend on property taxes (schools, fire-fighters, county services, etc.). As Woody noted, some will rob you with a gun, others with a fountain pen.

Got too much stuff? Need storage?

You need more stuff to hold all your stuff! See this Salem Craigslist ad for info on how to get $25 off first month's storage rental at Northgate Storage (just north of Pine near Portland Rd.). We rented a unit there for two years while we searched for the perfect place to set up LOVESalem HQ and it was fine. I can't compare it to other places in Salem, but we had no problems there in two years; our 10' x 10' unit was stuffed to the gills and it was clean and dry and seemed plenty secure.

So great. Watch.

Update: Here's the kind of messages you get once you sign up to help this wonderful organization:

A crop of plums will be harvested this Saturday, August 14, at 9:00 AM (30 pickers). The plum harvest listed below includes 30 trees in Dallas, Oregon. The lowest fruit is about six feet up, but the trees are tall. They may best be picked by shaking branches so that ripe fruit falls. If you sign up for this plum harvest, bring a tarp or an old sheet to catch the fruit and a ladder if you have one. We will have some orchard ladders on the site.

1,100 plants of blueberries a few miles East of Salem will be picked in three harvests:

Friday, August 13, from 6:00PM to 8:30PM (200 pickers)

Saturday, August 14, from 8:00AM to Noon (300 pickers. This harvest is scheduled for four hours. It will help with parking logistics if pickers do not all arrive at 8:00AM. There are plenty of blueberries for those that come later.)

Monday, August 16, from 6:00PM to 8:30PM. (200 pickers)

Sign up for these harvests at: http://www.salemharvest.org/harvestlist.php

Please remember that everyone who signs up must already be a registered picker. If you are already registered then you do not need to register again. If you are signing up someone who is not registered, first go to the picker registration page at http://www.salemharvest.org/pickerinsert.php then to the harvest parties page. Pickers cannot be added to the harvest roster unless they are registered.

Neighborhood Harvest runs entirely on volunteer power. In order to host these blueberry harvests, we need 10-15 intake assistants at each harvest to help with parking, checking people in, and weighing buckets in 30-40 minute shifts. Will you help out? It's easy and you still get to pick when it isn't your turn to help. Please respond to Lisa at lclark-burnell@salemharvest.org if you'd like to help make these harvests happen by being an intake assistant; write "Intake" in the subject line. One perk of serving as an intake assistant is that we will squeeze you into a full or closed harvest as a thank you for helping out. And you get the satisfaction of knowing that you made it possible for 200 people to pick berries and that literally a ton of fresh blueberries will go to hungry families. That's a pretty great feeling.

Hens still struggling to break out of the shell in Salem

Image by terriem via FlickrFrom Barb Palermo:

The good news is …… the city is sticking to the promised timeline. Notice has been given to the state (required for pending land use changes), the First Reading of the proposed ordinance is scheduled for this Monday night (Aug 16), and city staff is recommending a public hearing (also required) be held on September 13, along with the Second Reading and final vote. If all goes well, we could be legal 30 days after that!

The not-so-good news is …… the wording of the proposed ordinance has significantly deviated from our original agreement. This Monday night I will vigorously argue for a lower fee, fewer inspections, and no distance requirement pertaining to the coop's proximity to the chicken-owner's house. I will also point out that the 120 square foot requirement should apply only to the coop, not the chicken run. You'll see what I mean by reading the latest version of the ordinance here (pdf file).

Once again, I am requesting your presence at Salem City Hall this coming Monday, August 16, at 6:30 pm (555 NE Liberty St, Room 240). In May we had a huge turnout and as a result, they voted unanimously to reconsider the issue. Let's continue to show our city councilors that public support has not dwindled. This is the night they hash out all the details and vote whether to advance the ordinance to the final step!

Please feel free to email me with any questions and/or to let me know if I can count on your attendance Monday night. Thank you!

Another local gem to treasure and keep healthy

There's been a huge surge of support for Salem Cinema, thanks to the many fine people in Salem who just needed a reminder that this town has some real gems.

(Here at LOVESalem, we're very proud to have played a small part in getting out that vital message. Even if some people got a garbled version that suggested that Salem Cinema was going to close in two weeks -- NOT TRUE! The whole point of rallying the community was to make sure to alert people, so that we could act to head off the disaster that it would be if the Cinema had to close.)

Maybe "gems" is the wrong metaphor though -- gems are pretty much indestructible and don't need tending. Better that we think of these places as rare and wonderful creatures then, creatures that add immeasurably to the pleasure of living here, but which also need regular care and feeding. Luckily, that's the pleasurable part -- the effort to see more movies at Salem Cinema is surely no burden.

And, speaking of exotic and wonderful creatures in Salem needing some support and offering real pleasure in return, meet Tigress Books ("Wildly Independent") -- f/k/a "Tea Party Bookshop" until the apparent connection to the Teabaggers became too much. Located at Liberty and Ferry, Tigress is a great local bookstore. Just as Salem profits immensely from having Loretta Miles and her passion for movies, JoAnne Kohler's passion for books and ideas gives Salem a unique bookstore that doesn't look or feel like any other. And, soon she'll be adding gently used books, meaning you can afford to access more of the great ideas that have appealed to other Tigress fans.

So, keep up with the movie a week, and when you want to read the stories in the great movies, drop by Tigress Books.

The Big Lie: Highway Projects Help the US Economy

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One of the hardest things to notice is when something that used to be true is no longer.

When America was a young country of abundant natural resources and few people, transportation projects that enabled shipment of goods -- canals, plank roads, and turnpikes -- provided a huge economic stimulus, as those projects enabled those abundant natural resources to reach their markets in the East and in the greater world beyond.

And when America industrialized, transportation projects both fed and profited from our new mechanized prowess. Railroads, heavily subsidized, generated huge returns for their owners and (indirectly) for the nation as a whole, enabling our factories to supply the world with goods, even as the mechanized reapers also began to make the Midwest the granary of the world.

Thus, the mental link was forged in the minds of many: transportation projects create long-term economic benefits.

But note: what is true of a producing country is not true of a country that is primarily a consumer. In America of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, the country that realizes most of the benefits of our freight transportation projects is China, with Japan, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia following up.

Because today, freight COMES to the US, and containers leave empty. That means that all the hot air that the state and federal highway departments emit about the economic benefits of transportation investments is both true and terribly misleading. Transportation projects continue to help manufacturers and sellers, as they historically have.

What has to change is our willful blindness to our new reality that, as a consuming nation that has offshored its manufacturing base and runs a staggering monthly trade deficit (see graphic), each new project sold for its "freight mobility" benefits is really just another vein being opened in the American national body politic. Spending on highways not only just helps the nations selling us goods more than us, it also strengthens our addiction to petroleum, which further runs up our trade deficits. This way lies madness and economic collapse.

Just up the road in Portland, a gigantic multibillion dollar boondoggle known as the "Columbia River Crossing" is being sold as critical for freight mobility. Even if replacing the existing spans with a megabridge would actually increase freight capacity, it's crucial for us to ask, "Does America benefit when imported plastic crap and cars bought with borrowed money reach US markets faster?" To ask the question is to answer it: of course not.

Of course, none of this matters to the Oregon and Washington Highway Departments, salivating over the prospect of having billions of dollars of contracts to let and administer and lots of jobs for the consulting engineering firms, so you can be sure that they will continue to sell the "freight mobility" benefits of their work, confident that most people won't give it a second thought, even as they help bankrupt the country they claim to want to help.

UPDATE: June 2010 trade deficit wider than expected:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. trade deficit surged in June to the highest level since October 2008 and imports of foreign consumer goods hit an all-time high. But U.S. exports faltered, representing a setback for American manufacturers. . . .

The Fruits of the Voodoo breaking out all over

George HW Bush never said truer words than when he called Reagan's plan to cut taxes for the wealthy as a method of fighting deficits "Voodoo Economics."

But, alas, The Gipper, greatly aided by secret negotiations by GOP fixers like Jim Baker with Iran (to persuade them NOT to release the US Embassy hostages before the election) -- negotiations that should have put them all in jail, rather than the White House -- managed to win the election of 1980, which inaugurated a thirty years of bad Republican policies (Clinton) and worse ones (Reagan, Bush the Elder and especially Bush the Lesser), all of which boil down to trying to please the well-off by throwing money at them while they are busy seceding from America, off-shoring jobs and our US manufacturing base in order to obtain even more lavish profits.

Well, the chickens sacrificed for the Voodoo Economics rituals are walking around, headless and bloody, smearing goo and guts all over the rest of America, which is gradually imploding, thanks to a thirty year-long proof that, when you put government in the hands of people who think government is the problem, they make it ever so true.

All over America, libraries are closing up shop. And we're racing to undo a century of progress on countless other fronts as well. Salem and Marion County are certainly not exempt from the woes being felt everywhere. Worse, we are verging on a deflationary spiral where what was once unthinkable is now the new normal.

Sadly, Barry Obama's a much smaller and mousier president than the times require -- his hope and change turns out to have been little but the forlorn hope that the GOP minority would change, as in stop trying to drive America into a ditch from the backseat so they could blame poor Barry, who constantly acted the poor little puppy, begging to be liked, instead of the President, hired to clean up the world's biggest mess after the eight-year frat party that was the Bush/Cheney administration.

Alas, it seems that Barry missed his moment and we will all rue his unforgivable timidity and his failure to understand that you can't cut deals with people whose only real desire is to see you fail.

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

A principle Salem should embrace: reward rather than punish conservation

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Here at LOVESalem HQ, we're preparing for the future by doing a lot of things to enable us to garden year round. One of the things we did was spend mucho-dinero on installing underground pipes so that I could install a drip irrigation system.

Drip irrigation is one of the most important technologies out there -- it makes plants happier, more disease free, and uses much, much, much, less water (dozens of gallons per hour instead of hundreds or even thousands from a conventional spray irrigation setup), while eliminating excess moisture being pumped into the air, making it humid and stuffy.

Not only that, anyone who installs drip irrigation is doing everyone else a big favor, because it means that there is that much more water available for everyone else from our supply in the North Santiam river. Recall that last year we had water restrictions because we depend on filters to clean up the water. That's going to happen more and more often as it gets hotter and drier, which is the clear trend (even if this summer has been fairly cool here in Salem). If we could get everyone to use drip and let their lawns go without in summer (it greens up again just as soon as the rains return), Salem would have much greater water security and we wouldn't need to be mulling over millions of dollars to find another supply.

So, the other day, as a reward for spending thousands of dollars on a drip system, I got a letter from Salem telling me I have to get my backflow preventer checked. That's the little gizmo (a double check valve, basically) that keeps water from flowing backwards from my irrigation system and into Salem's water supply header, possibly bringing contaminants with it. So these checks are important -- vital, even.

The problem? I have to pay for the backflow preventer check every year -- even though I only have a backflow preventer because I'm dramatically lowering my call on Salem's water supply, leaving more for everyone else. And keeping contaminants out of the water benefits everyone, not just us. In other words, the City of Salem should be encouraging drip irrigation as much as possible, and that would mean picking up the cost of the backflow checks, rather than making the owner pay it.

It would be different if I had put in a conventional sprayer-type sprinkler system; Salem should discourage or even forbid them, because they waste so much water and allow individuals to force the rest of us to keep enlarging the water system. But where someone installs a water-conserving improvement at their own expense, the annual cost of making sure that the public health is protected should be picked up as a public good, and paid for by the water utility, not the owner.

The root of the problem is that water is so darn cheap that people waste huge volumes of it without a second thought; this underpricing of a precious resource means that people have a strong DISincentive to spend lots of money on a water-saving system like the one we put in. We need to revisit all our costs and fees and make sure that we're not creating these disincentives and that, wherever possible, we reward people who take private actions that create public benefits.

Word: Headline of the Century

We fight for the oil we need to fight for the oil.

Scam Warning: Robocalls from "ALS"

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Some idiot just directed a robocall to LOVESalem HQ, apparently unaware that here abides someone who likes nothing better than fighting back against consumer scammers like this one.

If you get any robocall solicitations -- like the one just received here from "Dave at ALS," at 888-712-4668 then you should go here to make a complaint. When you get the call, note the time, any name given (of the company or the caller) and especially any phone number they offer you.

These calls are illegal, and usually are the hallmark of a scam . . . this one promised me the opportunity to have my overdue taxes reduced (although I don't have any overdue taxes).

As times get hard, these roaches will come out of the woodwork, preying on people in dire straits and promising to get their debts adjusted. DON'T FALL FOR IT. As you can see from the message boards here, this company is nothing but a scam.