Archive for category Environment

The REbuilding Center An Idea Whose Time Has Come

This is an inspiring story of how much can come out of asking the right questions.  The Rebuilding Center is a great example of recognizing value both material and social.  They have developed several related businesses that comprise Our United Villages. Pretty cool stuff. Gainful employment doing valuable work, adding to the local tax base and stabilizing a declining community.  I’m sure it didn’t happen overnight, but what a fun journey it must have been creating a viable community.

It’s really great to know we have Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore in the community. They love the idea of “Re” ing almost anything. If your an artist or just play one at home, be sure to check them out for materials and inspiration.

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National Park Service Funds Trail Projects in 22 States and DC

Release Date: January 26, 2012

Contacts:         Kathy Kupper, 202-208-6843, Kathy_Kupper@nps.gov

Steve Elkinton, 202-354-6938, Steve_Elkinton@nps.gov

National Park Service Funds Trail Projects in 22 States and DC

 WASHINGTON – You’ve heard of taking a walk in a park, it will now be easier to take a walk to a park because of nearly one million dollars in trail grants announced today by the National Park Service.

The 2012 Connect Trails to Parks Awards will provide a total of $934,000 to 14 projects where national historic and scenic trails intersect with national parks and other federal facilities. The projects will restore or improve existing trails and trailhead connections, provide better wayside and interpretive services, encourage innovative educational services, support bridge and trailhead designs, and provide planning services for important trail gateways.

“We really want people to get up, get out, and enjoy the outdoors,” said National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis. “It is vital for physical and mental well-being. These trail projects will provide additional places to recreate and improve access to existing parks and other green spaces.”

Many of the projects reflect National Park Service priorities such as expanding outreach, connecting to youth, enhancing urban recreation, promoting healthy lifestyles, and upgrading interpretive materials as outlined in the agency’s A Call to Action: Preparing for a Second Century of Stewardship and Engagement.

In addition to operating 397 parks across the United States and its territories, the National Park Service plays a vital role in overseeing the 52,000-mile National Trails System. The trails system dates from 1968 legislation that created the Appalachian and Pacific Crest national scenic trails. Today, the National Trails System includes 11 national scenic trails (NSTs), 19 national historic trails (NHTs), and more than 1,150 national recreation trails (NRTs).

The Connect Trails to Parks program is designed to increase awareness, appreciation, and use of the nation’s federally-designated system of trails. The years from 2008 to 2018 have been declared “A Decade for the National Trails” ramping up to the trails system’s 50th anniversary in 2018. Many of these projects will help specific trails and their related federal facilities to achieve goals associated with this commemorative decade.  At the same time, the National Park Service, as an agency, is preparing to celebrate its 100th anniversary in August, 2016.

2012 Connect Trails to Parks Project Awards

 

 

States Award Amount Project Title Trail(s) Park or Other Federal Area
AlabamaMississippi

Tennessee

$100,000 Develop Natchez Trace NST Education Program Natchez Trace NST Natchez Trace Parkway
ConnecticutMassachusetts

Vermont

$83,200 Landscape Painting on the New England NST New England NST Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller NHP, Weir Farm NHS, and Thomas Cole NHS
ConnecticutGeorgia

Maine

Maryland

Massachusetts

New Hampshire

New Jersey

New York

North Carolina

Pennsylvania

Tennessee

Vermont

Virginia

West Virginia

$64,200 Implement Appalachian Trail Leave No Trace Initiative Appalachian NST 6 NPS park units8 national forests
North DakotaBroadcast network + Amtrak programs $64,500 Distance Learning Along the Lewis & Clark NHT Lewis & Clark NHT Ft. Union Trading Post NHSKnife River Indian Villages NHS
MassachusettsConnecticut $49,920 Creative Youth Engagement on the New England NST New England NST Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller NHP + 3 other NPS sites
Minnesota $99,840 Shingobee Connection Trail/Pumphouse Bay Bridge North Country NST Chippewa National Forest
MontanaNorth Dakota

South Dakota

$19,552 Interpreting Indian Language & Culture on the Lewis & Clark Trail Lewis & Clark NHT Ft. Union Trading Post NHSKnife River Indian Villages NHS
Utah $99,996 Interpretation at Lions Park Transit and Trail Hub Old Spanish NHT Arches National Park
Utah $36,644 Non-Motorized Pathway Along the Old Spanish NHT at Moab Old Spanish NHT Arches National Park
Virginia $43,543 Capt. John Smith Chesapeake NHT/James River Assets Capt. John Smith NHT Presquile NWR, Colonial NHP, Petersburg NB, Richmond NB, and James River NWR
VirginiaWashington, DC $98,800 Implement Signage Program in Virginia and DC Potomac Heritage NSTStar-Spangled Banner NHT National Mall and MonumentsRock Creek Park

Nat. Capital Parks-East

Washington, DC $84,760 DC Park Prescriptions Initiative Potomac Heritage NST,Star-Spangled Banner       NHT, and

Capt. John Smith Chesapeake NHT

DC Area Parks, including Chesapeake and Ohio Canal NHP
Wisconsin $57,200 Children’s TV Program About the Ice Age Trail Ice Age NST Ice Age Reserve Units
Wisconsin  $31,845 Trail Construction and Upgrades – Ice Age NST Ice Age NST Ice Age Reserve Units

 

www.nps.gov

 

About the National Park Service. More than 20,000 National Park Service employees care for America’s 397 national parks and work with communities across the nation to help preserve local history and create close-to-home recreational opportunities. Learn more at www.nps.gov.

 

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Tough Choices

Sacrificing the Desert for Solar

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Riverside City Council Votes Unanimously For Sustainabilty Charter Commission

A quick note to say that, by a unanimous vote, the Riverside City Council has placed the charter Sustainability Commission proposal on the June 5th ballot! The proposal was changed a bit, replacing the itemized list of powers and duties with a general statement that the Commission’s powers and duties would be determined by Council ordinance.
Please take the time to send a quick note of thanks to your respective member of the Riverside City Council, both for their productive discussion and consideration of the issue and for their unified vote on behalf of the Commission.
Now the work REALLY begins! Please start “talking up” the idea of the Commission to your neighbors, friends, enemies, colleagues, guests, companions, and strangers on the street. We will send out more info, talking points, and so on once we update our materials. You can, of course, always contact me with any questions or thoughts.

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Watkins Drive Clean Up A Success

Hillside-Arroyo Trash HaulThanks to all who helped make a hefty haul of trash from the hillside and arroyo along Watkins Dr.

Nothing like a fire to reveal how far some drivers can chuck a beer bottle.  It’s all better now.

Congratulations to those who volunteered for the clean up at UCR’s Botanic Gardens.  And they said it would rain!

And finally thanks to Keep Riverside Clean and Beautiful for the tools, bags and safety equipment. Here’s 12 bags, 2 tires, a sheet of fiber board, a metal sign post, a gas can, 1 bag of styrofoam and a box springs.

Questions about  grading into the arroyo have not yet been answered.  Was a grading permit issued? What is the restoration plan? The grading has not only left an ugly scar on the landscape, but it’s also an invitation to dumping. Access is easy and out of sight.

 

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Wall Street’s Not Cutting It – Can We Do Better?

By Ellen Brown. Wall Street’s not cutting it: California’s legislature voted to do a feasibility study on establishing a state-owned bank.

AB 750, California’s bill to study the feasibility of establishing a
state-owned bank that would receive deposits of state funds, has passed both houses
of the legislature and is now on the desk of Governor Jerry Brown awaiting his signature.


It could be the governor’s chance to restore the state to its former glory.
As noted in TIME Magazine
:


[I]n the 1950s and ’60s, California was a liberal showcase. Governors Earl Warren and Pat Brown responded to the population growth of the postwar boom with a massive program of public infrastructure-the nation’s finest public college system, the freeway system and the state aqueduct that carries water from the well-watered north to the parched south.

But that was before Proposition 13, a California constitutional amendment
enacted by voter initiative in 1978. Prop 13 limited real property taxes to
one percent of the full cash value of the property and required a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses for future increases of any state tax rates.

Prop 13 radically reduced the tax base, and as economist Michael Hudson
observes
, it is too late to raise property taxes now. The tax savings simply drove property prices up, getting capitalized into additional debt service to the banks.

Today, he says, “so much urban property is sinking into negative
equity territory that a rise in property taxes will lead to even more
foreclosures and abandonments, and hence even lower fiscal returns.”
Meanwhile, the state is struggling to meet its budget with a vastly shrunken tax base. What it needs is a new source of revenue, something that won’t squeeze consumers, homeowners, or local business.

A state-owned bank can provide that opportunity. North Dakota, the only state that currently has its own bank, is the only state to be in continuous budget surplus since the banking crisis began.

North Dakota’s balance sheet is so strong that it recently reduced individual income taxes and property taxes by a combined $400 million and is debating further cuts.

It also has the lowest unemployment rate, lowest foreclosure rate and lowest credit card default rate in the country, and it hasn’t had a bank failure in at least the last decade.


Revenues from the Bank of North Dakota (BND) have been a major boost to the state budget. The bank has contributed over $300 million in revenues over the last decade to state coffers, a substantial sum for a state with a population less than one-tenth the size of Los Angeles County.

North Dakota is an oil state, but according to a study by the Center for State Innovation, from 2007 to 2009 the BND added nearly as much money to the state’s general fund as oil and gas tax revenues did.
Over a 15-year period, according to other data, the BND has contributed more to the state budget than oil taxes have. North Dakota is a conservative red state, not the sort you would expect to be engaging in government enterprise. But the conservative justification for a state-owned bank is that it preserves state sovereignty, allowing the
state to be independent of Wall Street
and the Feds.

The BND is not a business competitor of the local banks but partners
with them, helping with capital and liquidity requirements. It participates
in loans, provides guarantees, and acts as a sort of mini-Fed for the state.

According to the annual BND report for 2010:
Financially, 2010 was our strongest year ever. Profits increased by nearly
$4 million to $61.9 million during our seventh consecutive year of record
profits. . . . We ended the year with the highest capital level in our
history at just over $325 million. The Bank returned a healthy 19 percent
ROE, which represents the state’s return on its investment.

A 19 percent return on equity beats the 170 billion dollars LOST
by CalPERS and CalSTRS
, California’s two public pension funds, by the time the stock market hit bottom in March 2009. The BND was making record profits all through that period.

The BND augments state revenues in other ways besides just returning its profits to the general fund. It helps build the tax base by providing the
funding needed by local businesses, and by financing the infrastructure that attracts them. Among other resources, it has a loan program called Flex PACE that allows a local community to provide assistance to borrowers in areas of jobs retention, technology creation, retail, small business, and essential community services. Doesn’t that sound a lot like what redevelopment agencies were supposed to be doing?


The BND also furnishes a credit line to the state itself, one that is
effectively interest-free, since the state owns the bank. Credit lines are
extended in times of emergency or whenever state departments or
municipalities face unforeseen circumstances, such as the recent flooding in the state. Having a credit line to the state’s own bank allows state and local governments to avoid extortionate interest rates from Wall Street and pressure to privatize and reduce services in order to avoid downgrades from rating agencies.

Timothy Canova is Professor of International Economic Law at Chapman
University School of Law in Orange, California. In a June 2011 paper
  “The Public Option:The Case for Parallel Public Banking Institutions ,” he compared North Dakota’s comfortable financial situation to California’s:


. . . California is the largest state economy in the nation, yet without a
state-owned bank, is unable to steer hundreds of billions of dollars in
state revenues into productive investment within the state. Instead,
California deposits its many billions in tax revenues in large private banks
which often lend the funds out-of-state, invest them in speculative trading strategies (including derivative bets against the state’s own bonds), and do not remit any of their earnings back to the state treasury.

Meanwhile, California suffers from constrained private credit conditions, high unemployment levels well above the national average, and the stagnation of state and local tax receipts.

California was once the nation’s leader in technology, industry,
entertainment and public education. Under Governor Pat Brown, tuition at UC campuses was free, making higher education available to all. Today tuition is about $13,000 a year, and the state has an unemployment rate hovering at 12%.

California, like North Dakota, is resource-rich. A state-owned bank will
allow it to capitalize on its resources to full advantage by providing the
credit needed to realize its potential. As the bank was described by
Assembly Member Ben Hueso of San Diego, who authored AB 750, “It’s not the fad of the moment, a pair of tight fitting jeans; it’s a pair of
construction boots.”

For more stories on banking possibilities, check out 1 Comment

Watkins Drive Coyote Hill – Arroyo Clean Up Set

In conjunction with the Friends of Riverside’s Hills and Keep Riverside Clean and Beautiful, we are having a clean up day.

Saturday, November 19th at 8:30 a.m. to noon.

(Rain Day Reschedule to November 26th).

Meet at Watkins Drive and Picacho. Tools, safety gear, gloves and a waiver await those ready and willing to tackle trash removal from the arroyo and Coyote Hill.

Wear sturdy shoes, long pants and sleeves and make a big contribution to the neighborhood. All participants are automatically enrolled in the UNA Sherpa Patrol.  (Hills and arroyos rule!)

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FORA.tv – Videos From The World’s Best Conferences and Events

Thanks to Kevin Dawson for sharing FORA.TV.

 

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Native Plant Sale

Western Municipal Water Native Plant Sale

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UC Regents Jan 16-17, 2012 Meeting at UCR

Mark your calendars for January 16-17, 2012. The UC Regents meeting will be at UC Riverside.

Here’s the link to the agenda.

Here are links to the Regents biographies.

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