Another Enbridge Oil Pipeline Of Concern→

Great Lakes Echo

“The Enbridge pipelines beneath the Straits of Mackinac have been in the crosshairs of environmental groups for years. Concerns about the pipelines in the wake of the 2011 Kalamazoo River spill prompted Governor Rick Snyder to create the Michigan Pipeline Safety Advisory Board. This summer, Attorney General Bill Schuette said that the pipelines’ days were numbered.

But some environmentalists are now worried about another pair of pipelines a little farther south.

Two pipelines laid in 1918 currently run underneath the St. Clair River in Southeast Michigan. The Texas based company that owns them applied in 2012 for a permit that allows liquid hydrocarbons including crude oil to flow through the pipelines. The company says it has no intention of shipping crude oil through the pipes, but environmentalists say they want more information.

Current State discusses the concerns of environmentalists with Liz Kirkwood, an attorney with the advocacy group For Love of Water (FLOW).”

Eric Anondson: MN Distressed Communities→

streets.mn:

“This is really fascinating to see visually and might even fit with many assumptions of what particular areas of the metro area are like. Go mouse around the interactive map at the link above, the zip codes reveal the statistics for each zip code.

But I had one particular issue that I couldn’t shake. The zip code map of Minnesota’s distressed communities had a worrying similarity with another map I posted about a few weeks ago. The Minnesota Carbon Donut. I immediately thought of the famous XKCD comic on heat maps. The map of economic distress correlates quite closely with the carbon footprint ring. Huh? I’m going to have to dwell on that a bit more, but I think how closely they match up deserves some attention.”

DIC Data for U.S. Zip Codes by State

Eric Jaffe: The Biggest Highway Boondoggles→

CityLab:

“When Texas expanded the Katy Freeway in Houston a few years back, the expectation was that making the massive road even wider would relieve traffic. Some $2.8 billion later, the 26-lane interstate laid claim to being the “world’s widest freeway”—but the drivers who commuted along it every day were no better off. More lanes simply invited more cars, and by 2014, morning and evening travel times had increased by 30 and 55 percent, respectively, over 2011.

The lesson of the Katy Freeway is precisely the one that U.S. PIRG hopes to convey in its new report, “Highway Boondoggles 2,” the sequel to a 2014 effort. Given that expanding highways at great public cost doesn’t improve rush-hour traffic, there are better ways to spend this money, argue report authors Jeff Inglis of Frontier Group and John C. Olivieri of U.S. PIRG. They identify a dozen road projects, costing $24 billion in all, that are “representative” of the problem:

”America does not have the luxury of wasting tens of billions of dollars on new highways of questionable value. State and federal decision-makers should reevaluate the need for the projects profiled in this report and others that no longer make sense in an era of changing transportation needs.””

Highway Boondoggles 2

5 of 12 were highway expansions. More is not better, and often more fails with larger gridlock.

David Smith: Architect of the Twin Cities’ Parks: Horace Cleveland→

MinnPost:

MHS

“Horace W. S. Cleveland was a pioneer landscape architect. His greatest achievement was designing a system of parks and parkways in Minneapolis. He advocated preserving spaces for parks in the rapidly growing cities of the American West. Cleveland was especially influential in preserving the banks of the Mississippi River gorge in St. Paul and Minneapolis as parkland.

Cleveland became a landscape architect at a relatively late age. He was forty years old when he went into business as a landscape gardener in Boston, not far from his boyhood home of Lancaster, Massachusetts. Following the Civil War, he moved to New York City, where he worked for America’s most famous landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted. Cleveland and Olmsted, who became lifelong friends, both believed that parks are essential to the life of cities.”

Read the short article on the important work Horace Cleveland accomplished for Minneapolis.

“Look forward a century, to the time when the city has a population of a million, and think what will be their wants.”

— Horace Cleveland

Josephine Marcotty: Buffer Law Debate→

Star Tribune:

“Only about one-third of the streams in Minnesota’s farming regions will get the maximum amount of protection under new state buffer rules — a number that environmentalists say falls far short of what Gov. Mark Dayton’s signature water protection law was intended to accomplish.

State regulators are drawing up a map of the streams, ditches, wetlands and lakes that will fall under the new and highly controversial buffer law — the nation’s first — enacted last year in an effort to reduce pollution from farm runoff.

But they are relying on a decades-old list that excludes more than half the known small streams that create a web across Minnesota’s landscape and carry sediment, phosphorus and other pollutants into the major rivers.”

Past regulatory approaches have failed in agricultural areas because people do not comply. As maps are created, both sides complain. What is public water? Common sense says it is all water is public water, but statute and rules each have definitions. In the legal world, words have meaning and consequences. All air is public, should all water be public? We need buffer laws that are meaningful and enforced. In addition, other approaches need to be adopted. For example, if you pollute you should pay. This approach is reasonable as well -- perhaps a mix of approaches will result in a system that produces clean water. 

Governor Dayton Backs Off Buffers for Private Ditches→

MPR:

“Gov. Mark Dayton’s aggressive plans to boost water quality by requiring buffer strips along Minnesota waterways took a step back Friday when the governor acknowledged he’s ordered state conservation officials to stop mapping “private ditches.”

Dayton’s made water quality and buffer strips a key part of his intended legacy in his last years in office. The Legislature last year backed a scaled down effort to require the buffers. While there was consensus on the plan for public waterways, farmers and farm groups remained concerned about the law’s intentions when it came to ditches on private land.

The new law requires strips on ditches in areas that would benefit public waterways, but farm groups say private ditches were never meant to be part of the deal.

On Friday, Dayton said he pulled back on the private ditch efforts and ordered the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to stop mapping them after Republicans threatened to torpedo water quality projects Dayton’s seeking in a public works spending bill in the coming session.”

Nathaniel Rich: DuPont's Sin and Rob Bilott's Courage→

New York Times:

“Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. He believed that the DuPont chemical company, which until recently operated a site in Parkersburg that is more than 35 times the size of the Pentagon, was responsible. Tennant had tried to seek help locally, he said, but DuPont just about owned the entire town. He had been spurned not only by Parkersburg’s lawyers but also by its politicians, journalists, doctors and veterinarians. The farmer was angry and spoke in a heavy Appalachian accent. Bilott struggled to make sense of everything he was saying. He might have hung up had Tennant not blurted out the name of Bilott’s grandmother, Alma Holland White.

White had lived in Vienna, a northern suburb of Parkersburg, and as a child, Bilott often visited her in the summers. In 1973 she brought him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants’ neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. Bilott spent the weekend riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. He was 7 years old. The visit to the Grahams’ farm was one of his happiest childhood memories.

When the Grahams heard in 1998 that Wilbur Tennant was looking for legal help, they remembered Bilott, White’s grandson, who had grown up to become an environmental lawyer. They did not understand, however, that Bilott was not the right kind of environmental lawyer. He did not represent plaintiffs or private citizens. Like the other 200 lawyers at Taft, a firm founded in 1885 and tied historically to the family of President William Howard Taft, Bilott worked almost exclusively for large corporate clients. His specialty was defending chemical companies. Several times, Bilott had even worked on cases with DuPont lawyers. Nevertheless, as a favor to his grandmother, he agreed to meet the farmer. ‘‘It just felt like the right thing to do,’’ he says today. ‘‘I felt a connection to those folks.’’”

Peter Callaghan: Chuck Marohn's Mission→

MinnPost:

“Marohn created a blog (strongtowns.org) to share his observations about land use, sprawl and how to make existing communities economically stronger. One of the early posts was titled “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer.” He is not particularly popular among his former colleagues.

“I am a guy who started out writing a blog and felt like I was a voice in the wilderness with maybe some crazy ideas that people around here certainly weren’t buying,” Marohn said. “What I found is there’s a nation of people hungry to do something different, share our message and support us.”

“Us” is Strong Towns, the nonprofit that grew out of Marohn’s blog and that now has a small-but-growing national membership. As part of his work for Strong Towns, Marohn publishes frequent blog items, records podcasts and travels (a lot) — he’s spent 64 nights on the road so far this year — delivering “Curbside Chats” to groups and working with cities. He had just returned from taking part in a White House conference on rural placemaking.”

I encourage you to catch one of Chuck's Curbside Chats. Several issues resonated with me. First, suburban development is insufficient dense to support infrastructure replacement costs at current tax rates. Suburban development is subsidized or the replacement costs are supported by ever more subdivisions. Chuck notes the latter fact and calls out suburban development as a Ponzi scheme. Second, communities should build roads and streets, not stroads. Stroads are hybrids that are dangerous for people, that also reduce economic value of the surrounding lands. Third, governments are deaf or ignorant on these issues. We (citizens) need to confront officials to demand better designed streets and require development patterns with higher density potentials. We also need to take small positive actions in our neighborhoods to produce safe streets and educate community leaders on the importance of economically sustainable development. We need to build areas with Strong Town Principles.

Casey Jaywork: Anatomy of a NIMBY→

Seattle News:

“The language is apocalyptic; the tone, desperate. “Cancer,” “canyons of darkness,” “anguish, hopelessness, and loss.”

But these aren’t war-zone dispatches, nor recollections of a natural disaster. They’re public comments from a Seattle City Council’s land-use-committee hearing held earlier this year. It was there that aggrieved homeowners walked up to one of two smooth wooden podiums in City Hall’s Council chambers to vent the vexation they felt as they watched their communities “being torn apart” by development, as Capitol Hill resident the Venerable Dhammadinna put it.

“Elderly homeowners, the gay community, older women, and families are no longer welcome,” she told the Council, referring to the city’s mixed-density residential areas. “Our neighborhoods are shadowed by tall, bulky buildings. Gardens are being cemented, trees cut down. Those who can’t carry their bags of groceries up and down the hills are not invited into this dystopia.”

The testimony was so consistent—or redundant, depending on your position—that a drinking game could have been fashioned from the proceedings: Take one shot whenever someone said “neighborhood character,” two for “transient.””

An interesting article of Seattle redevelopment dynamics and politics. I was struck by the sameness of the issues across many places.

Matt Steele: Use Cost:Benefit Analysis to Select Transit Routes→

streets.mn

“As the Twin Cities proceeds with plans to build over three billion dollars worth of rail extensions for the Blue and Green Lines, many transit advocates question if we’re missing an opportunity for transformative projects that lift up urban neighborhoods on their routes between suburban park & rides and the downtown core...

It comes down to this: Let’s discuss costs and benefits in parallel until shovels hit the ground, rather than committing to a “value” alignment and then being all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ when the cost goes up 50% or more. For things like tunnels under parks and bridges over the Grimes Pond which are being planned precisely because these low-development corridors were supposedly going to make the chosen alignment more cost effective. If we’re going to build viaducts and tunnels, let’s at least do it in a way that brings stations to the doorsteps of tens of thousands more transit riders.”

Sarah Booth: Zoning for Sustainability→

Sustainable City Network:

“In a study of 32 cities of various sizes, University of Wisconsin Professor Anna Haines found that most city zoning ordinances had little support for sustainable development. Large or small, coastal or central, most of the communities studied by Haines and her colleague Edward Jepson didn’t have much in their regulations that was useful for supporting sustainability principles. This isn’t surprising, since most of the ordinances were written long before sustainability became a household word.

“The city that I live in wrote their code in 1979,” Haines said, so it’s not very surprising that it doesn’t address sprawl, peak oil, floodwater control or other contemporary concerns.
“Almost 100 years ago is when the first zoning codes were put in place — New York City was the first,” she said. “And at that time the purpose was to strictly separate uses, to separate industry from housing, which made a lot of sense at the time, but doesn’t so much anymore.”

Haines’ study began by identifying nine principles of sustainability:
1. Encourage higher-density development.
2. Encourage mixed use.
3. Encourage local food production.
4. Protect ecosystems and natural functions.
5. Encourage transportation alternatives.
6. Preserve/create a sense of place.
7. Increase housing diversity and affordability.
8. Reduce the use of fossil fuels/encourage the use of fossil fuel alternatives.
9. Encourage the use of industrial by-products.”

There has been a big lag in revising zoning ordinances for sustainability and walkability.

Selena Hoy: Japanese Kids Walk and They Walk Alone→

Atlantic:

“Even in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves. The reason has a lot to do with group dynamics.

It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats. They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight.

A popular television show called Hajimete no Otsukai, or My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years...

Japan has a very low crime rate, which is surely a key reason parents feel confident about sending their kids out alone. But small-scaled urban spaces and a culture of walking and transit use also foster safety and, perhaps just as important, the perception of safety.

“Public space is scaled so much better—old, human-sized spaces that also control flow and speed,” Dixon notes. In Japanese cities, people are accustomed to walking everywhere, and public transportation trumps car culture; in Tokyo, half of all trips are made on rail or bus, and a quarter on foot. Drivers are used to sharing the road and yielding to pedestrians and cyclists.”

I find this fascinating, As a kid growing up in a rural area, Japanese children today have the freedom that as a kid I had. Today, most American kids appear to be motored around by parents. How can we change our cities and our culture to foster more independence for our young? 

Julie M. Johnson: What are the Unintended Consequences of Pesticide Use for Non-Natives?→

ENSIA:

“The U.S. Forest Service provides pesticide use summaries for national forests and grasslands on a region-by-region basis, but notes that the information “should not be interpreted as inclusive of all pesticide applications conducted by the agency, its partners, or collaborators on National Forest System lands and waters.” An unpublished study of herbicide use on public wildlands in the U.S. by University of Montana ecologist Viktoria Wagner and colleagues estimates that more than 1 million hectares (2.4 million acres) of such lands were sprayed with herbicides in the U.S. between 2007 and 2011, and more than 200 metric tons (220 tons) of herbicide active ingredients were used on these lands in 2010 alone.

Various conservation organizations contacted were reluctant to discuss the issue: When asked about chemical use, The Nature Conservancy wouldn’t interview on the record. Wiley Buck, a restoration ecologist with Great River Greening, an urban conservation nonprofit, also declined. The USFWS agreed to public affairs–supervised interviews with staff, but only after vetting questions to be asked.”

With the current fad to control non-native species that are well-adapted to places that they are indiscriminately dropped into, natural management agencies and organizations have forgot about the principle of 'First Do No Harm'. They are managing for their values of what is natural, and it could be counter to the public's interest or in the case of aquatic plants it may be consistent with the public's predisposition to favor ecologically destructive efforts to remove any and all plants from lakes (well-adapted native or non-native, they may not particularly care).

Issues Remain for MN Shoreline Buffers→

AP:

“State officials are moving to implement new requirements for setbacks between cropland and waterways passed by the Legislature this year, but concern and confusion among farmers and lawmakers surrounding the new law makes it clear — the buffer battle in Minnesota isn’t over.

Agricultural groups spent months negotiating with Gov. Mark Dayton on his controversial call to boost water quality by installing buffer strips along Minnesota waterways. They eventually passed a scaled-down compromise. The first of those buffers, on public waterways, are required by November of 2017, with smaller strips along public drainage systems coming the following year.

State officials say they’re still working to provide farmers and property owners clear guidance about where they’ll be required to install the grassland zones to filter harmful runoff. That information vacuum — and what little guidance they’ve received — has some lawmakers and farmers worried the state may grab up more land than they bargained for to get the buffer treatment. “I really want this to be successful, but the only way to be successful is if we get good cooperation,” said Republican Rep. Paul Torkelson, a farmer who played a key role in the bill’s negotiations. “We’re not going to get that cooperation if we break our word.”

The state’s Department of Natural Resources and other regulatory bodies are starting to work their way through the law and the state’s massive network of lakes, rivers, streams and drainage systems. The law generally requires 50-foot buffers along public waterways and 16 1/2-foot strips along public ditches.”

See other 'shoreline buffers' articles by selecting the same tag (bottom of list on the right) or by searching (top right).

Ryan J. Foley: The Midwest Water Crisis Has Begun→

Associated Press:

“Unlike pothole-scarred roads or crumbling bridges, decaying water systems often go unnoticed until they fail. “Buried infrastructure is out of sight, out of mind. We take it for granted. We turn on the faucet and we get good, clean, quality water,” said Will Williams, head of asset management for the engineering firm Black & Veatch and an expert on water infrastructure.

When failures happen, help can be hard to come by. Without big changes in national policy, local governments and their ratepayers will be largely on their own in paying for the upgrades. The amount of federal money available for drinking-water improvements is just a drop in the bucket...

More than a million miles of underground pipes distribute water to American homes, and maintaining that network remains the largest and costliest long-term concern.

Some pipes date back to the 1800s. As they get older, they fail in different ways. Some split and rupture, with an estimated 700 main breaks occurring around the U.S. every day. The most devastating failures damage roadways, close businesses and shut off service for hours or days. If pipes are particularly bad, they can contaminate water.

Utilities have long struggled to predict when to replace pipes, which have vastly different life cycles depending on the materials they are made from and where they are buried. Some might last 30 years, others more than 100. Sophisticated computer programs are helping some water systems prioritize the order in which pipes should be replaced, but tight budgets often mean the fixes don’t come until it’s too late.

Replacing a single mile of water main can cost from $500,000 to more than $1 million, but doing so is far more disruptive to customers if it fails first. Experts say a peak of up to 20,000 miles of pipe will need to be replaced annually beginning around 2035, up from roughly 5,000 miles currently. Des Moines Water Works alone has 1,600 miles of distribution pipes.”

Also see this  AP article on the federal aid program for improving the nation's drinking water systems, and another Foley article on the water crisis.

Lee Bergquist: WI DNR to Sell Lake Frontage to Scott Walker Donor→

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

“Elizabeth Uihlein, a major donor to Gov. Scott Walker, has reached an agreement with the Department of Natural Resources to buy 1.75 acres of prime lakefront property in Vilas County — a deal that gives her direct lake access to another property she now owns.

The agreement calls for the DNR to sell Uihlein 765 feet of frontage on Rest Lake in the Town of Manitowish Waters for $275,000. She currently owns an adjacent 11-unit condominium complex without lake access.

Uihlein and her husband, Richard, have donated nearly $3 million to Walker in recent years.

The businesswoman is a significant property owner in Manitowish Waters, is active in local affairs and is noted for her philanthropy, including paying for much of the cost of a pavilion in the community’s Rest Lake Park. A town official said that project will cost more than $1 million.

But also she has faced criticism for some of her activities and currently is under orders from Vilas County to replant trees at her condo complex after a worker she hired clear-cut foliage this summer on a portion of the property closest to the DNR land.”

Sarah Goodyear: Be a Chairbomber!→

CityLab:

“Making a decent place for people to sit shouldn’t be very hard. As the great observer of urban street life, William H. Whyte, once said: “It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.”

Why do cities get it wrong so much? Why are so many otherwise lovely public places barren of a decent bench? And why are so many benches plopped down in places where no actual human would want to linger?

Gracen Johnson, a young urban strategist and communications professional, has been thinking about these things a lot. Not only thinking, also doing.”

StrongTowns Blog: to Sit (Part 1) (Part 2)

Megan Garber: A Wish for the End of Lawns→

The Atlantic:

“As that country developed, its landscape architects would sharpen lawns’ symbolism: of collectivity, of interlocking destinies, of democracy itself. “It is unchristian,” the landscaper Frank J. Scott wrote in The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, “to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of nature which it has been our good fortune to create or secure.” He added, magnanimously, that “the beauty obtained by throwing front grounds open together, is of that excellent quality which enriches all who take part in the exchange, and makes no man poorer.” Lawns became aesthetic extensions of Manifest Destiny, symbols of American entitlement and triumph, of the soft and verdant rewards that result when man’s ongoing battles against nature are finally won. A well-maintained lawn—luxurious in its lushness, implying leisure even as its upkeep had a stubborn way of preventing it—came, too, to represent a triumph of another kind: the order of suburbia over the squalor of the city. A neat expanse of green, blades clipped to uniform length and flowing from home to home, became, as Roman Mars notes, the “anti-broken window.””

Change is hard... but when will we redefine wise landscaping in America? Some places are beginning to make progress.

Linda Poon: Putting Citizens at the Center of Urban Design→

CityLab:

“Creating a lively public space isn’t as easy as building it and waiting for the crowds to come. There’s a lot that city planners have to consider: How much space is available? What’s the target demographic? How can a public space be made energy efficient?

A group of researchers at MIT thinks that there’s an important piece of the puzzle that’s too often overlooked: the human experience. Studying how people interact with cars, buildings, and sidewalks within an urban space says a lot about its quality, says Elizabeth Christoforetti, an urban and architectural designer at MIT Media Lab.

With a $35,000 grant from the Knight Prototype Fund, she and her team are working on a project called Placelet, which will track how pedestrians move through a particular space. They’re developing a network of sensors that will track the scale and speed of pedestrians, as well as vehicles, over long periods of time. The sensors, which they are currently testing in downtown Boston, will also track the “sensory experience” by recording the noise level and air quality of that space.”

In the tradition of observations of William Whyte.

Michel Martin: From Fishing with Mom to Top Fisheries Official→

NPR:

“Mamie Parker, a former assistant director of fisheries and habitat conservation at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was the first African-American to head a regional office for that agency. But when she started out in the field, she says, she “did not see anyone that looked like me doing this type of work.”

When she was in ninth grade, Parker says, “I heard the song by Marvin Gaye, ‘Mercy, mercy me. Things are not like they used to be.’ He talked about the pollution in the air, and the wind that was blowing poison and radiation and all of that.” She decided she wanted to do something about it.”

A workplace pioneer!