Golfers will have a chance to win Seattle Seahawks tickets with sideline passes
Last year’s Northwest Indian College Big Drive for Education Golf Scramble garnered $19,000 and this year’s goal is to raise $25,000. Photo courtesy of NWIC
Source: NWIC
On Friday September 6, Northwest Indian College (NWIC) Foundation will host the 11th Annual Big Drive for Education Golf Scramble, the college’s biggest annual athletics fundraiser that supports student athletes and athletic programs.
The scramble will begin with a 1 p.m. shotgun start, in which all golfers tee off at different holes at the same time. The event will take place at the Sudden Valley Golf & Country Club on Lake Whatcom in Bellingham.
Last year’s event garnered more than $19,000 and this year’s goal is to raise $25,000. The Golf Scramble provides financial resources, such as athletic scholarships, for NWIC student athletes, and supports the development of the college’s health and fitness programs.
Registration rates are $800 for teams of four golfers or $200 for individual registrants who would like to be placed on teams. Costs include registration, carts, green fees, range balls, dinner and raffle tickets.
This year’s Golf Scramble will include a silent auction and a raffle with prizes that include Seattle Seahawks tickets with sideline passes. Players will also have an opportunity to win the “hole-in-one” car.
Winning teams will receive the President’s cup trophy and NWIC Golf Scramble jackets. There will be a jackets awarded to the top women’s team as well as medals to the winners of the side games.
Sponsorship opportunities for this year’s Golf Scramble are:
Premiere: $10,000
Reserved table and seating for eight at golf awards banquet
Name listing and logo in promotional literature
Golf registration for two teams of four (eight golfers)
Signage with logo at the event
Honorable mention throughout the event
Soaring Eagle: $5,000
Reserved table and seating for eight at golf awards banquet
Name listing and logo in promotional literature
Golf registration for two teams of four (eight golfers)
Signage with logo at the event
Honorable mention throughout the event
Hawk: $2,500
Reserved table and seating for four at golf awards banquet
Name listing in promotional literature
Golf registration for one team (four golfers)
Signage at the event
Honorable mention throughout the event
Birdie: $1,250
Reserved table and seating for eight at golf awards banquet
Name listing and in promotional literature
Golf registration for on team (four golfers)
Signage at the event
Honorable mention throughout the event
Tee Sponsors
$500: Name listed in promotional materials, signage at tee and green
$250: Signage at tee and green
$150: Signage at tee OR green
For sponsorship and registration information or for questions, email mariahd@nwic.edu or call (360)392-4217.
For 18 years, Clayton Brascoupe, director of Traditional Native American Farmers Association, has taught a course called Indigenous Sustainable Communities Design. The stories of how people and communities have been affected are powerful.
• There were the South American students who took back their knowledge and heritage seeds to create gardens and build a new community house. They grew a certain yellow watermelon and when presented to the elders at a fiesta, they began to cry because they hadn’t tasted the fruit since they were children. They were also recognized at the national level for this community work.
• Then there was the phone call Clayton received from the mother of a young man from Arizona. She asked what they had done to her son, because he had completely changed from a game-playing couch potato into an engaged busy gardener.
• Another young man returned home to Los Angeles to start urban gardens, but his story was not quite that simple: As it turned out, he was hard-core gang member who took it upon himself to change his community by providing fresh food.
• On another occasion, the course provided a natural solution when mother nature wreaked havoc: A Mayan group from Belize learned to preserve surplus garden-grown food and marinated chicken. When hurricanes damaged everything, they still had the preserves to feed the community.
Clayton Brascoupe. Photo by Alex Jacobs
Clayton Brascoupe — known around Turtle Island as Clayton or “Scoobie” — is Mohawk and Anishnabe, and was raised in Tuscarora, NY. He married Margaret Vigil from Tesuque Pueblo, NM and they have four daughters, which is also the name of their farm “4 Sisters”. He served an appointed position on the Tesuque Pueblo Tribal Council, and has been involved in community gardens and marketing for years. We travelled together with White Roots of Peace/Akwesasne Notes on the 1973 Wounded Knee trip; Clayton returned to NM to marry Margaret, and our fellow traveler Tom Cook returned to Pine Ridge, SD to marry Loretta Afraid of Bear. I went on to become an editor of Akwesasne Notes, co-founder of Indian Time and Akwekon, Tom is now a respected member of his Lakotah community and participates in the Sun Dance. Clayton’s older brother Simon Brascoupe, was an important artist in the early development of marketing Canadian Native Arts.
Clayton’s course is a two-week hands-on grassroots workshop — it’s also, frequently, a life changing experience. Class size ranges from 20 to 25, with the most ever being 35. Locals from New Mexico, Arizona, and elsewhere in the southwest make up most of the class. There are urban Natives, as well as Natives from Canada, Central and South America. Many students return to become instructors — the staff is 98% indigenous, and many of are women. Recently there’s been a Midwifery component — the thinking being, if we can grow clean food in a non-industrial way, then why not our children?
Traditional foods ready to eat. Image courtesy Clayton Brascoupe.
What Clayton says is important for these students, is it to develop a resource base of knowledge in the affected communities and to become experts in their respective communities. Identify resources, land bases, elders’ knowledge, youthful energy, water sources, urban parks, markets and outlets, recycling discarded resources and discarded people too. Identify problems and solutions and use local resources to fix them, and if there aren’t enough local resources, go out in wider and broader networks to find more. Its base knowledge is agriculture, but it’s not just about planting gardens. Health care is everyone’s biggest issue and expense, but fresh food dramatically changes diet and lifestyle, positively affecting diabetes and heart disease. Food, health, economies, energy, housing, spiritual well-being, elder care, raising children, education — it all becomes inter-related.
Clayton had originally started the course as Permaculture Design but each group had different issues, so the course grew outward and became its own living organism, adapting and changing. Citing examples around Indian country, he talked about ecology and borders and what he terms eco-tones, where two environments come together. These “edges” are where things happen and exchanges are made, where there is more diversity of plants and animals. It’s the difference between a riparian area with a meandering river or a re-created “seaway”, dug out and made straight for industrial traffic. Communities become just like these traffic lanes — dollars don’t stay, they leave immediately like out a pipeline fast, instead of percolating around families. In most communities, dollars are replenished in grants instead of recycling via local diverse economies. Just like a riparian wetland or our own digestive system, there needs to be more meandering, more edges where things meet, interact and exchange, to yield more nutrients, more bang for the buck, rather than having everything of value be extracted by corporations and outside markets.
Although the course is designed for and made up of indigenous peoples, non-Natives have been students and there are usually around 5 spots for non-natives who pay the full course fee. Sometimes Native organizations or benefactors will sponsor individuals to come and learn and then go back to Native communities to teach. Participants can camp nearby, children are allowed but there’s no daycare, and there’s local food catering from San Juan (Ohkay Ohwingeh). The 2013 session of Sustainable Communities Design runs from July 28 through August 9 in Santa Cruz, New Mexico. Those interested should visit tnafanm.org/TNAFA.html for more information.
One final story: An El Salvadoran farmer comes every year driving his cooking-oil fueled pick-up truck. He fills up at restaurants (which usually have to pay to have their oil picked up), the best fuel oils are from Taiwanese, Chinese, and Mexican restaurants. The McDonalds waste cooking-oil clogs his vehicle’s engine, it won’t run; so think about that for awhile.
Alex Jacobs, Mohawk, is a visual artist and poet living in Santa Fe.
Now, I know online commentary isn’t generally known for its erudite reflection. After all, troll culture revels in trashing everyone.
But whenever an article is posted about Idle No More or treaty rights or First Nation poverty, the comments section is quickly overwhelmed with abusive attacks. It is impossible not to recognize a relentless pattern of malevolence. In cyberspace the racists are loud, proud and determined to define the terms of discussion around aboriginal issues.
Let’s compare these responses to those following recent natural disasters in Oklahoma, Bracebridge and Alberta, which prompted outpourings of heartfelt and moving comments.
And yet when two communities in my region, Attawapiskat and Kashechewan, were hit by flash flooding earlier this spring, the pages were filled with vicious glee. Online consensus was that the families who were flooded out by failed sewage lifts were actually responsible for the flood – either because of deviousness or mental decrepitude. The idea that government agencies might send aid to help these Canadian citizens sent commentators into a rage.
I used to think trolls wrote their crap because they could post it anonymously. But now I see people not only willing to sign their name to it but even to supply a headshot. The purveyors of these false stereotypes seem to be hijacking the public conversation away from issues like chronic infrastructure underfunding, third-class education and the inability to share in economic development.
So why the lack of action?
It’s not as if Canadians haven’t taken impressive steps to fight cyber-bullying. And yet whenever I hear about the wonderful efforts being made to protect young people online, I think of the trauma experienced by children in Attawapiskat from online attacks. When the media began reporting on their struggle to have a school built in the community, online haters again took over the comments pages. A teacher in Attawapiskat told me the children were shaken by commenters calling them “lazy Indians,” “losers,” “gasoline sniffers,” etc.
How is it that school boards, parents, police and editorialists rightly tell young people to speak out against the humiliation by individual youth online but don’t seem to notice when the hate is directed at First Nation children?
Canada is one of the most digitally literate societies in the world. The task before us isn’t just about challenging stereotypes of First Nation people, but correcting the emerging and inaccurate image of the ugly Online Canadian. There is simply too much at stake to allow important issues and stories to be poisoned by trolls. So when you see examples of these hate comments, please be Idle No More.
Charlie Angus is the Member of Parliament for Timmins-James Bay.
Facebook’s data center in Prineville. The main data halls are in the center of the picture. The cold storage facility is the L-shaped building on the lower right. (Facebook photo)
Facebook users post 350 million photos on a typical day. On a holiday, like Christmas or New Year’s Eve, they post more than a billion.
Altogether, Facebook now hosts more than 250 billion photos — and it’s seeking new technologies to store those old pictures efficiently and reliably at its data centers in Prineville and elsewhere around the world.
“These are the precious memories of people around the world,” said Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure. “We can’t lose them.”
Parikh was in Portland today to deliver a keynote address at OSCON, the annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention at the Oregon Convention Center. He spoke about the company’s “Open Compute Project,” an effort to build collaboration among data center operators to improve performance and efficiency.
Facebook says 82 percent of its traffic is focused on just 8 percent of its photos, generally the most recent posts. It plans to put older images into “cold storage,” data centers that host older photos in more efficient — albeit a bit less speedy — facilities.
If Facebook can store photos more efficiently, it can substantially cut its energy use, operating costs and environmental impact.
OSCON back again in 2014 and 2015
The O’Reilly Open Source Convention will return to Portland in 2014 and again in 2015.
The state’s largest annual tech conference attracts more than 3,000 people to the Oregon Convention Center each year. It first came to Portland in 2003, then moved to San Jose in 2009. The following year, Portland signed a four-year deal to bring OSCON back.
That deal expires this year, but OSCON says it plans to return next year and in 2015. Next year’s conference will run July 20-24.
The cold storage concept isn’t new. Parikh talked about it early last winter, and I wrote about it in February after visiting the cold storage construction site in Prineville.
On Wednesday, Parikh offered more detail about Facebook’s vision for the future. Construction on its Prineville cold storage facility is due to wrap up this fall, he said in a conversation following his OSCON keynote. Substantial testing will follow, he said, before it begins hosting older photos.
Each cold storage data hall will hold 1 exabyte of data — equivalent to 1 million of the 1 terabyte hard drives now common in PCs. Facebook will fill each cold storage data hall with 500 racks of servers.
Most of those servers will be idle most of the time. Facebook will keep just a small number of hard drives running, and spin up additional ones when it needs to retrieve the photos they store from cold storage.
Waking up those hard drives is a slow, energy-intensive process. Parikh said Facebook hopes a new technology will emerge that’s both faster and more efficient. He calls it “cold flash.”
It’s the same flash memory technology that stores the songs on your smartphone, and the documents you carry around on a thumb drive.
Cold flash, Parikh said, would be a low-grade, high-capacity storage technology. It wouldn’t need the durability that flash memory in a thin laptop requires — most of the cold storage material stored on it would sit unused forever.
It will likely be a year or two before anyone develops suitable flash memory, Parikh said. And perhaps it’s impossible to do it at a price that would be cost-effective for Facebook.
But through its Open Compute efforts, Parikh said he hopes to demonstrate that Facebook and others would provide an eager customer base for whoever invents cold flash.
All kinds of businesses, he said, need electronic cold storage for old records they may never need — but must retain, just in case.
Crews with SWCA Environmental Consultants dig in a field east of Northwest 253rd Avenue in search of Native American remains or remnants of the historic Methodist Meeting House. The contract is now significantly more expensive, according to city officials (Andrew Theen/The Oregonian)
Hillsboro’s ongoing search for human remains and historic sites in a field and along a gravel road earmarked for development has thus far turned up “two indistinguishable pieces of metal” and nearly $140,000 in unforeseen costs, according to public works officials.
The city hired SWCA Environmental Consultants to use ground-penetrating radar along Northwest 253rd Avenue in May to survey for historic sites. The initial contract was for $38,215. The new contract estimate is $177,813, according to a staff report presented to the Transportation Committee on Tuesday.
Local historians and some nearby residents believe one of Washington County’s oldest buildings, the Methodist Meeting House, used to be in that area. Descendants of Joseph and Virginia Meek, the famous Oregon frontiersman and his Nez Perce wife, are believed to have been buried near the meeting house too.
The ground-penetrating radar survey identified more than 600 anomalies that necessitated excavation to determine their historical significance, according to a staff report. So far crews haven’t started to analyze the anomalies deemed of “highest interest,” due to permitting delays. That’s where the additional costs come into play.
“So far, we haven’t found anything,” Bob Sanders, assistant public works director, said on Tuesday. “But we still have to go through that process.”
That process, Sanders said, has been frustrating.
It will also likely push back Hillsboro’s schedule for widening and paving 253rd Avenue, a road that city officials call key to opening up the 330-acre North Industrial Areafor development.
The road, Sanders said, also has a more immediate need, as an escape route for residents on nearby Northwest Meek Road, who will lose access to Northwest Brookwood Parkway once a $45 million interchange project is scheduled to begin later this fall. Hillsboro initially hopes to break ground on the road project this summer, using $6.3 million from the interchange project and another $1.8 million in traffic impact fees to fund the road work.
Beyond analyzing the cultural resources along Northwest 253rd, which includes an 1890Queen Anne-style home built by John W. Shute, the city is going through a concurrent natural resources permitting process related to two creek crossings on the rural property.
Sanders said he’s now planning for a situation where the entirety of 253rd can’t move forward in time for Meek residents. He said the city is looking at another options, the extension of Northwest Huffman Street from 253rd east to Brookwood, as another route for Meek Road residents.
Revenues from gambling at Native American gaming centers across the nation hit a new record in 2012, bringing in nearly $28 billion dollars, a 2.7 percent increase over 2011.
The two fastest growing regions in the country were in Oklahoma. The Tulsa Region, which includes parts of Kansas and eastern Oklahoma, had the greatest revenue growth, increasing 6.6 percent.
The Oklahoma City Region, including Texas and the western parts of Oklahoma, were in second place with gambling revenue growing 5.8 percent in 2012 as compared to the year before.
The annual report from the National Indian Gaming Commission shows those two areas outpaced all others in the country in 2012. The Tulsa area showed gross gaming revenue of $1.9 billion. The Oklahoma City Region came in at $1.8 billion.
“In 2012, the Indian gaming industry saw its largest gross gaming revenues ever,” Tracie Stevens, chairwoman of the commission, said. “For those who judge casino spending as an indicator of increased discretionary spending and economic recovery, 2012 revenues certainly display economic encouragement.”
The Tulsa and Oklahoma City regions top the nation in the growth of Native American gambling revenues in 2012. Credit National Indian Gaming Commission
PLUMMER, Idaho – Peggy Mahoney always wanted to open a regalia store.
She spent hours stitching intricate beadwork on the outfits that her husband and kids wore for powwows and other special occasions, and she knew plenty of other Native American families crafting heirloom-quality clothing that would patronize a local supplier.
Porcupine teeth and claws are among the variety of natural and manmade items for sale in the Four Shells store. Jesse Tinsley photo
Four Shells Regalia Supply started out as a small selection of beads tucked into a corner of War Path Tribal Corp., a convenience store, gas station and gift shop that Mahoney, her husband, Pete, and their children run on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation.
Three years ago, the shop expanded into the regalia store that Mahoney had dreamed about. The shop attracts both native and non-native customers, who can spend an hour or more browsing through the inventory and talking about their current projects.
Four Shells Regalia stocks items that don’t appear in chain craft stores.
There are stacks of brain-tanned buckskin, deer and elk rawhide, and otter, mink and beaver furs. The display case features elk teeth, porcupine quills, cowrie and dentalium shells. And there are hanks of dyed horsehair, packets of face paint and geometric Indian prints in cotton, fleece and wool.
Four Shell’s biggest draw, however, is the three walls devoted to glittering glass beads, which gives the store a rainbow appearance. The beads are imported from the Czech Republic and end up in the intricate beadwork decorating moccasins, jewelry, chokers and other clothing and accessories.
Allyssa Haynes, left, shows Peggy Mahoney her beaded medallion at the Four Shells store in Plummer, Idaho, on Monday. Haynes works at the store, which is run by Mahoney’s family. It is one of the few places where Native American crafters can find almost any material needed for Indian regalia worn at traditional gatherings. Jesse Tinsley photo
Mahoney, who is Lakota, grew up watching female relatives doing beadwork. “When you are making the items, you put a lot of prayer into them,” she said. “And it’s a way to pass on tradition and culture.”
She said she’s seen a revival of interest in handcrafted regalia in recent years, particularly among the younger generation. One of Four Shell’s clerks, Allyssa Haynes, is already an expert bead worker at 17. Haynes, who will be a high school senior next year, frequently doodles, and her doodles turn into original designs.
Four Shells attracts regular customers from as far as British Columbia, Montana, Oregon and Wyoming.
“They come this way every year or so, and this is one of their main stops,” said Mona Gonzales, another of Four Shell’s clerks.
Vivian and Pete Williams, of Creston, B.C., were browsing in the shop this week.
Both do beadwork – Pete uses a loom – and they make the 2 ½-hour drive to patronize the store because of its large bead selection, Vivian Williams said.
Jeanne Sijohn Gravatt was also shopping for beads. Gravatt, who lives on the Spokane Reservation, has five orders pending for handcrafted gifts, including cradleboards.
Gravatt said that finding a local bead supplier was one of her top priorities after moving to the area from South Dakota. A friend told her about Four Shells.
Gravatt’s husband, Mark, knows not to interrupt her when she’s lost in thought in the store. Her creative wheels are spinning over color combinations and designs.
Four Shells will be busy with tourist traffic through October. But it’s December through February when the most dedicated customers stroll the aisles. They’ll be busy sewing and beading outfits and accessories for the next powwow season.
“It makes you feel pretty good,” Mahoney said of the store’s popularity. “It wasn’t just my hair-brained idea.”
Baker Lake sockeye anglers are scratching a little harder for fish so far this season than in 2012, and that probably means predictions for a somewhat smaller run are proving accurate.
“Historically, about half the run has been counted at the (Baker Dam) trap by July 19,” said Kevin John at Holiday Sports in Burlington. “The count at that point this year was a little over 9,000 fish, and if you double that, you’re getting close to the prediction of 21,000 fish.”
That would be down from last season’s total trap count of 28,410 sockeye, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t fish to be taken.
“It has actually been fairly good,” John said. “The numbers seem to be holding true, so it’s going to be a little tougher, but that only means moving around, watching for ‘showing’ fish, using a sounder, spending a little more time on the water.”
John said salmon are scattered, mostly above the bend, and at different water depths as well. Heavy morning fog recently delayed the morning bite, he said, and fishing didn’t really pick up until more light was on the water.
He recommends starting early in the day and dropping your gear to 20 or perhaps 30 feet to start, going down later to as deep as 55 feet or so. Rig with a big ring “0” dodger, eight to 18 inches of leader, bare red or black hooks, or a 11/2-inch pink hoochie. Add a small piece of raw or cured shrimp or a sand shrimp tail, and douse the works with shrimp oil.
The hoochie can be UV pink, John said, maybe dressed up with a smile blade or a red or pink size 8 or 10 Spin N Glo. John likes dodgers in UV white, UV purple haze, or 50-50.
The dam counts as of July 19 were 9,032 trappoed, and 4,620 transported to the lake. Check out the current trap counts at http://wdfw.wa.gov/fishing/salmon/sockeye/baker_river.html.
Pinks
The big run of odd-year humpies continues to work its way down the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but it’s not here in any numbers yet. State creel checks at the Washington Park public ramp west of Anacortes on Saturday showed 59 anglers with 11 chinook, one coho and 38 pinks. On Sunday, it was 38 anglers with 21 pinks. Those are Fraser and/or Skagit fish which tend to be a little earlier than those headed for Puget Sound tributaries in this area.
Sunday’s count at the Port of Everett ramp was 10 pinks for 390 anglers, most of which were caught incidentally to the ongoing chinook fishery. Weekend checks at Olson’s Resort in Sekiu showed outstanding salmon fishing: 206 anglers with 130 chinook, 10 coho, and 61 pinks.
Local chinook
Gary Krein, owner of All Star Charters in Everett, said that after a very hot couple of opening days, fishing for clipped-fin kings in the Port Townsend area dropped off precipitously, and that Possession Bar remained fairly slow. He said a few fish are being picked up a lot of places — Pilot Point, Point No Point, Possession, Kingston, and Richmond Beach among several others — but that there has been no local hot spot.
State check numbers, however, indicate at least decent local fishing. On July 16, opening day, some 212 anglers at the Port of Everett ramp had 96 kings, 11 coho and three pinks. And last Sunday, it was 390 fishermen with 39 chinook, 10 coho and 10 pinks — still not too bad.
But how long has it been since you’ve seen success rates on adult kings better than a fish per rod? Check this out: On July 16, opening day of the area 9-10 selective chinook fishery, 169 fishermen at the Port Townsend Boat Haven ramp were contacted with 194 chinook. And that’s about as good as it gets around here.
Krein said the scattering of pinks caught already on Possession Bar is encouraging for this early in the season, particularly as they were mostly taken on spoons worked by chinook fishermen. Good-sized humpies, too, he said, some in the 7- to 8-pound range.
Westport open seven days
Marine Area 2 opened July 19 to salmon fishing seven days a week, joining the three other coastal areas already open daily. Angler effort and catch rates are building slowly, but creel checks have not yet broken the one-per-rod figure, according to Wendy Beeghley, creel sample coordinator for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. The latest Westport numbers showed about one-third chinook and one-half coho per person, Beeghley said.
“That may improve in the next couple of weeks,” Beeghley said. “They’re doing better up north, on fish moving down the coast, and trollers are also reporting more fish.”
Waterfowl outlook
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has released its report on 2013 duck breeding populations, and while predictions are for a slightly lower total North American duck population, the numbers remain strong and well above the long-term averages. The report said its survey showed an estimated 45.6 million breeding ducks in the heart of the most important areas in the U.S. and Canada, a six-percent decrease from last year’s estimate but 33 percent above the 1955-2012 average.
Of the 10 species surveyed, seven were similar to last year’s estimates, including mallards. Scaup and blue-winged teal were significantly below last year’s estimates. American wigeon were 23 percent above last year, and mallards are 36 percent above the long-term average.
Neah Bay strong
Best coastal salmon results recently have been at Neah Bay, where anglers are averaging about one fish per rod, equally split between chinook and coho. They have been killing the pinks there, however, and when humpy numbers are added, Neah Bay anglers are scoring at a 1.6-fish-per-person clip.
Cowlitz River
Pretty good steelhead fishing on tap between the hatcheries, where 74 boat anglers last week were checked with 43 fish.
Buoy 10
The lower end of the Columbia opens to chinook and hatchery coho on Aug. 1 but, as usual, fishing probably won’t be close to hot on the opener. Joe Hymer, state biologist in the Vancouver office, said there are a few chinook in the area, but warm water temperatures and a lack of big tides early in the Buoy 10 season will probably tend to keep an improved coho run off the coast.
Hymer looks for fishig to improve, however, over the next few weeks and said the coho numbers look good this year.
The post office has been moving toward curbside and cluster box delivery in new housing areas since the 1970s.
Associated Press
July 25, 2013
WASHINGTON — Americans for generations have come to depend on door-to-door mail delivery. It’s about as American as apple pie.
But with the Postal Service facing billions of dollars in annual losses, the delivery service could be virtually phased out by 2022 under a proposal a House panel was considering Wednesday. Curbside delivery, which includes deliveries to mailboxes at the end of driveways, and cluster box delivery would replace letter carriers slipping mail into front-door boxes.
Letter carrier Diosdado Gabnat moves boxes of mail into his truck at a post office in Seattle.
The proposal is part of broader legislation by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, designed to cut costs at the cash-strapped agency by up to $4.5 billion a year. The Postal Service had a $16 billion loss last year.
The agency has been moving toward curbside and cluster box delivery in new residential developments since the 1970s. The Postal Service in April began deciding whether to provide such delivery for people moving into newly built homes rather than letting the developers decide.
“A balanced approach to saving the Postal Service means allowing USPS to adapt to America’s changing use of mail,” Issa said. “Done right, these reforms can improve the customer experience through a more efficient Postal Service.”
About one in three mail customers has door-to-door delivery, Issa said. The shift would include safe and secure cluster box delivery areas, he said, especially for elderly customers who receive Social Security checks and prescriptions through the mail.
About 30 million residential addresses receive delivery to boxes at the door or a mail slot. Another 87 million residential addresses receive curbside or cluster box delivery.
The cost differences are clear. Curbside delivery costs average $224 per year for each address, while cluster box delivery averages $160. Door-to-door delivery costs the agency about $350 per year, on average.
Sue Brennan, a Postal Service spokeswoman, said, “While converting delivery away from the door to curb or centralized delivery would allow the Postal Service to deliver mail to more addresses in less time, doing so is not included in our five-year plan.”
Brennan said the agency’s five-year plan does call for shifting 20 percent of business address deliveries from door-to-door to curbside and cluster box delivery through 2016.
Rep. Steve Lynch, D-Mass., said the plan to move some 30 million residential addresses from to-the-door to curbside and cluster box service would be virtually impossible in dense urban areas such as his hometown of South Boston crowded with triple-deckers — three apartments stacked on top of each other.
“You’d have to knock houses down in my neighborhood to build cluster boxes,” Lynch said. “This will not work.”
It might work in places like Manhattan with big apartment buildings, he said.
“Look, there’s no availability for cluster boxes in many communities around the country,” Lynch said.
Issa’s plan allows for people with physical hardships to get waivers allowing them to keep door delivery. There’s also a provision giving people the option to keep door delivery by paying a special fee to cover the additional cost.
Issa’s bill also allows the Postal Service to take into account factors such as poverty rates and population density in deciding which areas would be allowed to keep door delivery.
The financially beleaguered Postal Service, an independent agency, gets no tax dollars for its day-to-day operations, but is subject to congressional control.
The Postal Service is pursuing a major restructuring throughout its retail, delivery and mail processing operations. Since 2006, it has reduced annual costs by about $15 billion, cut its workforce by 193,000 or 28 percent, and consolidated more than 200 mail-processing locations.
The service’s losses are largely due to a decline in mail volume and a congressional requirement that it make advance payments to cover expected health care costs for future retirees. About $11.1 billion of last year’s losses were due to payments for future retiree health costs.
The volume of mail handled by the Postal Service has decreased steadily as the popularity of email, Facebook and other electronic services has grown. Total mail volume handled by the agency fell to 160 billion pieces last year from its all-time high, 213.1 billion in 2006. Revenue fell to $65.2 billion last budget year, from a high of $74.9 billion in 2008.
The Postal Service is considering several options to fix its finances, including negotiations with unions to reduce labor costs and another possible increase in prices.
The service earlier this year backpedaled on its plan to end Saturday mail delivery after running into opposition in Congress. It has tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully over the past several years to persuade Congress to approve ending Saturday mail delivery and to free the service from the advance health payments.
Commercial honey bees used to pollinate crops are exposed to a wide variety of agricultural chemicals, including common fungicides which impair the bees’ ability to fight off a potentially lethal parasite, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Maryland and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The study, published July 24 in the online journal PLOS ONE, is the first analysis of real-world conditions encountered by honey bees as their hives pollinate a wide range of crops, from apples to watermelons.
The researchers collected pollen from honey bee hives in fields from Delaware to Maine. They analyzed the samples to find out which flowering plants were the bees’ main pollen sources and what agricultural chemicals were commingled with the pollen. The researchers fed the pesticide-laden pollen samples to healthy bees, which were then tested for their ability to resist infection with Nosema ceranae – a parasite of adult honey bees that has been linked to a lethal phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.
On average, the pollen samples contained 9 different agricultural chemicals, including fungicides, insecticides, herbicides and miticides. Sublethal levels of multiple agricultural chemicals were present in every sample, with one sample containing 21 different pesticides. Pesticides found most frequently in the bees’ pollen were the fungicide chlorothalonil, used on apples and other crops, and the insecticide fluvalinate, used by beekeepers to control Varroamites, common honey bee pests.
In the study’s most surprising result, bees that were fed the collected pollen samples containing chlorothonatil were nearly three times more likely to be infected by Nosema than bees that were not exposed to these chemicals, said Jeff Pettis, research leader of the USDA’s Bee Research Laboratory and the study’s lead author. The miticides used to controlVarroa mites also harmed the bees’ ability to withstand parasitic infection.
Beekeepers know they are making a trade-off when they use miticides. The chemicals compromise bees’ immune systems, but the damage is less than it would be if mites were left unchecked, said University of Maryland researcher Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s senior author. But the study’s finding that common fungicides can be harmful at real world dosages is new, and points to a gap in existing regulations, he said.
“We don’t think of fungicides as having a negative effect on bees, because they’re not designed to kill insects,” vanEngelsdorp said. Federal regulations restrict the use of insecticides while pollinating insects are foraging, he said, “but there are no such restrictions on fungicides, so you’ll often see fungicide applications going on while bees are foraging on the crop. This finding suggests that we have to reconsider that policy.”
In an unexpected finding, most of the crops that the bees were pollinating appeared to provide their hives with little nourishment. Honey bees gather pollen to take to their hives and feed their young. But when the researchers collected pollen from bees foraging on native North American crops such as blueberries and watermelon, they found the pollen came from other flowering plants in the area, not from the crops. This is probably because honey bees, which evolved in the Old World, are not efficient at collecting pollen from New World crops, even though they can pollinate these crops.
The study’s findings are not directly related to colony collapse disorder, the still-unexplained phenomenon in which entire honey bee colonies suddenly die. However, the researchers said the results shed light on the many factors that are interacting to stress honey bee populations.
