Andrew Damitio

Outstanding news.

Capacity building at Sound Transit 18 primes 248 subconsultants [large chart showing which consultants and subconsultants the agency is bringing on]

I keep going back to this slide shown to the Sound Transit board this month, showing how "capacity building" means consulting firms, more consulting firms, and more subcontractors.

Just look at this appeal by Providence Park to the Oregon Plumbing Board of Appeals from 2014.

They had to submit bathroom cleaning schedules to try to win the appeal.

www.portlandoregon.gov/bds/appeals/...

google maps screenshot of portland with the marquam bridge and the east side waterfront freeway edited out

take out the marquam and you can unwind the entire east side waterfront freeway. such a huge part of our post-freeway future

The Oregon plumbing code has a thing against trough urinals, so any high capacity restrooms will need a variance...

Reading the replies, I don't think your question has been answered...

They don't have big athletics programs, large endowments, restrictive admissions, or prestigious research labs...

They have something more important: Opportunity.

They're avenues of upward mobility for working class people to cheaply learn trades in their hometowns, and increase their earnings.

Map of Oregon's community college districts.

Oregon's community colleges are a great example of government quietly working well, without any headlines.

They're modern facilities funded by stable property tax district revenue that teach ~200k students/yr, creating new tradesmen across the state and providing opportunity for the working class.

Yeah "Abundance" liberals are very clearly in the ideological tradition of Atari Democrats, New Democrats, etc.

Doesn't running cable take considerably more time? Labor is the biggest component of electrician billing.

And when running the cable, you're connecting to the electrical panel, sometimes necessitating upgrade.

This bypasses the electric panel.

That's much cheaper than an electrical panel upgrade.

Another example of "plug and play" low-cost electrification not allowed in most of the US:

Instead of installing Level 2 home EV chargers which take up to 4 hours of electrician time to install and may necessitate electrical panel upgrades, meter-socket adapters can be installed in 20 minutes.

American residential rooftop systems are overengineered to export onto the grid as if they're mini-power plants, and installed on roofs by professional firms.

Technically none of it is necessary if you have a microinverter and an extension cord. It's just much less power.

But it's so much cheaper.

In America, residential solar costs $10K-$50K.

In Europe, plug & play solar kits are sold for a few hundred dollars, DIY installed & plugged directly into wall outlets, defraying home energy use without export.

No IX agreement or professional install needed.

But plug & play is illegal in the US.

A recent report showed that the destruction of just one USAID program, the anti-AIDS PEPFAR initiative, would lead to the deaths of one million people *every year* www.vox.com/future-perfe...

I am not in the know, but things like single stair tend to be added as amendments to existing omnibus housing bills.

If there's any legislative action on single stair this year, it would probably be that.

The 911 Federal Building AND the BPA building?

Poor Lloyd District.

The Sightline Institute documented this in 2017, comparing 1970 data to 2010 data.

Many entirely single family zoned neighborhoods in Seattle lost population even as Seattle's population grew, as kids left the nest and only the aging parents remained.

www.sightline.org/2017/05/04/s...

There's a monument in Portland to a tree planting happening without an Environmental Impact Statement, design review, or public comment taking place.

What flexposts say: "We could use steel bollards but a bollard might scratch a car and that would be a tragedy. So, we're going to use these instead — things literally designed to be run over — because protecting even one car from a scratch is worth thousands of pedestrian deaths every year."

The butterfly effect:

Concerns over ozone & carbon monoxide caused catalytic converter mandates.

Catalytic converters ended leaded gas, spurring the growth of ethanol as a stabilizer.

Ethanol expanded corn production.

The hedgerow to hedgerow production destroyed monarch butterfly habitat.

To prevent a chicken and egg issue, the US mandated large gas stations offer unleaded gas by July 1, 1974 to accomodate the catalytic converters having 1975 model year vehicles.

Unleaded was only sold from narrow nozzles so people wouldn't fill up with leaded gas accidentally.

The reason leaded gas was phased out so rapidly was because the US mandated auto air pollution cuts, forcing the mass adoption of catalytic converters.

Lead breaks catalytic converters, forcing cars with them to only buy unleaded gas.

NAAQS criteria pollutant rules unintentionally phased out lead.

Plastics?

There are also sectors with unavoidable process emissions like cement.

Sankey diagrams showing the electricity inputs needed to power a light-duty vehicle.

Bluntly, non-BEVs won't take off.

1.53 joules are needed to give a battery-electric EV 1 joule of power.

Hydrogen? 4.5

Synthfuels? 9.2

Synthfuel with direct air capture? 11.85.

www.cell.com/joule/abstra...

It's insufficient, but legislation is never passed based on what's the best, most wonky fix.

Legislation is a complicated mess of amendments, horse trading, and coalitions.

It was probably as good as we could get out of Massachusetts right now.

Yes.

Too many influencers like Armand, God bless them, wrongly dogpiled on it.

It wasn't perfect by any means, but it added permitting certainty (with a shot clock), consolidated permits in a single place, and limited injunctive relief to directly aggreived parties.

Better than the status quo.

Takings of an endangered species under the ESA.

How you plan to mitigate your impact upon the species.

Interconnection always costs far more than site surveys.

And there's the engineering, procurement, and construction costs...

I will admit it always rubs me the wrong way that solar developers getting tax credits must do all those surveys while car scrapyards destroy the land and never need to.