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Washington Village Progress Report for Nobo North Boulder
Mar 9th
We are excited to announce the start of demolition and abatement! We will begin with the removal of the cinder block classrooms built in the 1950’s and 1960’s and start our site work soon after. This past week our site development loan was closed and the final civil engineering and landscape plans for Phase I were submitted to the City for approval. The architectural design work has been 
progressing on the single-family homes, and unit design meetings are happening this month with the community members that have reserved units in the historic school building. Current plans are to start two or three of the single-family homes, the historic school building, and the Carriage residences, by May or June, depending on the timing for building permits.
-Steven Toot, VP of Construction
progressing on the single-family homes, and unit design meetings are happening this month with the community members that have reserved units in the historic school building. Current plans are to start two or three of the single-family homes, the historic school building, and the Carriage residences, by May or June, depending on the timing for building permits.-Steven Toot, VP of Construction
SENIOR COHOUSING:
Establishing a Healthy, Sustainable Lifestyle for an Aging Generation
by Chuck Durrett
Last year Americans drove 5 billion miles caring for seniors in their homes (Meals on Wheels, Whistle Stop Nurses, and so on). In our small, semi-rural county in the Sierra foothills, Telecare made 60,000 trips in massive, lumbering, polluting vans-buses – usually carrying only one senior at a time – schlepping a couple thousand seniors total over hill and dale to doctor’s appointments, to pick up medicine, or to see friends. In our cohousing community of 21 seniors, I have never seen a single Telecare bus in the driveway. In cohousing it happens organically by caring neighbors: “Can I catch a ride with you?”; “Are you headed to the drug store?”, etc. And this alternative is much more fun and inexpensive for all involved, and much less damaging to the environment. Wolf Creek Lodge, a new senior cohousing community under construction, has 30 units on 1 acre within walking distance of downtown Grass Valley, CA. population 12,000. Top of mind, one future household will be moving from a 20 acre lot, 9 miles from town, another from 15 acres, also 9 miles out of town, and another from 13 acres, 7 miles from town. These are young seniors planning not only to live more sustainably, but more fulfilling as well.
Bill Thomas, M.D. and prominent author on issues affecting seniors, describes our currently predominant scenario of caring for seniors as the “$3 trillion dollar dilemma.” The cost of care for the 78 million new senior/baby boomers “coming of age” in the next 20 years will be $3 trillion dollars more per year than it is now (and that is in a nation with a $13 trillion dollar GDP – to put it into perspective). It goes without saying, that the current pattern is not sustainable from an environmental, cultural or financial point of view.
President Obama has announced that for us to arrest global warming, we will have to reduce carbon emissions by 2% per year until 2050. It seems doable, but last year, carbon emissions increased by 1.4% – we are headed in the wrong direction. Given this situation, we’ve got to do something. We need to think collectively about how to set seniors up for success and to help them achieve their full potential into their last 20-30 years and how to set the environment up for success at the same time. Cohousing is for seniors who want to be a part of the solution.
SENIOR COHOUSING WORKSHOP APRIL 11-15, 2011
Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living, second edition published by New Society Publishers (www.newsociety.com) – and the type of communities it describes and helps to create – allows seniors to live lightly on the planet and to enhance their quality of life at the same time.
City of Boulder Named IBM Smarter Cities Challenge Grant Recipient
Mar 9th
City of Boulder today announced that IBM has selected the city to receive an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grant.
The grant provides Boulder and 23 other cities worldwide with access to IBM’s top experts to analyze and recommend ways Boulder can become an even better place in which to live, work and play. The approximate value of each Smarter Cities Challenge grant is equivalent to as much as $400,000.
The IBM Smarter Cities Challenge is a competitive grant program in which IBM is awarding a total of $50 million worth of technology and services to 100 municipalities worldwide over the next three years. Teams of specially selected IBM experts will provide city leaders with analysis and recommendations to support successful growth, better delivery of municipal services, more citizen engagement, and improved efficiency.
In its application for the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge, Boulder identified three potential projects to work with an IBM expert team. The projects focused on developing new technology applications to support community action in key areas: community engagement, sustainability indicators, and smart grid-enabled energy management. The project selected by IBM focuses on the smart grid, as Boulder is the home of the nation’s first fully integrated smart grid. The City of Boulder will explore the project scope and details with IBM over the next few weeks, as well as with Xcel Energy, which owns and operates the project, known as SmartGridCity™. IBM will help the city explore the potential for consumer-facing devices to help residents and businesses become more savvy energy managers, and increasing the potential for distributed renewable energy generation in the city.
“Over 46,000 homes and businesses have been enabled with communications technology that supports a smart grid platform,” said City Manager Jane Brautigam. “Energy management tools in the hands of our residents could be an integral part of optimizing smart grid technology for Boulder and other cities throughout the nation.”
IBM selected cities that made the strongest case for participating in the Smarter Cities Challenge. During these engagements, IBM technical experts, researchers and consultants immerse themselves in local issues and offer a range of options and recommended next steps. Among the issues they examine are healthcare, education, safety, social services, transportation, communications, sustainability, budget management, energy, and utilities.
“We selected the City of Boulder because of its commitment to the use of data to make better decisions, and for its desire to explore and act on smarter solutions to their most pressing concerns,” said Pete Lorenzen, IBM Boulder Senior Location Executive. “The cities we picked are eager to implement programs that tangibly improve the quality of life in their areas, and to create roadmaps for other cities to follow. The stakes have never been greater but we’re excited at the prospect of helping cities tackle the most pressing challenges of our time.”
Smarter Cities Challenge draws upon IBM’s intrinsic technological savvy, but also upon the field experience accumulated by IBM over the last three years from the company’s ongoing pro bono Corporate Service Corps grant program. Corporate Service Corps has deployed 100 teams of 1,000 top IBM employees from around the world with skills in technology, scientific research, marketing, finance, and business development. They work with local government, non profit civic groups, and small business to develop blueprints that intersect business, technology, and society.
Here are the 24 cities that earned IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grants in 2011:
Antofagasta, Chile
Boulder, CO
Bucharest, Romania
Chengdu, China
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Delhi, India
Edmonton, Canada
Eindhoven, Netherlands
Glasgow, UK
Guadalajara, Mexico
Helsinki, Finland
Jakarta, Indonesia
Milwaukee, WI
New Orleans, LA
Newark, NJ
Nice, France
Philadelphia, PA
Providence, RI
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Sapporo, Japan
St. Louis, MO
Syracuse, NY
Townsville, Australia
Tshwane-Pretoria, South Africa
NPR, PBS on chopping block backed by Boulder City Council
Mar 8th
Republican congress is after public broadcasting again. Though you might think the Boulder City Government would want pulic broadcasting, they voted against it repeated over the past 10 years. Your local channel 54 was shut down in 2007 by Shaun McGrath, Macon Cowles, and that bunch.
According to Cowles ” I have no interest in ever having public broadcasting back in Boulder.” That gang at city hall then took all of our dedicated funds to public broadcasting , stole it, miss-used it and put in censorship everywhere.
Tell Congress: Don’t pull the plug on NPR and PBS!
We’re only a few weeks into the 112th Congress, and Republicans are already attempting to pull the plug on public media.
In a budget proposal made public last week, House Republicans announced plans to zero out all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the nonprofit responsible for funding public media including NPR, PBS, Pacifica and more.
If the Republicans are successful, it would be a tremendous blow to the entire public interest media sector.
We cannot allow Republicans to destroy public media.
Tell Congress: Fully fund NPR and defend public service media!
Republicans are disingenuously claiming that they need to cut funding for public media because of budgetary constraints. But what they fail to highlight is that national public broadcasting is remarkably cost effective, providing local news and information, free of charge, for millions of viewers while only receiving about .0001% of the federal budget.1
More to the point, it’s nearly impossible to put a price tag on the actual value of public broadcasting.
Public media is one of the last bulwarks against the corporate media, where the combination of consolidation and profit motive has long since shifted the focus to infotainment rather than substantive news. In many rural and less affluent communities, broadcasters rely on federal funding to provide the only available high-quality news and public affairs programming.
Without public media, corporate media monopolies would increase their already large control of what we see on television, hear on the radio or read in the newspaper.
This outcome should deeply worry all of us. The increased accumulation and consolidation of corporate power is a threat to our democracy. And nowhere is this more evident than in our media.
At a time when media consolidation is shrinking the number of perspectives we have access to over the airwaves and when newsrooms are shrinking, we need more diversity in our media not less. And we simply cannot afford to lose what public media brings to the table.
Tell Congress: Fully fund NPR and defend public service media!
Conservatives have longed for any opportunity to defund NPR, PBS and other public media. And with Speaker Boehner wielding the gavel, it looks like they may finally get their wish.
Don’t let Congress pull the plug on NPR and PBS! Tell them reject cuts to public broadcasting.
