By Jim Gersbach | Contributing Writer

What was once just a grassy field at the former Meek Elementary School (4039 NE Alberta Ct.) has recently been accredited as a Level 1 arboretum by Arbnet, an international arboretum accreditation and networking program. The new arboretum is called the Concordia Learning Landscape Arboretum and is the fifth in Oregon nationally accredited by Arbnet.

Jim Gersbach and Mallory Pratt, longtime Concordia Tree Team volunteers, submitted the successful application. They were required to meet five criteria:

• At least 25 different species, with labels and documentation
• An oversight group for the accreditation process
• An operational plan for the protection and maintenance of the trees
• A group dedicated to care and maintenance of the trees
• Public access, community engagement, education and on-site events

With the help of Friends of Trees, Concordia Tree Team volunteers began planting trees at the school (now called Alliance High School) on April 2nd, 2010. The first trees at Meek came from Portland Parks and Recreation Urban Forestry’s Learning Landscape Program. Today, the volunteers continue to weed, mulch, water and do structural pruning on the trees.

The arboretum has about four dozen species of trees representing 27 genera in 20 families. A main focus is the rapidly expanding oak family. The collection includes species from five different continents and at least five species native to Oregon. Members of the Concordia Tree Team are very excited to have their many years of dedication be rewarded with arboretum status.

Jim Gersbach is a longtime volunteer with the Concordia Tree Team and has lived in Concordia for 22 years. He is a master pruner and planting crew leader with the non-profit Friends of Trees, and occasionally gives tree walks at Hoyt Arboretum and around the city.

By Micha Wolf | Contributing Writer

Two changes coming soon to Portland will affect Neighborhood Emergency Teams (NETs). The mayor’s office has proposed a new budget for the year 2024/25 that would cut funds to Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Management. In addition, NET leadership is planning the realignment of neighborhood districts.

The Impact of NET

Founded in 1994, the NET program has been serving the community for 30 years. In 2023, at the city’s request, NETs deployed for over 2200 hours. Work included helping our neighbors in warming and cooling shelters, clearing storm drains, and maintaining safety perimeters around downed power lines – freeing up fire and police until utility crews arrive. In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, NETs responded to more than double the usual number of deployment requests – making masks, distributing public health posters, and staffing vaccination clinics. That volunteer work provided almost $450,000 of service to the city.

New Budget

The following statements are from S. Ahmed, the mayor’s designee.

First and foremost, a 60% reduction in non-personnel costs will not carry the most basic functions of our core mission of emergency response. Therefore, we will need to eliminate or hold an additional position while we evaluate how to make up for this. The position being considered for this is the vacant position in Operations.

We also have five limited term positions that are slated to end June 30th, four of which are currently occupied covering functions such as planning, community programs support, training and exercise, and emergency operations.

At present, NET volunteers do not know fully the scope of the impact this measure will have. Funding cuts could mean fewer resources for Neighborhood Emergency Teams, the BEECN program (Basic Earthquake Emergency Communications Node) and fewer training possibilities for all volunteers.

If you’d like more detailed information about the budget cuts or to voice your opinion, please contact Mayor Wheeler’s office directly at MayorWheeler@ PortlandOregon.gov.

NET District Realignment

There will also likely be realigning of NET districts. Portland has about 2000 active NET volunteers, and they are spread among many city districts. Up until now, NETs were organized by neighborhoods, often having to travel quite a distance to meetings or staging sites.

The new proposal would allow NETs to form smaller ‘pods’ among their immediate neighbors and neighborhood streets, thus allowing for a more knowledgeable and immediate response should a disaster strike.

We are proud to have been able to provide education and disaster preparedness and we all hope we can continue to serve our community.

Micha Wolf ha s retired from teaching primary school, loves being in nature and believes in building community through engagement.

Portland’s Alberta Street neighborhood is known for its art community and festive street fairs. Alberta Main Street is the nonprofit organization that has put on many of those events over the past decade. However, recently all but two members of the Alberta Main Street Board resigned reportedly due to their frustration with the organization.

Former Alberta Main Street president Devon Horace, who served as president from July 2021 to January 2023, solicited $100,000 in donations from Nike and $5,000 from the Portland Trail Blazers on behalf of the Alberta Street business district. Horace has been accused by the Multnomah County Circuit Court of withdrawing the funds from the district’s account, diverting the money to his own account and falsifying records to show to the organization’s treasurer. Horace has pleaded not guilty to all accusations, which included four counts of first-degree aggravated theft, five counts of first-degree theft and seven counts of falsifying business records.

When Horace left the position, former board member James Armstrong agreed to step in as the Interim Board President and made a review of the financial records a priority. Armstrong realized there was a major monetary loss that led right to Horace.

Prosecutors say that the full extent of the misconduct may not yet be fully uncovered.

“Given the sophistication and breadth of the scams, combined with how quickly the defendant spent the proceeds in this case, the state is concerned that [Horace] could be further victimizing other community members and committing fraud,” says the DA’s office.

Devon Horace moved to Portland in 2015 from New York and was featured as a “40 Under 40” of “the Portland’s area’s brightest rising stars“ in the Portland Business Journal in 2023. He has worked for Nike, the Portland Trailblazers and holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree in Leadership and Management from Concordia University. Horace has been permitted to reside in Seattle until his next court appearance, which is scheduled for Wednesday, June 12th. Armstrong says they are cooperating with investigators. When contacted by the Concordia News media team, Horace declined to respond.

To learn more about this story, join Concordia Neighborhood Association at our next General Meeting on Wednesday, June 12th at 7:00 p.m. at the Kennedy School community room.

After living east, south, north and west, Marsha Sandman is home at last. And she wants to hear your story. Contact her at MarshaJSandman@ gmail.com.

By Elaine Oliver | Contributing Writer

If you’ve driven down NE 27th toward the stoplight at Lombard, you may have noticed a lot of construction. It is the site of Dekum Court Apartments, a new affordable housing complex and Phase Two of construction is well underway. Most recently, a large community center made of timber has taken shape and with it will be a covered basketball court for residents.

The site is a redevelopment of an existing affordable housing complex which contained 40 two-and-threebedroom units. The new site expands the housing capacity to 187 units and ranges from studios to four-bedroom units.

147 of the units are funded by a Metro Affordable Housing Bond and 67 by federal rental assistance. Most notably,40 units are one-for-one replacement homes for existing Dekum Court households where there was special care taken to not displace the residents during construction. Phase One of construction began in September 2022 and opened to new residents September 2023. Phase Two is projected to be completed by late summer 2025.

The homes were designed by Lever Architecture and are being constructed by Walsh Construction. The property was previously and will continue to be managed by Home Forward which is the designated housing authority for Multnomah County and the largest provider of affordable / subsidized housing in the area.

Dekum Court was one of the first projects the Metro Council approved for bond funding, awarding $21.03 million to the project. Among the factors the council considers in granting bond funds are a project’s plan for community engagement and strategies for advancing racial equity. As reported in Street Roots, many residents feel that the approach Home Forward took to Dekum Court allowed for redevelopment and focused on residents’ involvement.

“The project presented some very unique opportunities for us to make sure that we did not have any interruption in our tenants’ lives as we develop their new homes,” Home Forward CEO Ivory Matthews told Street Roots in November.

As affordable housing development increases in and around Portland, Dekum Court could act as a guide, Mathews says.

Elaine (she/her) is a former tech trainer turned ADHD coach and the Concordia News Ad Sales Rep. She is a passionate auntie, pitbull mom, and soccer player who has called Concordia home for four years. You can find her eating good food with friends or walking her lovable pitbull Charlie in the neighborhood.

By Esther Lerman Freeman | Contributing Writer

Living in Northeast Portland, most of my neighbors are committed to doing what they can to improve our environment and keep Portland and the world healthy. Since I had been recycling, composting and donating to The Community Warehouse, The Rebuilding Store and other reuse organizations for quite some time, I thought I knew everything; that is, until I participated in the City of Portland Metro’s Master Recycler Program (MRP).

Developed in 1991, MRP is a partnership between Metro, three counties, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, and lay community members. MRP educates community members on best practices for recycling in Portland while also providing a workforce for community initiatives. There are three courses held annually and each is eight weeks long.

Upon graduation, MRP students are asked to spend time sharing what we learned, and through this column I hope to fulfill that obligation.

I will start with the number one thing that I learned.

The program should be called How To Bring Less Stuff Into The World rather than Master Recyclers. The first words from the instructor were, “Reduce and reuse BEFORE recycling.”

The very active Buy Nothing Group in our community is an example of folks trying to share with one another rather than supporting consumption. I watch as Buy Nothing members share extra food, clothing and lend one another items to use. They truly embody the Reduce ethos.

In terms of physical and financial effort, reducing is quite easy; it takes no resources to “not buy”. It does, however, take psychological energy. I often spend time scrolling through online offers that have found their way into my inbox.

Luckily, these companies usually have a cart on their websites that I can fill to my heart’s content until I wake up from my hypnotic consumer state and am able to just walk away from them. It is an experience of shifting from thinking wouldn’t that be nice? to do I actually need that?

However, sometimes you really do need to buy something; like a pair of waterproof pants for a hiking trip. In these instances, consider whether it is something you can borrow, something you can buy secondhand, or if you indeed need to buy it new. Taking the time to go through this thought process means you will have done the the first part of your basic training; going from automatic pilot to considering other options.

When we recycle, we are still not compensating for the energy and materials that went into producing the article. We get some return savings of energy and materials by recycling, but only a small percentage of what would be saved if we did not produce unnecessary things in the first place. A good example of this is food waste. While I have tried to be careful about not letting any food go to waste, I have always felt OK about it because at least I can put spoiled food into the green compost bin. Again, even though recycling food waste separately decreases the volume of waste at the dump and decreases the methane gas emitted from the dump site; the amount of labor, water, earth, and energy that went into growing and producing this food is not recovered by composting. So composting is great, but not wasting food is even better.

Tips for this month:

1. Before you buy, ask yourself if you need it. Can you borrow it? Can you buy it secondhand? If the answer is that you do need to buy it, go ahead, knowing that you have considered the options.
2. When buying food, consider using a shopping list and planning your meals for the week. Pay attention to what is most perishable in the refrigerator and keep it in the front of the shelf to increase the chance of using it before it spoils.
3. Freezing is a great option to save food that is in danger of not being used before it goes bad. Cutting up fruits and vegetables and freezing them is easy and saves money.
4. The ends of carrots, beet greens, the stems of mushrooms, etc., are all great to keep in the freezer until you have a good amount and then make a delicious broth, which is free! You won’t need to pay for broth and you won’t have any packaging from the broth to dispose of.
5. Find a neighbor you can share food with so that when either of you overshops or overcooks, you can help each other make meaningful use of the overage.
6. The type of food we eat also impacts the environment. One doesn’t need to become a vegetarian to decrease the impact of their diet, but perhaps cutting out one or two meals of beef a week would be a start.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Next month’s article will focus on REUSE.

Esther Lerman Freeman is a certified Master Recycler and Concordia resident.

By John Fitzgerald, CNA Board Chair

Greetings Neighbors, It has been a busy entrance into spring, and we had a great Egg Hunt on Easter Weekend! I wanted to thank all who helped with this event, which is our biggest event of the year.

However, it is not our only event of the year. A major part of our mission as a neighborhood association is to create a community where all feel welcome and part of something special. One of our avenues to achieve this goal is to provide gatherings to celebrate all of the cultures, ethnicities, and identity groups within our neighborhood.

To make these events possible, we need you not only to attend events, but to help in the planning and execution of them. For example, as of this writing, the Muslim holiday of Ramadan concluded with the final Iftar meal. We had neighbors express interest in attending an Iftar meal and learning about the traditions which accompany the breaking of the daily fast during the month of Ramadan.

Unfortunately, we did not have anyone in the neighborhood step up to organize this event. Thus, I am blowing the horn, making the call, and shouting to the mountaintops (or at least to the crest of the hill at Alberta) for volunteers who are willing to take the lead or work with others on planning an event for the Concordia Neighborhood Association. I am asking for your time on just one event which ignites your passion or piques your interest. You can certainly work on multiple events, but I am only asking for your time for one event. We can provide assistance with event organization; we simply need neighbors who are willing to devote their time to initiating making an event happen.

In addition to planning events, we are asking people to serve on committees. We have different committees for different things; for example, at our April meeting, the board created an ad hoc committee to explore the possibilities of a name change / rebranding of our association. The Concordia Neighborhood Association was formed in 1975 and eight months from now, will have its 50th anniversary.

Thus, we would like to ensure our name, our brand, and our identity are what we need for the next 50 years. I would love to see a good many of our neighbors reach out to be a part of this committee and help us gather the feedback necessary to move forward with confidence that we are serving the will of Concordia. Please contact us through any of the avenues to express your interest in being part of this research and action. You can also reach out to the committee chair, Patricia McMahan at AL2@ConcordiaPDX.org, or to me at Chair@ ConcordiaPDX.org. We look forward to some great conversations about how we present our identity and image in the next chapter of our neighborhood association.

Let’s all have a great rest of the spring, get all of our plants and veggies planted for the wonderful neighborhood gardens, and I look forward to a wonderful summer season of backyard gatherings, street parties, and fun in the sun.

Cheers!
John Fitzgerald

After a 16 year run as a high school English teacher on the International School circuit in six different countries, I am excited to be back home in PDX. My wife Michelle and I are back getting enmeshed into the community and developing our real estate careers.

Marbott’s Greenhouse & Nursery (1808 NE Columbia Blvd.), which first opened in 1930, will close this spring due to third generation owner Larry Marbott’s complications with his recent eye surgery.

Marbott’s sells annuals and perennials, trees and shrubs, unique houseplants and home goods. 90% of the plants sold at Marbott’s are grown onsite in one of eight greenhouses.

Marbott’s was started by Larry’s grandparents, Ernest and Anna Marbott, who lived with their children on the property and ran the nursery. At the time, the area surrounding the nursery was filled with dairy farms, produce markets, and other agricultural businesses.

In its early days, Marbott’s faced significant environmental challenges. The year that the greenhouse opened, the Columbia River froze. In 1948, the Columbia River flooded Vanport, the then largest housing project in the U.S., located between Vancouver and Portland. Ernie Marbott (who was Ernest’s son and Larry’s father), remembered how close the water came to the nursery during the Vanport flood.

Ernie took over the nursery in 1954 and was one of the first growers in Portland to grow poinsettias, still a specialty of Marbott’s. Ernie also created a new gloxinia color and named it Marbott’s Pink. The gloxinia was listed in seed catalogs when it first came out.

Ernie died in 2022 but even towards the end of his life, he enjoyed sitting at the nursery’s outside counter and giving advice to customers.

Larry Marbott has announced that Marbott’s Greenhouse & Nursery will be closed at least for this April, May and June, and maybe longer. “The future is a little bit hazy, just like my eye is,” Larry Marbott told Willamette Week last month.

By Micha Wolf | Contributing Writer

Climate change and Pacific Northwest hazards are changing the environment for all of us in the Portland metro region. Over the past few years, we have experienced heat waves, floods and hazardous ice storms during the wintertime.

The Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM) as well as the Neighborhood Emergency Teams (NETs) are continuously striving to educate and help neighbors navigate any possible disaster. Additionally, during annual City Wide Deployment Exercises (CDE), NETs brush up on their skills to search and rescue.

In order for you and your family to adequately prepare for possible emergencies, it is important to be aware of these potential local hazards:

• Earthquakes
• Landslides
• Wildfires
• Flu, pandemics or fallout from chemical disasters
• Floods
• Volcanic eruption

Discuss with your family where you plan to go should you have to evacuate your home. Take into consideration which routes you might take and plan alternatives in case freeways or local streets are impassable. If possible, involve your neighbors as much as you can so they know where you will be and how to reach you. This may also be achieved with an email list, provided the neighborhood still has power or cell service available. Most importantly, reach out to those neighbors who might need special assistance, such as a visually impaired person or someone in a wheelchair.

Here are the steps to take during an emergency evacuation.

1. Listen to a battery powered radio.
2. Locate emergency supplies, including extra batteries (radio/hearing aids/ etc.), medications and pet food.
3. If time allows, unplug electrical appliances.

To best prepare to execute your plan, practice it on a regular basis. Especially with children involved, practicing will ensure that they are less frightened and know how to calmly evacuate.

Here are tips for preparation so you are ready.

• Download the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) app for a list of shelters and local alerts (available for both Android and iPhone).
• Stock up on necessary medications and medical supplies and also have them available at your possible evacuation site.
• Place emergency phone numbers at a prominent location in your home.
• Identify emergency contacts and their location.
• Check smoke and carbon monoxide detectors regularly.
• Have an emergency kit handy.
• Teach children how and when to call 911.
• Take a First Aid/CPR class. Emergency Preparedness is the key to a good outcome should disaster strike.

Micha Wolf has retired from teaching primary school, loves being in nature and believes in building community through engagement.