Monday ReportOctober 5, 2015

"Don't worry about a thing, 'Cause every little thing gonna be alright.Singing' "Don't worry about a thing, 'Cause every little thing gonna be alright!

The great Jamaican philosopher, Bob Marley

Ogden Featured in Newsweek!

As Wealth Inequality Soars, One City Shows the Way SEPTEMBER 24, 2015 6:20

Tom Christopulos steers a black Nissan Armada through the sharply angled streets of Ogden, Utah, a historic metropolis about 35 miles north of Salt Lake City lodged at the base of the towering Wasatch Mountains, dissecting the neighbor-hoods home by home and crunching the numbers out loud. As part of his drive-by, he canvasses the terrain voraciously, even compulsively, visually cataloguing every detail—a rite he’s performed for nearly a decade. “I know every block in this town, every house,” he says. “See those mansions over there on Jefferson Avenue? They were cut up long ago, turned into rentals—flophouses, really. We bought them up, renovated them and turned them back into single-family homes.”

Born and raised in Ogden, Tom Christopulos, director of Og-den Community and Economic Development, remembers when it was a thriving railroad town in the 1960s. By the late 1990s, businesses had shut down and the city was in dire straits. Christopulos was one of the chief architects of Og-den's turn around, prioritizing affordable housing and rede-velopment during his tenure.JIM URQUHART FOR NEWSWEEKBorn and reared in Ogden, Christopulos has labored for the past eight years as the town’s director of community and economic development, squeezing prosperity—slowly and painstakingly—from abandoned rail yards, slaughterhouses and run-down buildings in an effort to rebuild Ogden’s middle class. “It’s been real pick-and-ax work,” he says.

Try Newsweek for only   $1.25 per week   Today, Ogden, with a population of roughly 86,000, boasts a distinction that has put it on the national radar: At a time when the United States—along with much of the rest of the world—is grappling with the pernicious effects of ever-widen-ing wealth inequality, Ogden has become an unlikely beacon of egalitarianism. The city, together with its neighboring com-munities, has the narrowest wealth gap among America’s largest metropolitan statistical areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's five-year American Community Survey.But just over a decade ago, the future here looked bleak. Ogden’s main streets were deserted, its shopping districts lay in ruins, and vagrants roamed downtown, peddling drugs. An online message board from 2009 decried Ogden’s urban wasteland and reputation for being “a low-class gang-in-fested area,” adding despairingly: “Sadly, the Ogden mental-ity is so deep-rooted” that any efforts to revitalize the town were opposed, and “pursuit of change has offended” many.

Related:   U.S. Household Incomes Lost Ground, Number of Uninsured Dropped, Poverty Rate Ticked Up in 2014Driving this past summer with Christopulos and his economic team, one could not help but be awed by the beauty of this stretch of land at the western edge of the greater Rocky Mountains. Yet just before us were dilapidated rail tracks, a harsh reminder of the city’s glorious commercial past. These days, steel-and-glass aeries rise from the rusting, crumbling infrastructure, punctuating the prosperous present land-scape. The story of how Ogden got here is a valuable lesson for a country struggling to bridge the chasm between haves and have-nots.

Traffic travels under a sign on Washington Boulevard in Og-den, Utah, August 17. The city, together with its neighboring communities, has the narrowest wealth gap among Amer-ica's largest metropolitan statistical areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's five-year American Community Sur-vey. JIM URQUHART FOR NEWSWEEK‘The Defining Issue of Our Time’Over the past several years, renowned libertarian and former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, outspoken billionaire Warren Buffett and presidential candidates have come to the same conclusion: Ordinary Americans are no longer getting a fair shake. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Greenspan described the emergence of two different Ameri-cas—“fundamentally, two separate types of economy”—one in which the wealthy had made a “significant recovery” and the other in which the bulk of America’s labor force remained in a financial rut.

This year, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush called the growing divide “the defining issue of our time,” stepping up the rhetoric. “More Americans are stuck at their income levels than ever before,” he said. While the causes of the trend are the subject of endless debates, the statistics don’t lie. Since 1979, real earnings have risen 17 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, non-partisan Washington think tank. Such slow growth makes it tough for most Americans to pay the bills, let alone accumu-late any wealth.

Yet Americans turn on their TVs and watch U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew hailing the nation’s impressive economic growth, which he recently called one of the world’s only “bright spots.” That disconnect can be jarring, says Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University and winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, because “for many, the middle-class lifestyle is no longer in reach.”

Police officers monitor an Occupy Wall Street protest outside the New York Stock Exchange in New York March 30, 2012. Anger at income inequality inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement, which spread across the country but changed lit-tle.ANDREW BURTON/REUTERSThe consequences for society go beyond dollars and cents. While research on the interplay between economics and so-cial patterns is still relatively new, says Stiglitz, he notes that it shows “more and more people are exhibiting patterns of social dysfunction”—delaying marriage, buying a home and having children; or raising a family as a single parent—be-haviors, he says, that “used to be an attribute of families who were at or below the poverty line” and yet now are encom-passing anyone who’s not wealthy.

Stiglitz says rising inequality is not so much the result of nat-ural forces of capitalism but what he calls an “ersatz” capital-ism in which a “predatory” few at the very top put more effort into “getting a larger slice of the country’s economic pie than into enlarging the size of the pie” for all.

Lest the ultra-wealthy think this won’t matter to them, re-cent research from Barry Cynamon and Steven Fazzari, re-leased in conjunction with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, shows that rising income inequality may be the pri-mary reason for the nation’s lethargic economic recovery. They point to a 17 percent drop in household demand, com-pared with pre-recession numbers.On a global scale, inequality threatens to “set the fight against poverty back decades” by moving more riches into fewer hands, says the international anti-poverty agency Ox-fam. Unless current trends change, Oxfam projects the rich-est 1 percent of the world’s population will own more than 50 percent of the world’s total wealth by 2016. This year, even Pope Francis spoke out to lament what he called “the econ-omy of exclusion.”The Great Gatsby CurveIn a groundbreaking studyreleased by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Emmanuel Saez, professor of econom-ics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of its Center for Equitable Growth, and Gabriel Zucman, as-sistant professor at the London School of Economics, pin-pointed when U.S. wealth inequality began its upward climb: 1978.Sifting through tax records going back a full century—the only data consistently available on a long-run basis in the U.S.—Saez and Zucman found the growing wealth gap in the U.S. shouldn’t be attributed so much to the top 1 percent as to the top 0.1 percent—about 160,000 families with net assets above $20 million. (The wealth gap and income in-equality are inextricably linked, but they are not the same; this study defined wealth as the current market value of all assets owned by households after deducting debts.)Related:   Obama Focuses on Income Inequality in State of the Union AddressAlthough the average real growth rate of wealth per Ameri-can family between 1986 and 2012 was 1.9 percent, that number was skewed by the nation’s richest 160,000, who saw their real wealth grow 5.3 percent per year from 1986 to 2012. By contrast, for the bottom 90 percent in the U.S., there was no wealth growth at all.

This is a sharp reversal of the prosperity trend that saw the bottom 90 percent of America’s earners go from holding 20 percent of the nation’s wealth in the 1920s to 35 percent in the mid-1980s, according to Saez and Zucman. As of 2012,

the bottom 90 percent had fallen back to holding just 23 per-cent.

Zoom to enlarge. Full width version available here.Meanwhile, America’s 160,000 richest families more than tripled their share of the nation’s wealth, from 7 percent in 1978 to 22 percent in 2012, representing a level not seen since America’s peak years of inequality 1916 and 1929. “It is a very concerning trend,” says Marjorie Wood, senior eco-nomic policy associate with the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank fo-cusing on social justice issues in Washington. She likens the wealth gap to the coming of a second Gilded Age, but one that differs from the first in that much of today’s accumulated wealth is not ostentatious. “In the past,” she notes, “there were a lot more public protests because wealth back then was so much more visible.”

The very notion of rising inequality is offensive to many Americans, because it counters the American dream and the widely held notion that we live in a land of equalopportunity. Yet it’s a problem researchers in Washington have known about for years. In 2011—the year Greenspan acknowl-edged the emergence of two Americas—Miles Corak, pro-fessor of economics at the Graduate School of Public and In-ternational Affairs at the University of Ottawa, laid bare the troubling relationship between inequality and social mobility in his paper “Inequality From Generation to Generation,” later dubbed by the White House “the Great Gatsby Curve.”Corak’s research showed that the family an American child is born into greatly affects that child’s future earnings. His in-ternational rankings of the countries with the worst intergen-erational mobility included Chile, the U.K., Italy and the U.S. (in that order). Countries offering the best intergenerational mobility were Denmark, Norway, Finland and Canada. Coun-tries falling somewhere in the middle were Spain, Japan, Germany and New Zealand. “There is a disconnect between how Americans see themselves and the way the economy and society actually function,” he wrote. “Many Americans may hold the belief that hard work is what it takes to get ahead but, in actual fact, the playing field is a good deal stickier than it appears.”

This year, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen weighed in. “We know that families are the locus of both opportunities and barriers to economic mobility,” she said, calling for care-ful study of the issue.Yellen has taken a lot of heat from critics who contend the Fed should stay out of matters of income inequality, arguing it is too political. She fired back, stating, “Economic inequal-

ity has long been of interest within the Federal Reserve Sys-tem” and is of increasing concern to Americans.

‘Grotesque and Immoral’Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions. Top-down efforts to address the trend have not gotten very far. Experts such as America’s Stiglitz, French economist Thomas Piketty and British scholar Anthony Atkinson have proposed shifting re-sources from the wealthy to the less wealthy through various mechanisms, from tinkering with estate taxes to creating an “inheritance for all,” to publicly funded “universal social safety nets,” to guaranteeing public-sector jobs at a mini-mum wage for the otherwise unemployed.

Writing in The New York Review of Books, Piketty this sum-mer applauded Atkinson’s suggestion in his recent tome, In-equality: What Can Be Done?, to return to a more loophole-free, “progressive” tax system where the wealthy are uni-formly asked to pay more and the working class less. “The spectacular lowering of top income tax rates has sharply contributed to the rise of inequality since the 1980s, without bringing adequate corresponding benefits to society at large,” Piketty wrote. In America, at least, that shift won’t be happening anytime soon. Indeed, Bush’s tax plan proposes to lower the amount of taxes top-earning Americans pay.With another election cycle revving up in the U.S., Ameri-cans are hearing the same bromides as in past seasons from presidential candidates of both parties. Democratic front-runner Clinton is trying to make fixing inequality a cor-nerstone of her campaign, observing that “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.” Bush recently acknowl-edged, “If you’re born poor today, you’re more likely to stay poor.”

Ogden's historic 25th Street shopping district was once a rundown shell reminiscent of many of the U.S.' main streets in decay, but is now once again a bustling part of the city. CITY OF ODGENVermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a longtime independent now running for the Democratic nomination, has been de-nouncing the nation’s wealth gap since Nixon was in of-fice, when he wrote that 2 percent of Americans held more than one-third of the nation’s wealth. Sanders stated, “A handful of people own almost everything…and almost every-body owns nothing.” That was in 1973. More recently, he has advocated a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour by 2020 (right now, it’s $7.25), but other candidates have been slow to second that proposal.

Related:   Many More Americans Seen Spending More Than Half Their Income on RentThe infighting and lack of consensus have been frustrating, even to the candidates. In September, Republican contender Donald Trump bashed Clinton for having a donor list catering more to the superrich than to ordinary Americans. Sanders vented on Twitter, “The skyrocketing level of income and wealth inequality is not only grotesque and immoral, it is eco-nomically unsustainable.”

If income inequality remains sky-high and the bottom 90 per-cent cannot start to accumulate wealth again (remember that their gains have been close to zero from 1986 to 2012), the resulting disparity will destroy decades of progress, warn Saez and Zucman. “That is to say, 10 or 20 years from now, all the gains in wealth democratization achieved during the New Deal and the post-war decades could be lost,” they contend. “While the rich would be extremely rich, ordinary families would own next to nothing, with debts almost as high as their assets.”

All of which raises the fiendishly difficult question: What if the inequality problem is too big for any one leader—or team—to fix? Perhaps, rather than unpacking and debating its bottom-less nuances, it might be helpful to examine a community, preferably of substantial size, that has already identified and successfully solved many of these problems.

Waitresses Buying HousesFor the purposes of this article, Newsweek looked at the lat-est wealth data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s five-year American Community Survey for major metro areas with sur-rounding communities of at least 300,000 residents. The widest wealth gap in America, according to that data, can be found in three Connecticut cities: Bridgeport, Stamford and Norwalk—known as American hedge fund country for the crush of millionaires and billionaires settled in their environs, many of whom work in nearby Greenwich. Second place for widest wealth gap was Naples, Florida, which included the upscale Immokalee-Marco Island. The third covered the combined area of New York City plus Newark and Jersey City, New Jersey.

The top 10 most equal and unequal metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S., as measured by gini coeffi-cients.NEWSWEEK

How does Ogden compare with Connecticut’s hedge fund country? The richest 20 percent of Ogden’s households hold around 40 percent of the city’s income. By contrast, in the metro area covering Bridgeport, Stamford and Norwalk, the richest 20 percent hold close to 60 percent of the income.

Ogden does not simply have the narrowest wealth gap; this middle-class oasis also offers many residents higher wages and a lower cost of living than the national average, with some of the lowest unemployment and best job growth num-bers in the country. It’s the type of place most Americans had assumed disappeared in a cloud of cynicism some-where between Studio 54 and Reaganomics.

Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the director of its Metropolitan Policy Program, co-authored a report in June listing Ogden as one of “the hottest 15 metros for advanced industries,” a city that has worked hard to at-tract jobs in high-growth sectors. In particular, Ogden’s focus on technical jobs and vocational training for its nonuniversity graduates has made it a U.S. hub for science, technology, engineering and math (also known as STEM) jobs, Muro says.

Students work with latex at the Plastic and Composites Lab at Weber State University in Ogden. Weber State University and Ogden’s schools have made science, technology and math a priority as early as kindergarten, with a view to pre-paring young people for good jobs. JIM URQUHART FOR NEWSWEEKWhile the number of university graduates in Ogden is less than half its adult population, the town has installed numer-ous STEM programs in its schools and single college, Weber State University, that match students and adults with high-tech employment opportunities—and technical training starts as early as kindergarten, says Terrence Bride, Ogden’s busi-ness development manager. This leads to higher-paying jobs for graduates without the need for a four-year university degree, which means lower debt for graduates and ulti-mately a chance to accumulate wealth.

“I came here from California with my husband, who’s an aerospace engineer,” says Carrie Vondrus, who owns a retro clothing shop in Ogden’s downtown. “The low cost of living allowed me to stay home and raise my kids, which we couldn’t have done where we were living. Now my 25-year-old son just bought a five-bedroom house in town. He is a manager at Dick’s Sporting Goods, and it’s his first home. He and his girlfriend are paying for it by themselves.”

Mark Martinez mows his lawn while wearing an Ogden Foot-ball sweatshirt. JIM URQUHART FOR NEWSWEEKStories like this abound in Ogden, where the median age is 30 and even restaurant waitstaff are buying houses—for

many, the first step toward accumulating wealth. While the city’s median income is still below the national average, at $35,844, its growth is led by the high-tech job sector, which according to Brookings pays an average annual salary of $60,580 a year.

Perhaps most significant, Ogden did not start out this way. Throughout the 1990s, the town was mired in seemingly in-tractable problems not unlike those facing the nation today: crumbling infrastructure; a lack of stable jobs with good wages and benefits; a shortage of affordable, quality housing and schools; and an increasingly frustrated population that, nonetheless, was deathly afraid of change.

Before and after: Ogden was once a rundown town, until the city started buying up property, refurbishing it and granting loans to new businesses.CITY OF OGDEN“It took us 50 years to figure out that doing nothing was a lot riskier than doing something,” Christopulos, the city’s eco-nomic development director, tells Newsweek. “For a long time, nobody could agree on what to do. We found out the price of doing nothing was the loss of millions and millions of dollars in tax revenue and decay. It wasn’t until we hit rock bottom that we finally got the consensus we needed to change.”Until the 1960s, Ogden was a thriving railroad town, the junction of the once-warring Central Pacific and Union Pa-cific railroads, which reached a détente in 1869 with the planting of the golden spike that joined the two lines at Promontory Summit, just northwest of Ogden, to create the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. So great was Ogden’s wealth at the turn of the century, it boasted “more million-aires per capita than any city in the country,” according to Mayor Mike Caldwell.

But with the rise of the interstate and the decline of the rail-roads, Ogden lost its status as northern Utah’s primary com-mercial hub—and its wealthy denizens fled. Between 1960 and 1990, Ogden hemorrhaged thousands of people and millions of dollars of business. By the late 1990s, the city was in dire straits, its once-resplendent downtown in a shambles and its 25th Street shopping district vacant.

The turnaround began in 2002, with the election of 29-year-old Matthew Godfrey, at the time one of the youngest may-ors in the U.S., who spent the next decade tearing down and rebuilding the city’s downtown—often over protests—and courting businesses to move to Ogden, which he tried to re-brand as a mecca for high-tech talent. “I was young, and we had a really ambitious agenda, and I don’t think that many people thought we could pull it off,” he says. 

Bartender Cory Birkholz, left, visits with customer Jim Tobin at Roosters Brewing Company and Restaurant on 25th Street. JIM URQUHART FOR NEWSWEEK“At first, there were no takers. Our tech industry was virtually nonexistent. We were just this dirty, run-down old railroad town,” says Godfrey, now 45. “Businesses would come in, look around and then relocate to Salt Lake City or some-where else. So we gave up on the high-tech firms and started to recruit outdoors companies full bore. And when they started to come in around 2008, suddenly the high-tech firms were interested. Suddenly, we were this hip, cool out-door-recreation town.”

Beau Rawlinson climbs at The Front Climbing Club. The gym is surrounded by a complex of tech companies which were drawn to the city in part thanks to its recreational offer-ings. JIM URQUHART FOR NEWSWEEKMeanwhile, Christopulos, who worked under both Godfrey and his successor, Caldwell, had begun buying back pol-luted land, industrial buildings and trashed neighborhoods, cobbling funds together wherever the city could. “My team and I created our own kind of Skunk Works to bring together whatever we needed to do a project, from federal and state grants to financing to contractors to environmental remedia-tion,” he says.

By 2007, their efforts to attract commercial tenants to Og-den’s newly renovated historic buildings started to pay off, generating millions of dollars in revenue for the town in the form of tax increments, property leases and sales taxes, which it reinvested in more projects and improvements. To date, the town has generated more than $4 billion of new tax revenue.

Critical to the master plan was a vibrant downtown. After rot-ting for decades, Ogden’s historic 25th Street, where Al Capone used to bootleg liquor, was recently listed as one of the most beautiful thoroughfares in America for its amphithe-ater, festivals and street art. (The town’s planning manager, Christy McBride, says the downtown, now 95 percent occu-pied, hosts around 650 events a year, attracting tens of thou-sands.)

A woman walks along 25th Street with one of the scores of painted horses being displayed throughout Ogden, August 16. JIM URQUHART FOR NEWSWEEKOther than Albuquerque, New Mexico, Ogden was the only major metro area in the West to post job growth in 2009, while the recession was still raging throughout the rest of the country. It was one of the first cities in the nationto return to its prerecession peak output that same year. And before the recession, Ogden’s high-tech job sector had grown 12.6 per-cent from 2002 to 2007.Today, Ogden hosts a diverse group of expanding busi-nesses, with advanced industries representing around

26,500 jobs, according to Brookings. Its employers include Northrop Grumman, Rossignol, Universal Cycles, Mercury Wheels, U.S. Foods, Amer Sports, Cornerstone Research, Home Depot, Hart Skis, ConAgra Foods and Hershey’s.

A sign in front of Ogden’s highest peak proclaims in great, arching letters: “It pays to live in Ogden.”

A Solution Beyond PoliticsWhile every town is different, and there are limits to how even the best growth strategies might be applied elsewhere, what happened in Ogden can happen elsewhere. Professor Raj Chetty of Stanford University, one of the world’s fore-most economists and currently a visiting professor at Har-vard University, says while policy solutions at the state or federal level can offer a better overall environment for eco-nomic growth (by improving access to college, for instance), a person’s hometown can have the greatest impact on chances for upward mobility.

Parsing big data from cities across the U.S. with a team of other researchers as part of the Equality of Opportunity Project, Chetty found that the city where a child is born af-fects his or her chances for upward mobility in life enor-mously. According to the project’s data, released earlier this year, a child from a lower-income family in Ogden would make $2,440, or 9 percent, more annually by age 26 than the national average. The same data also show that Weber County, where Ogden is located, offers greater income mo-bility than 76 percent of the counties in the U.S. “The local level is of significant interest, because it’s an area where I think there might be more tractable policy solutions,” Chetty says. “Federal or state policy is unlikely to be the entire solu-tion, because it seems like the problems are different in dif-ferent places and require a more tailored approach.”

Victorian homes in the Jefferson Historic District. During its heyday, Ogden was a boom town along the railroad. JIM URQUHART FOR NEWSWEEKBy working as a community to increase overall prosperity, Ogden has moved past the economists’ discussion about how to redistribute existing wealth to focus on attracting new wealth by cultivating businesses that offer higher labor in-come to its residents and enlarging the “pie” described by Stiglitz.

Higher labor income, plus a lower cost of living, leads to a greater savings rate and wealth accumulation. Perhaps this period is not the end of the American dream, says Christopu-

los, but only marks its redefining. “From a philosophical standpoint, we would just as soon find a way to create more overall wealth and raise the level of all income,” he says. “That is more related to economic opportunity than a gap be-tween the rich and the poor.”

Surveying Ogden’s downtown, Christopulos glowers at an-other row of houses he’d like to gut, refurbish and release back into the neighborhood. “We try to use economics to try to figure out how to effect social change, but it is hard,” he says. “Unlike Uncle Sam, I cannot increase the money sup-ply. We don’t have those kinds of control elements. Each sit-uation is different and has so many parts. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.”

Whatever the solution is for the country, Christopulos says he’s pretty sure it will have nothing to do with politics—and especially not with partisanship masking the real divide: fi-nancial inequality.

“I’ve been a Republican and I’ve been a Democrat,” Christopulos says. “Now I’m a communitarian.”

How Green Is Your City?

https://data.cdp.net/Cities/2015-Cities-Electricity-Mix-Map/kwjr-j78z

Energy Notes:

Is Sugar the New Tobacco?

Ask a doctor or other health professionals what the next big public health challenge is, and they are likely to say sugar!

The US has made significant progress reducing tobacco use, and the number who suffers early death is falling.

But the excess consumption of unhealthy food and bever-ages is now creating a surge in ill-health that is proving in-

Companies accel

creasingly burdensome for the health care providers, em-ployers and taxpayers.

Sugar is a primary driver of type 2 diabetes!

Type 2 DiabetesType 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes. His-torically, type 2 diabetes has been diagnosed primarily in middle-aged adults. Today, however, adolescents and young adults are developing type 2 diabetes at an alarming rate. This correlates with the increasing incidence of obesity and physical inactivity in this population, both of which are risk factors for type 2 diabetes.

This type of diabetes can occur when: The body develops "insulin resistance" and can't

make efficient use of the insulin it makes, and The pancreas gradually loses its capacity to produce

insulin.

In a mild form, this type of diabetes can go undiagnosed for many years, which is a cause for great concern since un-treated diabetes can lead to many serious medical problems, including cardiovascular disease. Type 2 diabetes may be delayed or controlled with diet and exercise.

Health Risks of Insulin Resistance

People with insulin resistance are at greater risk of develop-ing type 2 diabetes. They also are more likely to have too much LDL ("bad") cholesterol, not enough HDL ("good") cholesterol, and high triglycerides, which cause atheroscle-rosis.

Untreated diabetes can lead to many serious medical prob-lems, including heart disease and stroke.

American Heart Association recommends 6-9 teaspoons per day.

Men -9 teaspoons per day Women – 6 teaspoons per day

The high use of sugar in many processed foods — espe-cially in so-called “high energy drinks” — is an issue of par-ticular concern. Health care professionals have recently

highlighted growing levels of obesity among children and teenagers who consume sugary drinks.

When we read the labels, we are generally told how many grams of sugar and how many calories. If you are like me, I think of sugar as how many teaspoons and one teaspoon of granulated sugar and one standard cube of sugar are equal to 4 grams of sugar. To put it another way, 16 grams of sugar in a product is equal to about 4 teaspoons or 4 cubes of granulated sugar.

Therefore, ranked by Teaspoons of Sugar:

ITEMGrams

ofSugar

Tsp of Sugar Calories

Coca-Cola 7-11 32 oz Big Gulp 91 23 364Mtn. Dew 20 oz 77 19 290Rockstar Original 16 oz 60 15 248Arizona Iced Tea: 16 ounces 46 12 180Nesquick Low Fat Choco-late Milk: 8 ounces 44 11 300Jones Cane Sugar Soda 43 11 165Coca-Cola 12 oz 39 10 120Goya Fruit Drink 35 9 150American Heart Associa-tion recommendation for Men 9Coca-Cola Fanta 32 8 120Dr Pepper Big Red 32 8 120Welch's Fruit Drink 32 8 130Yoplait Original 99% fat free, Lemon Burst: 6 ounces 31 8 180Otis Spunkmeyer Wild Blueberry or Banana Nut: 1 muffin (4 ounces) 30 8 360Minute Maid Lemonade, 12% Lemon Juice All Nat-ural: 8 ounces 29 7 110DelMonte Fruit Chillers Frozen Fruit Sorbet: 1 small individual cup 26 7 190Red Bull 8.3 oz 26 7 110American Heart Associa-tion recommendation for

6

WomenMotts Apple Sauce (cinna-mon or original): 1 small serving cup (113 g) 22 6 100Jell-O Instant Vanilla, Chocolate Chip, or Cook-ies and Creme Pudding: 1 serving as packaged 21 5 110Pop Tart, Frosted Blue-berry: 1 pastry 18 5 200Capri Sun 25% Less Sugar, Wild Cherry: 1 pouch 18 5 70Sweet Baby Ray’s Honey Barbecue Sauce: 2 table-spoons 15 4 70Nature Valley Strawberry (or Vanilla) Yogurt Gra-nola Bars: 1 bar 13 3 140

See Rankings of Sugary Drinks!

http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/sugar-shockers-foods-surprisingly-high-in-sugar?page=5

http://www.sugarydrinkfacts.org/resources/nutrition/Nutri-tional_Content.pdf

http://www.sugarstacks.com/beverages.htm

What about “Adult Beverages”?

Gin & Tonic and Margarita = 5 teaspoons of sugar (in the mix, not the alcohol)

The most controversial public policy question is whether the government should tax sugary drinks in order to reduce con-sumption as has happened with tobacco.

A tax on sugar may not be popular with voters; but they should not be tolerating the spiraling costs of treating dia-betes either.

We would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks, Jon & Bob

40 YEARSActing with IntegrityServing with Purpose

Reaching Forward

Comments:

https://jbrenner.cartodb.com/viz/6c6e1942-614a-11e5-ad68-0e43f3deba5a/public_map

National Economic Notes:

Global Business Confidence: -1.3Global business sentiment remains strong, with American companies the most upbeat. Confidence has softened a bit in recent weeks, perhaps related to concerns about the Chi-nese economy and the heightened volatility in global finan-cial markets. But sentiment is still very near record highs. Businesses continue to report strong sales, sturdy pricing, and solid investment and hiring. There is no indication from the survey results that businesses are turning more cautious.

Conference Board Consumer Confidence: +1.7The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index rose to 103 from a revised 101.3 in August, taking the index to its highest since January. The unemployment rate is trending downward toward 5%, and for the first time since before the Great Recession more consumers are optimistic about the job market than pessimistic. Low gasoline prices are giving consumers some extra spending cash and the labor market has experienced strong growth over 2015.

Chicago Fed National Activity Index: -0.41The Chicago Fed National Activity Index slumped to -0.41 in August from 0.51 in July because of a broad-based decline across the economic indicators that compose the index. The CFNAI’s four major categories posted declines from the prior month and contributed negatively to the headline index. Even employment-related indicators, which have been pillars of the CFNAI’s most recent readings, made a negative con-tribution for the second time since April 2013. The diffusion index, also a three-month moving average, decreased from 0.05 in July to -0.09 in August—its lowest reading since April. The index suggests that the economy grew at a below-average rate last month. However, trend growth is near its historical trend, and inflationary pressures will be subdued over the next year.

Jobless Claims: +3,000Initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits rose by 3,000 to 267,000 in the week ended September 19. The in-crease was a touch less than we had expected and puts the four-week moving average at 271,750, little changed from the prior week. Continuing claims fell by 1,000 to 2.242 mil-lion in the week ended September 12, putting them down around 2,200 between the August and September house-hold reference weeks. The insured unemployment rate didn’t budge from 1.7% in the week ended September 12. Most signs point toward little movement in the unemployment rate in September.

Durable Goods (Advance): -2.0%New orders for durable goods fell 2% in August, in line with the consensus forecast. Weakness was concentrated in transportation orders, which edged 5.8% lower, though much of the slowdown can be attributed to a pullback in civilian air-craft orders. Orders excluding transportation were un-changed, while orders excluding defense fell 1%. Core capi-tal goods orders (nondefense, excluding aircraft) fell 0.2% and are around 2.3% below 2014 levels. Total shipments were flat, though core capital shipments fell 0.2%.

Personal Income: +0.3%Personal income grew by 0.3% in August, which was below our expectation of a 0.6% gain and slower than its upwardly revised 0.5% increase in July. Disposable income rose by 0.4%, down from the prior month’s unchanged rate of 0.5%. Gains in wages and salaries were less than in the previous month whereas rental and asset income registered greater increases. Proprietors’ income, on the other hand, fell. The saving rate was 4.6%, down from 4.7% in July.

Agricultural Prices: +3.0%Prices received by farmers increased 3% in August. This was not enough to offset the 5.7% decline in July. The crop production index increased 2.3%, and the livestock produc-tion index increased 1.7%. Overall, prices paid by farmers are down 3.6% from a year earlier, and prices received are down 6.4% year over year. This indicates that input prices have been stickier than output prices for farmers.

Pending Home Sales: -1.4%On a seasonally adjusted basis, the pending home sales in-dex declined 1.4% to 109.4 in August, giving back all of the prior month’s gain and falling back down to its level reached in March. Nonetheless, the index is still up 6.1% over the year and its longer-term trend remains positive. The August decline in pending home sales was uniform across regions with exception of the West. The Northeast and South clocked the largest declines, falling 5.6% and 2.2%, respec-tively. Meanwhile, the Midwest also inched down 0.4% from the previous month. The pending home sales index for the West bucked the trend, rising 1.8% from the prior month.

New-Home Sales: +6.7%New-home sales got a strong boost in August, increasing by 5.7% from the revised total for July, and by 21.6% compared with August 2014. The increase in sales was driven by the Northeast, though the other Census regions still have strong year-over-year gains. Despite the tightening market, the me-dian price of new homes has barely budged from the previ-ous year in part because inventory is also growing as single-family construction starts to trend upward.

S&P/Case-Shiller® Home Price Indexes: +5.0%The 20-city S&P/Case-Shiller composite index was up 5% in July from the previous year, same as in June. In addition, the 10-city index is up by 4.5% over last year’s figure, only slightly below the 4.6% registered in the previous month. The national index increased 4.7% over the 12 months end-ing in July, up from the 4.5% gain in the 12 months ending in June. On a seasonally adjusted month-to-month basis, both the 10-city composite index and the 20-city composite index inched down 0.2% from June to July.

Natural Gas Storage Report: +106 bil cubic feetWorking gas in storage rose by 106 billion cubic feet during the week ended September 18, far exceeding analysts' ex-pectations of an increase of 97 bcf. The implied flow was also 106 bcf. This report will push down natural gas prices.

This Week's Leads:

Beauty Brands Salon Spa Superstore Beauty Brands, LLC trades as Beauty Brands Salon Spa Su-perstore at 60 locations throughout AZ, CO, IA, IL, IN, KS, MO, NC, NE, OK and TX. The stores, offering beauty sup-plies and related products, as well as featuring an in-store salon and spa, occupy 7,000 sq.ft. inline spaces of lifestyle and specialty centers. Plans call for 90 openings nationwide during the coming 18 months. Typical leases run five to 10 years. Specific improvements are required. Preferred co-tenants include women’s fashion retailers. Preferred demo-graphics include a population of 150,000 within five miles earning at least $75,000 as the average household income. For more information, contact Mitch Truster, Beauty Brands, LLC, 4600 Madison, Suite 400, Kansas City, MO 64112; Web site: www.beautybrands.com.

Pump It Up – Maybe they can be convinced there are a lot of kids is Utah!Fun Brands, LLC trades as Pump It Up at more than 150 lo-cations nationwide. The children’s entertainment facilities prefer to occupy spaces of 9,000 sq.ft. to 12,000 sq.ft. in freestanding locations and inline spaces of shopping cen-ters. Growth opportunities are sought throughout CA, FL, HI, LA, MA, MO, NJ, NY, PA, TX, VA and Washington, DC during the coming 18 months. For more information, contact Rick Howard, 1860 West University Drive, Suite 108, Tempe, AZ 85281; Web site: www.pumpitupparty.com.

Wharton Notes:PUBLIC POLICYWhy There’s No Quick Fix for Volkswagens Emissions CrisisThe crisis underway at Volkswagen over EPA allegations that the firm cheated on emissions tests for their popular TDI diesel engine line has caused a significant drop in the firms stock price and led to the departure of its CEO. What else will it mean for the company and the industry?http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-theres-no-quick-fix-for-volkswagens-emissions-crisis/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_cam-paign=2015-09-23

MANAGEMENTEmerging Multinationals: The Talent Wars Latest Con-tendersEmerging multinationals may reap the same benefits of do-ing business globally as developed-market firms, but they face distinctive troubles when it comes to finding skilled workers.READ MORE

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/emerging-multi-nationals-the-talent-wars-latest-contenders/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_cam-paign=2015-09-30

LEADERSHIPThe Pope as CEO: Can He Shift Direction and Revive the Brand?How can a new pope attract new groups and generations �without alienating historically important demographics?READ MORE

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-pope-as-ceo-can-he-shift-direction-and-revive-the-brand/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_cam-paign=2015-09-30

MARKETINGMillennials on Steroids: Is Your Brand Ready for Gener� � -ation Z?It’s still early days for Gen Z its oldest members are still in their teens or early 20’s, but marketers are trying to get a handle on what they want and expect from brands.READ MORE

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/millennials-on-steroids-is-your-brand-ready-for-generation-z/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_cam-paign=2015-09-30

PUBLIC POLICYThe Immigratio Boogeyman: Separating Fact from Fic-tionDespite the strong campaign-trail rhetoric against immigra-tion, actual data might help to ease any worries about the economy and waves of crime, experts say.READ MORE

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-immigration-boogeyman-separating-fact-from-fiction/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_cam-paign=2015-09-30  

   

This Week's Interesting Announcement:

Overweight or Obese by Age and Sex, Utah, 2013

Retail Notes:

How Will Omnichannel Initiatives Impact Local and State Government Sales Tax Revenues?

Kohl’s Top Five Omnichannel Initiatives1. Store Mode for Kohl’s Mobile App: A new store

mode for Kohl’s mobile app will provide a more per-sonalized experience. Customers can opt-in to store mode in the Kohl’s app to search store inventory and find in-store promotions that can be applied to their purchase, like Kohl’s Cash and percent off coupons.

2. Enhanced Mobile Payment Options: Beginning

this fall, Kohl’s customers will have a new way to pay in stores with the rollout of Apple Pay, as well as the ability to use Apple Pay within the Kohl’s app. Kohl’s customers will also be able to add their Kohl’s Charge card as a form of payment within Apple Pay. Kohl’s customers will be able to complete purchases easily across all digital channels with Visa Checkout, which will be available on Kohls.com and mobile de-vices.

Also new this fall, Kohl’s mobile app will feature en-hancements to Kohl’s mobile wallet including the op-tion to scan and save Kohl’s gift cards and direct de-livery of promotional codes. Customers can continue to browse and shop by category, easily manage and redeem their Yes2You Rewards points and scan their Kohl’s Cash and savings offers to their mobile wallet to be used in-store at checkout. 3. Omnichannel Shopping Bag: Kohl’s has bridged its digital shopping carts into one virtual shopping bag that can be accessed via smart phone, tablet or desktop. When shopping across devices, customers’ shopping bags will be automatically updated when they log into their Kohl’s account. 

4. Buy Online, Pick Up in Store - Across All Chan-nels: Beginning in late September, customers will be able use their smart phone or tablet to opt to buy items online and pick them up in a Kohl’s store that is convenient to them. The option to buy online and pick up in Kohl’s stores nationwide was previously avail-able on desktop and laptop as part of a nationwide rollout earlier this spring. 5. Redesigned Mobile Kohls.com Site and Tablet App: For consumers who shop at Kohls.com on their smart phone browser, Kohl’s will launch a redesigned Kohls.com mobile site that makes it easier for users to find what they’re looking for, as well as an im-proved mobile checkout experience. The Kohl’s tablet app will also have an improved look and in-creased functionality including integration of the Yes2You Rewards loyalty program and access to Kohl’s mobile wallet. Product detail pages and collec-tion pages will also have a new look, allowing cus-tomers easier access to products and savings from Kohl’s.

Source: RIS News

This Week's Jobs:

Friends:

After 28 years of ably leading our Utah Conservation Pro-grams, Chris Montague has announced he will be retiring in December. We wish Chris the very best enjoying his well-de-served retirement and the next chapter of his life.

With Chris departing, we have recently posted the position of Utah Director of Conservation Programs and are actively re-cruiting qualified candidates. This is a senior level position responsible for, amongst other duties: developing and imple-menting our Utah Chapter’s conservation strategies, super-vising a team of +/- 10 conservation professionals, helping to coordinate government relations efforts and overseeing land and water transactions statewide.

If you know of anyone you’d recommend who might be inter-ested in this position, please feel free to forward this mes-sage and encourage them to apply. The PDF attached con-tains relevant information and a job description. Applications are being accepted through October 18, 2015, and must be submitted online at www.nature.org/careers. (Once on this page, click “search careers”, go to “basic job search” and en-ter job # 43499.)

Thank you for considering and/or sharing this information. Don’t hesitate to contact me or Teri Black, our Utah Chap-ter’s Director of Operations, at 801-531-0999 tblack@T-NC.ORG if you have any questions.

Dave

PDF----------------------------------------------------------------------------

JOB OPPORTUNITYPLANNER I

Opening Date: September 25, 2015

Closing Date: October 8, 2015

Salary Range: $32,914 - $48,383 Summary of Responsibilities:Performs entry-level land use planning work in the office and field.

Provides ordinance interpretation to the public, prepares re-ports on applicant projects, and prepares exhibits and graph-ics. Minimum Qualifications:1. Graduation from an accredited college with (2) years of college coursed in urban planning or any combination of ex-perience and training.2. Possess a Utah driver license.3. Good moral character as determined by a background in-vestigation.4. Must be able to communicate effectively verbally and in writing, and be computer literate. Method of Selection:All qualified applicants will be notified of the date and time of interviews. A background investigation and drug test will be conducted for final candidates. Application Procedure:Applications can be obtained at the North Ogden Human Re-source Department,505 E. 2600 N., North Ogden, Utah 84414, or www.northog-dencity.com. Submit the completed application in person or email to aspend@nogden.org on or before October 8, 2015 by 4p.m.

RobRobert O. Scott, AICPNorth Ogden City Planner505 East 2600 NorthNorth Ogden, UT 84414rscott@nogden.org(801) 737-9841

Bonneville Research - Who we are and what we believe  Bonneville Research is a Utah based team of dedicated pro-fessionals committed to economic development through a holistic approach to community building.  We believe it is the connections between seemingly disparate segments of a

community that form the strength and define the fabric of a neighborhood and a region.

Bonneville Research was not formed as a concept, but was born of necessity - the only way to realistically address these community issues of connectedness and diversity is through a concerted effort that involves all of the major, and minor, aspects of an economically viable and implementable projects.

Generally, communities have all the ingredients to become strong and attractive communities but this potential all too of-ten remains dormant because of plans that have no real eco-nomic basis or community support.

Bonneville Research employs a proven process which in-cludes planning, vision, skills building, and exclusionary neighborhood participation to realize neighborhood's full po-tential.

Bonneville Research believes in involving professionals who are passionate about their areas of expertise and believe that a truly sustainable community necessitates cross-disci-plinary planning and communication.

This innovative teamwork approach is built upon flexible connections between the disciplines - each being responsive to changes made within another as the process advances. This integration of expertise is a defining characteristic of Bonneville Research, facilitating a comprehensive process that results in sustainable solutions.

Research, community building, conflict resolution, plan-ning, marketing, design, infrastructure - are seamlessly coordinated to deal effectively with real-life issues.

Inclusiveness must be a proactive part of the process and may require skill building in the areas of cultural sensitivity and conflict resolution. Otherwise, the under-represented will not identify with the community, and those that are driving development will miss out on the significant contributions, both economic and social, that characterizes an inclusive neighborhood.

By taking a holistic approach all members are given voice and empowered to discover their own personal identity which becomes part of the community identity, strengthen-ing, enlivening, and contributing - true community members and valued citizens.

It has become apparent to city dwellers throughout America that good cities are made, they just don't happen, and need a coordinated plan that includes the most important part of a community, its people, all that will be created is a façade that will not wear well over time.  Bonneville Research does not come in and define a community; we assist a community in finding its own identity.