On Wednesday September 12, 2007, Central Oregon LandWatch launched a brand new website. Why? Because land use in Central Oregon is always a hot topic and we want to help the community get more involved.

We believe that the best planning occurs when people understand the issues at stake and stand up for what they believe in. So we decided to create a site that does more than simply provide a little information about LandWatch and what we're up to, and focuses instead on creating a true community resource for people interested in following land use issues in Central Oregon.

What can our new website do for you? In short, it can help you track land use, planning, and environmental issues affecting Central Oregon communities, help you learn more about those that are of interest to you, and provide information to help you get involved.

Listed below are a few examples of the resources this site provides. We should point out that as of the release date, some of these resources will contain limited information (because the site is new!) but we promise that in the next several weeks, every resource available on our site will be chugging along nicely.

One more thing: This site is blog-based, and we’ve set it up so that if you have something to say you can comment on any post you like. You can do this by signing up here. (Doing this comes with no financial obligation) Please keep your comments constructive and on-topic, the cursing to a minimum, and respect other people’s opinions.

Tracking Legal Notices: A great number of land use and environmental actions must be announced in local papers with a detailed legal notice. Nearly all public hearings on land use matters must be announced by legal notice as well. As such, legal notices are a great way to stay on top of important issues. The problem is that the legal notices printed in the paper are long, the font is small, and you have to scan through all kinds of notices to pick out the ones that interest you.

Not anymore. With our new website, neatly summarized versions of important legal notices are posted on a regular basis so that you can track upcoming applications, decisions, hearings, and pubic meetings with ease. Please see our legal notices page for details and to find out what’s in the queue.

Land Use Applications: Most any time a development or change in city or county code is proposed, it is done so through an application process. Our land use applications page provides a place where you can go to find applications that might be interest to you or affect you in some way. We have taken the time to scan through incoming applications, find those that are potentially significant, and tease out the most essential details so you don’t have to.

Community Resources: In addition to legal notices and land use applications, we’ve created a page on our website dedicated to providing links to important city, county, state, and federal sites where you can learn more about current and upcoming issues. Please visit our web resources page to learn more.

News Updates: It’s one thing to read your daily paper every morning to stay up on the news. It’s another thing entirely to attempt to stay on top of a particular set of issues around the region, state, and nation from a variety of news sources. With online papers, blogs, and other news sites, there is a wealth of information out there, but finding it – much less reading it – can be a time consuming effort.

LandWatch has gone out of its way to save you that trouble by scanning these sites ourselves, pulling out relevant stories, providing brief overviews and commentary, as well as the links to the full stories. Please see our news updates page for current stories and commentary.

LandWatch Projects: Although quite of few of the resources posted on our site our purely for your information and do not reflect positions taken (or not taken) by LandWatch, we have our issues too. To learn more about our current projects and areas of focus please visit our current projects page for details.

Actions Alerts: And while in many cases we assume to let you pick and choose your own involvement in issues, there are some issues that we just have to shout about which you’ll find on our action alerts page. Some of these alerts will be related to projects we’re working on, some may not be. Either way, these are issues that will have a great impact on the community, and we want to make sure you hear about them.

If you’re interested in receiving these alerts yourself rather than having to go to our site to see them, there’s two ways to do that:

1. RSS Feeds: Click on the little orange signal button down at the bottom of each page or in the window at the top of your browser. It will bring up an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed page that allows you to subscribe to an individual feed (i.e. “Action Alerts” or “News Updates”) using one of several methods. All you have to do is hit the “subscribe now” button, name it, and a bookmark will be added to your tool bar. Just click the newly created bookmark to see if anything new has been posted to our site, and if it has, just click on the title you’re interested to go read it.

2. E-mail Action Alerts: For issues of particular importance or timeliness, we will be sending out action alerts to via e-mail. To sign up for action alerts, you need first sign up for an account on this site which you can do securely here. An e-mail will be sent to you with a temporary password as well as a sign-up link. Follow the instructions and once you're signed up, you can add yourself to newsletters on your account page. We promise not to sell or distribute your e-mail or to overload you with alerts like some other groups.

Editorial Blog: If you spend any time on our site at all, you’ll soon realize that it’s almost entirely based on blogging, which is an extremely useful way of presenting and organizing information and keeping you updated. If you want to know what we reallythink, we’ll be posting editorials, critiques, observations, perhaps even free-form rants and tirades (all principled, of course) from time time on our editorial blog.

So that’s it. That’s a summary of our new site. We hope you enjoy it, and find it useful.

-Central Oregon LandWatch