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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 2, 2019)
January 2, 2019 The Skanner Portland & Seattle Page 3 News cont’d from pg 1 now, in the really high 90 percent. Every day, you know we’re hitting the high numbers. TSN: How does that change, particularly in the summer time, when you’re doing so much construction? Not you per se, but the city? How do you keep that on-time performance? DK: I define us into the buckets that we own and control and the buckets that we share ownership with our partners on. So, some we directly control “ My vision is, TriMet will be- come 100 percent transit-ac- cessible and some we influence. And so the parts, like construction — we do some of our own con- struction. So we manage our own work and deal with the cities, plural, be- cause we have a regional system, and the counties. And we try and syner- gize and if we’re going to do a project of construc- tion — I did one a couple years ago — and said, ‘Gee, if we’re going to open this patient up,’ like First Avenue, let’s work with all our partners. PG & E, what work do you want to do? Fiber optics. City of Portland, what do you want to do? Mult- nomah County, what do you want to do? Instead of TriMet just causing disruption, I’d rather do one — let’s consoli- date it for the taxpayer and leverage as much in there as we possibly can. So that’s an example: in- stead of being disrupted four times, because we had four different part- ners, let’s do it once and get it done in the same amount of time. If we look out 20 years, this region, including Clark County, is gonna be three million people. That is a different con- versation around how we run the system today versus what we’re leav- ing for our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandkids. We need to be playing for not just today, but playing for what we need to do to make this a continued competitive and highly healthy liveable city and inclusive for all, starting with the system needs to be 100 percent transit-ac- cessible. Every person, regardless of ethnicity, age, size, gender, needs to have privilege to get on the system, including those with disabilities. So my vision is, TriMet will become 100 percent tran- sit-accessible. We need to, with the three million mindset coming, what are we doing differently to be ready, like other glob- al cities before us have done, including steps like that? We need to have transit as a priority. It cannot be equal in our policies or our practices to the single-occupant vehicle. Having a bus sit- ting next to a car is not an advantage. Because the person who took time to get to the bus — the oth- er person who came out of their parking lot or garage or wherever they came from, and they’re already in the comfort. We need to give an advantage to transit, cycling and walking in this region and healthy options. But if you need your car, take it so we can be free of the road space for goods movement and people movement alto- gether. It’’s how do we use and leverage and free up our infrastructure in different ways than we have contemplated before, the partnership with municipal govern- ments. And they need to do more too. So just putting a bus stop down, in our partnership, and I’ve said this to some of the mayors just recently: don’t just put a bus stop down. If we are around grass, what’s your plan to have a sidewalk next to it? To have lighting next to it? To allow us to be truly accessible and safe for all. If not, don’t have us put a bus stop in a grassy area in a field. TSN: I’m thinking about [outer] southeast. They’re putting side- walks there now, but it was years before they had sidewalks out there. DK: I see it in all parts of the region. Nobody has an exclusivity on getting it right or wrong. I just think it needs to become a standard way of life for all of us. I have had two full knee replacements. I have a severed Achilles, I have C2C3 fused, I’m a broken athlete — and never was very good, by the way — but I know what it’s like to need help. And what looks like a speed bump when you’re healthy is big when you’re not. I believe we owe it to this region to become a champion of 100 percent access for all. Read the rest of this interview at TheSkanner.com Earl’s Cuts 30th Anniversary Earl Lancaster, owner of Earl’s Cuts and Stylez lets his protégé, Paul Hinton trim his beard before attending Earl’s Cuts and Stylez 30 on 30 Anniversary Roast, Sunday December 30th at the Midtown Plaza. Many of Earl’s friends, family, customers and community members showed up to tell stories and reminisce about Earl’s 30 years as an expert barber, small business owner and mentor to other barbers. PHOTO BY SUSAN FRIED TriMet Gossett cont’d from pg 1 Central District, Mt. Baker, Co- lumbia City, Rainier Valley and Skyway). He served as chair of the entire Council in 2007 and 2013. A native of Seattle, Gossett helped found the Black Student Union on the University of Wash- ington campus and helped to or- ganize nearly a dozen high school and middle school Black Student Unions throughout Seattle. He’s credited with bringing about the U.W.’s Educational Opportunity Program minority recruitment program. In the 1970s, Gossett was the first supervisor of the Black Student Division, in the Office of Minority Affairs. From April 1979 until December 1993, he was the Executive Director of the Central Area Motivation Pro- gram (CAMP), one of the oldest and largest community action agencies in the city of Seattle. In 2007 Gossett became just the second African American elect- Nurses “ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Gos- sett spearheaded the campaign to change the King County logo from an imperial crown to an im- age of Dr. King. “We thought it would be good for him to come down here and We thought it would be good for him to come down here and talk about some of the economic advantages of what the county has to offer Nicaragua. He has represented the King County Council on pro- motional trade missions to Singa- pore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Viet- nam, Cambodia, Thailand, India, South Korea, China, several coun- tries in South America, and most recently, South Africa. In 1999, 13 years after the 1986 change of the county’s name to honor the slain civil rights leader, talk about some of the economic advantages of what the county has to offer; he was a county ex- ecutive,” said Bernie Foster, pub- lisher of The Skanner News. “We thought it would be different. We bring people from all over the world. We thought it would be good to have some regional fla- vor to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Breakfast.” cessful, despite evidence for the impact of these services being so clear,” Knudsen told The Skanner. By 2015, their luck had turned. Worksystems was granted $12 million from the Health Pro- fession Opportunity Grants program, under the U.S. De- partment of Health and Human Services. During the next two years, Worksystems laid the groundwork for the Immigrant Nurse Credentialing Program and eventually partnered with IRCO to deliver it. “When I watched the first co- hort of INC graduates receive their certificates, it dawned on me that this had been a half-decade in the making,” said Knudsen. “And well worth every bit of effort it took to make it come to fruition.” Knudsen added that Worksys- tems regularly convenes local health care companies to identify workforce gaps, so it can better direct its investments and train people for in-demand positions. “For years, our partners in the health care industry have placed workforce diversification at the top of their needs list,” said Knudsen. “As the community is becoming more diverse, the pa- tient-facing workforce needs to keep pace.” Worksystems said its partners — which include OHSU, Kaiser, Legacy, and Willamette View, among others — are committed to recruiting diverse, multi-lin- gual nurse graduates from the Immigrant Nurse Credentialing Program. Each graduate who passes the NCLEX — a nationwide examina- tion for the licensing of nurses — and obtains their license in the coming months is expected to be employed promptly, according to Worksystems. The Immigrant Nurse Creden- tialing Program will begin its second cohort in January 2019. El- igible applicants come to the pro- gram largely by word-of-mouth and through referrals from the Oregon State Board of Nursing. All applicants must be autho- rized to work in the U.S. and must have worked as a nurse for at least six months outside the coun- try, as well as be English-language proficient. cont’d from pg 1 “Since taking this program their confidence has skyrocketed,” Wehmueller continued. “They’re also shown they have value be- yond their nursing credentials, like bringing different languages and cultural backgrounds to their community.” “ ed to be chair of the King County Council. Gossett has participated as a delegate in numerous interna- tional trade missions. His des- tinations have included Japan, Canada, Russia, England and They had been told in the past that their de- gree doesn’t matter and that their profession is obsolete The new effort is based on the since expired Workforce Im- provement with Immigrant Nurs- es (WIIN) program, once operat- ing out of Clackamas Community College. In 2014, Knudsen approached former WIIN director Judy An- derson to find a way of reviving a similar program locally. “We attempted multiple grant applications that weren’t suc-