Mike Bookey

Sandee Burbank is 65 years old, a breast cancer survivor, a grandmother and a longtime community volunteer in her hometown of Mosier, Oregon. She also uses marijuana.
Burbank is one of Oregon's 23,000-plus marijuana cardholders and also the executive director of Mothers Against Misuse and Abuse, a group that has long held two-day clinics here in Bend to assist residents in obtaining medical marijuana cards. She doesn't think of herself as a criminal – even if federal law says she is – and she hasn't for a long while, ever since taking up the cause of medical marijuana in the early 1990s. This winter, her organization plans to open a permanent clinic in Bend. It's the first such business in the region and comes at a time when marijuana and the enforcement puzzle surrounding it is becoming an increasingly frequent topic of political discussion.

The Trust for Public Land’s Kristin Kovalik, one of the Greenprint Coordinators, taking a look at area maps. Photo by Ben Murphy.

What if you could ride your bike, expressly on maintained trails, from Bend to Redmond? What if we saw another Shevlin-sized park on the city's perimeters or if more large-scale conservation efforts, like Skyline Forest, were created in Deschutes County? And what if our region became a magnet for federal conservation funding? This could happen, and it could start with a “Greenprint,” a broad planning process backed by the Trust for Public Lands, one of the largest land conservation groups in the country, that's on the ground and running here in Deschutes County with help from a wide range of community groups and agencies.
The Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit land conservation group, and its local managers have been working over the past several months with several local government officials, agency heads, conservation and business leaders, tourism agencies and the general public to create this plan for Deschutes County that would identify, among other things, land that could be used for wildlife and water conservation or perhaps recreational trail connections. Again, the Greenprint doesn't create or enforce policy, but what it does do is bring seemingly divergent interests to the table, something that doesn't always happen in this region when it comes to conservation. By May of next year, TPL hopes to have completed the Greenprint, providing the community at large with high-tech interactive maps that will serve as a comprehensive plan for how we, as residents of Deschutes County, would like to protect our land and, in a larger view, our quality of life.
Kristin Kovalik is a project manager with TPL, working in the national conservation organization's Bend office and has been involved with the Greenprint for Deschutes County for about nine months. Although the Greenprint is new to Central Oregon, 24 Greenprints have been conducted throughout the country over the past eight years, including projects in the Seattle and Wenatchee areas. Presently, Greenprint projects are also underway in other areas throughout the country, including projects in Texas, Wisconsin, Maine and Missouri. And while this is the first time a Greenprint has been executed locally, the idea has been floated before – some might remember that Greenprint was mentioned during the Bend 2030 project, which itself is similar to this project in that it's also a community-oriented long-term planning effort.