It’s great to hear of a neighborhood council taking positive steps concerning nudity. The Venice Beach neighborhood council has voted allow topless sunbathing. Melissa Diner, who proposed the measure, sees the issue as a rights issue, that is that women should have the same rights as men. This is the good news part of the story.

The measure still needs the approval of the city of Los Angeles, which includes Venice Beach.

Reading the story in the LA Times http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-topless-venice-20150423-story.html, I was very surprised at the bias the news article took against the proposal. This is the bad news part of the story.

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The 2015 AANR-NW Spring Board is happening at Squaw Mountain Ranch April 24 – April 26. There will be sessions about topics ranging from pot legalization to cooperative background checks. There will be Government Affairs Training on Saturday morning. Learn how to do your part to prevent legislation that is bad for nudists. However, there is more than just meetings at a board meeting. Squaw Mountain is planning to show us all a good time with a welcome receptions, games, movies and other activities

Board Meetings are open to all AANR members. You are not only allowed to come, but encouraged. In addition to running the region, we have a great time. Please join us.

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AANR-NW is the proud adopter of Rooster Rock State Park through the Oregon State Park Adopt-A-Park program. AANR-NW invites you to participate in this family tree planting event. This is not a clothing optional event. We will be planting trees in the textile portion of the park.

Usually the weather at this event has us appreciating clothing!

What: Earth Day Tree Planting at Rooster Rock State Park

Where: On I-84 East of Troutdale take exit #25

When: April 25th 9 am- 1 pm

Lava Nursery located in Parkdale, Oregon, generously continued their donation of 400 tree seedlings. We value their contribution and solicit your help to get them planted. We work in partnership with Oregon State Park staff, Sierra Club members, Scouts, SOLV, and local community members.

Please wear weather appropriate clothing to this rain or shine event. Park tools are limited. We have been asked to bring garden planting tools, 5 gallon bucket, gloves, and drinking water. However, no tools or experience are required.

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An organizing committee that came out of the discussions from the one day Unity Summit on February 11 in Miami continues to meet via phone conference. Two ideas are being pursued. One is how the various nudist/naturist groups can collaborate to support the Celebrate Nude Art Festival that is being planned for the Miami area in the fall. The intent is that this event can be put on in other areas in future years. The organizing committee is also looking into forming an ongoing way for our various nudist/naturist groups to work together, taking form as some sort of industry council.

I sit on this committee and will let you know as more information becomes available. Please email me if you have questions, concerns or suggestions.

Karen Lahey president@aanr-nw.org

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Concerns that an anti-nudity initiative would be on the ballot this fall in the City of Spokane have been allayed. The group that gathered the necessary signatures turned in 3,320 signatures. However, 1,548 were ruled invalid for various reasons. This reduced the validated signatures to significantly fewer than the needed 2,477.

About one third of the invalid signatures came from people who live outside of the city of Spokane. Another third came from unregistered voters. The rest were invalidated because they were duplicates, couldn’t be verified or the signatures didn’t match what the county had on file.

Thanks go out to our Spokane nudists for their visibility at the city council meetings and with the city council.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2015/mar/17/exposure-law-proposal-focused-on-spokane-baristas/

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An important function of AANR is to watch legislation that might be harmful to nudism and to block it or to change it so that it will not affect social nudism.

In order to do this, AANR needs to know what legislation is being planned.

At the state level, AANR membership dollars go to buy a subscription to CQ State Track (http://www.cqstatetrack.com/index1.html). This website tracks bills given a set of keywords. Your regional GAT chair (Mike Parker – gat@aanr-nw.org) has a login to this site. However, any of us can look at the search results to see what is going on in our region. It is important to note that many of the reported bills do not affect us at all. They just meet the search criteria.

For the Northwest, the link is
http://www.cqstatetrack.com/texis/statetrack/insession/viewrpt/main.html?event=545a5e1821c

That is just the first step. AANR-NW needs to know what is going on in each county, city, town, etc. Spokane Valley, WA, passed a law last year banning mere nudity. AANR-NW didn’t know about it in time to mount an effective fight against it.
That is where you come in. Read your newspaper and your local blogs. Watch your local TV. Listen to local radio. Go to community meetings. If you learn about anything at all that might affect us, send information about it to gat@aanr-nw.org and to president@aanr-nw.org. It is better to get multiple emails about the same issue than no emails at all.

Remember that AANR is us. And we are AANR. It is up to us to make it work.

For your information —
The links to pending legislation for all of the US AANR regions are:
AANR-East
http://www.cqstatetrack.com/texis/statetrack/insession/viewrpt/main.html?event=545a5d3821c
AANR-Florida
http://www.cqstatetrack.com/texis/statetrack/insession/viewrpt/main.html?event=545a5d76264
AANR-Midwest
http://www.cqstatetrack.com/texis/statetrack/insession/viewrpt/main.html?event=545a5dba21c
AANR-Northwest
http://www.cqstatetrack.com/texis/statetrack/insession/viewrpt/main.html?event=545a5e1821c
AANR-Southwest
http://www.cqstatetrack.com/texis/statetrack/insession/viewrpt/main.html?event=545a5e6721c
AANR-West
http://www.cqstatetrack.com/texis/statetrack/insession/viewrpt/main.html?event=545a5ead1ac4

There is no comparable pending legislation link for AANR-Western Canada.

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The Rooster Rock Public Meeting that was previously scheduled for Wednesday March 18th has been canceled. This meeting will be rescheduled at a future date.

Please visit www.gorgeparksplan.com for updates.

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Kray Van Kirk is an Alaskan singer-songwriter, delivering performances that the Borderline Folk Club in New York called “…what every singer-songwriter should aspire to.” His warm and intimate concerts on six- and twelve-string guitar have received critical praise and enthusiastic receptions from the house concert circuit to festivals and larger stages.

His songs are rich tapestries of myth (The Queen of Elfland, Three Days to England), passionate echoes of the world (A Chorus of Stones, Dust), and a pure expression of the American singer-songwriter (A Medicine for Melancholy, Walk With Me). At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where many shows receive only a handful of audience members due to the sheer volume of available performances, his room was sold out, leaving some folks sitting on the stairs and a Fringe reviewer to write “the Alaskan singer-songwriter, in his Edinburgh debut, was not the reason I arrived early, but certainly why I stayed late”.

Living without road access in Alaska might not seem the best way to be a touring musician, but that’s where he makes his home with his daughter, one cat, and far too many books to fit into one room (along with the occasional bear sitting in the front seat of his car). He supports his touring through proceeds from live shows only, as he no longer sells CD or charges money for his songs; all of them wait patiently on his website, ready to march their way across the world like little digital penguins, leaving no footprints in the snow.Kar

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Last monday night Dave and Kathy Smith showed up at the Spokane City Council meeting. They both testified as did three other Kaniksu Ranch members. There were three others that showed up. The end result was that the signatures are going to be sent to be validated, which was our best outcome. Once that is done, it goes before the council again to decide if they pass it (not likely in our opinion) or send it to ballot in November. We will be at that meeting as well and will again put out the call to local nudists for support at the meeting.

Dave and Kathy were approached by a reporter from the Spokesman-Review. He asked for their information for a possible future article. They were also both contacted by a Chanel 2 reporter. They also talked with two of the council members on the way out which were both positive conversations. A snippet of the testimony was on the Chanel 4 news.

Margie Cantlon at Sun Meadow alerted us to an article in the online version of the Inlander paper. The printed Inlander is a regional paper located in Spokane and is published weekly, put in many places and is free. We’ll be watching to see if it shows up in the printed version next week.

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