Sustainability means smart investment in jobs and economy

Are we in this together?

Last year I called for all to work together as "we are in this boat together" and by working together we can move forward together. Perhaps the specter of an election in November has spooked some people and I see many potential fractures of this idea that we are in this economic challenge together. For instance, recently I got a couple of emails that said, "forget history" we need to watch our pennies and not be "historical perfect", or another set of emails that the Community Sustainability Commission is "out of control and too powerful" and then my favorite is "run government like a business" as if government has a profit center (essential to business). These are confusing statements if, indeed, we are working together.

The following helps sew together the ideas that investment in our historic districts is part of growing jobs and sustainable growth and how we can grow new jobs and keep our existing jobs and finally government (and I am glad to say) is not to be run like a business but is "business plus". We need to be lean, efficient, effective for the good of all. Let me know if you know of a business model that has this as a mission statement. Government is not the panacea but it sure can advance the investment for jobs that the private sector has been shy about for more than two years.

Hard Budget Decisions

The City Council makes hard decisions, but laying off employees is the hardest. At its regular meeting Tuesday night, May 3, the Council may decide to reopen city employee contract agreements to avoid potential layoffs as we address the $1.7 million deficit for the 2011-12 budget.

Action is necessary to achieve a budget with balanced expenditures and revenue projections for fiscal year 2011-12. Our employees stepped up in 2010 when agreeing to salary and benefits reductions requested by the Council. Revenues on which the city depends are lower because of depressed property values, lower Benicia Industrial Park sales taxes and lower franchise fees, so we continue to make expenditure adjustments. The choice between layoffs and salary and benefits reductions is not a welcome one, but the situation speaks for itself.

These decisions are grounded in the Council’s policy to maintain a balanced budget, to avoid service cuts and to maintain fair and competitive salaries. To quote our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Our city employees have been inventive, creative and frugal in finding ways to reduce costs and maintain our parks as the jewels of Benicia; our police deparment’s vigilant effectiveness; our fire department’s dependable and responsible emergency response; our water quality for drinking; our wastewater treatment to avoid polluting the Carquinez Strait; and other everyday public safety and administrative needs.

Their efforts are commendable. But it is not enough in the face of such a severe revenue shortfall. That is why we have the decision Tuesday night about further layoffs and potential salary and benefits reductions.

CSC Lecture-Workshop Series

The Community Sustainability Commission has worked hard to make this lecture-workshop series possible and would love to have your full participation in this FREE series.
This is a working collaboration with Solano Community College. Here's the series at one glance.

Stewards of our Children's Future: 2011

for Ecologic and Economic health
+ Community Resilience

Free Public lecture-workshop series

American obsession with bottled water

At their May 17 meeting, the Benicia Community Sustainability Commission discussed prioritizing 120 Climate Action Plan strategies. One of the recommended 2010 priorites was Strategy SW-1.1. -Limit City Spending on Bottled Water: Limiting City spending on bottled water to necessary fire safety operations will reduce the City’s solid waste consumption and will demonstrate community-wide leadership, while reducing overhead.

National Public Radio (NPR) yesterday featured an interview with Peter Gleick who is with the Pacific Institute in Berkeley and a 2003 McArthur Fellow (genius award) discussing his new book: Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water. More than 85 million bottles of water are sold every day in the United States. Freshwater expert Peter Gleick explains what's in them -- and why we drink them -- in his book.

Read a fascinating excerpt from Peter Gleick's book, Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water at this link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126833795 

Below is the transcript of the NPR interview with Peter Gleick on May 17:
War On Tap: America's Obsession With Bottled Water

ACTION this Tuesday - Sustainability and Arts and Cultural Commission Ordinance‏

Your participation in civic affairs is important and vital to ensuring our quality of life in Benicia. This Tuesday's Council meeting agenda includes two ordinances that will establish major commissions: Benicia Arts and Cultural Commission and Benicia Community Sustainability Commission. Your interest, support and future membership are welcomed.

The ordinances will be discussed and a few minor suggestions are anticipated. For instance the ordinance for the BACC should include the power and the duty to review projects for consistency with the Public Arts Ordinance. The ordinance should also clarify that membership is art and cultural demonstrated interest-based and not organization-centric (in other words, not a club for the community organizations, but a commission of broad public membership).

Please read the staff reports here:
Benicia Community Sustainability Commission
Benicia Arts and Cultural Commission

Benicia debates smog, noise from motorcycles

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Here is a link to an interesting LA Times article about the pollution from motorcycles.

Motorcycles and emissions: The surprising facts

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By Tony Burchyns/Times-Herald staff writer

Posted: 07/09/2009 01:00:48 AM PDT

BENICIA -- A discussion about loud motorcycles dominated Tuesday's Benica City Council meeting, with a downtown resident and a merchant complaining about "rolling thunder" on weekends.

"We know it is a beautiful day ... because before our alarm goes off we are jarred (out of bed) by the sound of motorcycles" rolling past her East Second Street home, resident Robin Stanton told the council members. "Sometimes it shakes the house."

The discussion arose while the council considered its position on a pending state law requiring smog checks for motorcycles. The council ultimately voted to support the legislation if it is amended to focus only on smog rather than after-market systems that make bikes louder.

The legislation, which addresses air pollution, also would require checks for after-market exhaust systems that may make bikes louder than regulated factory standards.

Benicia Mayor Elizabeth Patterson said she raised the issue because the bill would address smog. But later Patterson said she wanted to give residents a chance to speak out about "noise pollution" on quiet Benicia streets.

Tony Shannon, a First Street business owner, told council members that packs of loud motorcycles disrupt his Web design business -- even when his doors and windows are shut to block out the noise and exhaust.

Shannon questioned the argument raised in the motorcycle community that louder bikes save lives by alerting motorists of their presence.

"It is not OK to annoy everyone just to be a little safer," Shannon said.

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A representative of the American Motorcycle Association, Wayne Phillips, testified that his group supports making motorcycles cleaner and quieter. But Phillips, an Orinda resident, said that the proposed state law would create an "uneven playing field" because it would require muffler checks for motorcycles but not for cars.

"The (association) is against the bill because it should go after (engine) performance, not mufflers," Phillips said.

Patterson suggested that the Benicia Police Department could crack down on excessively loud bikes by enforcing noise laws. The noise limit for most motorcycles in California is 80 decibels.

Police Chief Sandra Spagnoli, however, said that the state's law is vaguely written and lacks specific direction on how to measure noise. Noise citations that officers hand out could therefore be overturned in court, Spagnoli said.

About two noise citations a month are issued, police said.

Police identified the Military corridor and E. Second Street as especially prone to loud traffic because both roads are connected to freeway entrances.

Patterson said that some California cities have outlawed motorcycle traffic on certain roads -- a measure that Phillips said his group strongly opposes.

The legislation -- SB 435 by state Sen. Fran Pavely, D-Agoura Hills, narrowly passed the Senate last month. It is now in the Assembly.

Contact staff writer Tony Burchyns at tburchyns@thnewsnet.com or call 553-6831.

Confessions of an Environmentalist for Earth Day

While in college I, as a student representative, had lunch with David Brower – an environmental hero. Over nearly 25 years we would take time at various conferences and events to talk. His resolve toward sustainability was resolute. He was fond of quoting Adlai Stevenson, who said in 1965:

"We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and place, preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of humankind, and half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew, can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the security of us all."

During my college days, I heard Senator Gaylord Nelson’s (D-Wisconsin) call for a nationwide "Environmental Teach-in," on college campuses. Working my way through college kept me too busy to be very active in things, but this one-day “environmental teach-in” event seemed perfect for me. And that was my first experience of the energy of a grassroots explosion. More than 20 million people from all parts of the country participated in the first Earth Day. Events were held in 10,000 schools, 2,000 colleges, and over 1,000 communities. I learned the lessons of the power of grassroots organizing and successfully influencing governmental and private change.

On the 25th Anniversary of Earth Day, Senator Nelson said, "It worked because of the spontaneous, enthusiastic response at the grassroots. Nothing like it had ever happened before. While our organizing on college campuses was very well done, the thousands of events in our schools and our communities were self-generated at the local level . . . They simply organized themselves. That was the remarkable thing that became Earth Day."

That grassroots legacy can be seen this Tuesday at our Council meeting where there will be a timely presentation on the status of the closure of the former IT Corporation Panoche Facility Class I Landfill. The facility occupied 248 acres and at one time contained 45 surface impoundments, two landfills, four waste piles, and five drum burial areas. Wastes managed at the Facility included caustic and acidic liquids and solids, petroleum refining sludges, catalyst, hydrogen sulfide abatement sludges, oily slurries, truck-washout debris, inorganic precipitates, contaminated soils, organic sludges, shredded currency, and paint pigment sludges. Waste management practices used at the facility included biological treatment, neutralization, evaporation in ponds, and burial of waste in landfills and trenches. The facility received between 80,000 and 220,000 tons of waste material per year from 1968 through 1986.

Local Benicia residents including Mayor Marilyn O’Rourke, Bob Berman, Marilyn Bardet, Mary Francis Kelly Po among a few others fought for the closure of the landfill because it leaked and was a public health threat. For this Earth Day we can celebrate their success. It was not easy. There were the skeptics that things could be so bad, government regulators who minimized the cleanup, and the responsible corporation who declared bankruptcy.

For years, environmental contamination was seen as the inevitable (and accepted) consequence of economic progress. As cities grew and industries flourished, toxic emissions polluted the air and wastes were dumped into waterways or buried in the ground. Benicia was no different.

In the 1960s, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, exposing the health effects of pesticides and other chemicals on our birds, mammals and us. Others wrote passionately about squandering what once seemed like the country's limitless resources. The 60s word "environment" meant more than simply preserving wilderness areas or regulating the most obvious forms of pollution. Media coverage of disasters like the Santa Barbara oil spill focused popular concern on the environment threatened by human activities and the need for protection.

At times it seemed that every day there were newly discovered threats followed by new protections. Being able to have confidence in law makers and government to address air and water pollution, we saw their efforts to protect us from ourselves as the highest calling of responsible governance. My own path to becoming a public servant owes, in part, from the examples set by Congress and the California legislature’s bold environmental protection actions.

Environmental protection was not a Republican or Democratic issue and the best of both parties coalesced around the needed action. Of course, it could have been better, stronger and quicker, but it was done. A perfect example of this bipartisan and shared sense of responsibility is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established by President Nixon, followed by Congress's passing of a series of laws that regulated the introduction of pollutants into the nation's air and waterways, controlled the production of pesticides and other toxic substances, and required "cradle-to-grave" tracking of hazardous waste.

The 1970s have been called the "golden age" of environmentalism in the United States, but it was also a time when the nation first became aware of a serious threat to human health and the environment.

And that brings me back to Benicia. For it is due to those myriad laws passed, and the power of the EPA, that set the stage for those Benicia citizens’ efforts demanding state regulators investigate the Class I landfill at Lake Herman Road and close it – shut it down. Without all the public awareness, regulations, and grassroots efforts, this closure would not have happened as quickly, nor been as thorough. Neither would the cleanup of Rose Drive have been possible, without Cal-EPA, the city's toxics consultant Jodi Sparks, and the hard work of neighborhood activists, especially Dick Lubin, Larry Fullington and Tom Busfield, who rallied successfully to have landfill wastes left from the Braito dump cleaned out of backyards and Blake Court.

This Tuesday, when you listen to the report about the on-going monitoring of the plumes of toxic brew that almost polluted Paddy Creek and has polluted the city’s watershed, take a moment and reflect on the drama of getting the right legislation at the right time to protect our water and air and public health. (Although we do not use the ground water now, we may want to in the future, but it will need to be cleaned up).

What Earth Day awareness did for Benicia in the 1980s for public safety, Benicia citizens working on the new General Plan in the '90s, and activists such as Gene Doherty, Kathy Kerridge, Jim Stevenson and the usual suspects have carried forward, to promote economic and environmental health. These citizens advocate for sustainability as a city priority. Staff has made exceptional effort in developing the greenhouse gas emission reduction goals and the draft Climate Action Plan. This is a new green generation of environmental protection. Next year we will celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day in 2010 by highlighting our progress at reducing greenhouse gases, increasing water conservation, providing alternative energy, transit and walkable streets – all the interconnected actions necessary to protect our planet and grow our economy.

Some say we live in dark times: we are destroying Mother Earth and many people have lost hope. But I am energized by all the efforts ongoing at our schools, in our community, our state and – at long last – our nation, again.

I am deeply touched by what Benicians are doing - we are realizing that we as individuals truly make a difference and are thinking more carefully about the effect of our actions. My greatest source of hope for the future is the energy, commitment and often the courage of our young people who are engaged in solving the peril of the warming earth.

But we cannot put off tomorrow for our youth to solve the problems of today. We must take the responsibility to ensure that their environment is not wrecked. A compassionate and successful society will invest its assets in the good health of its children – all of its children. It is up to us to weigh our responsibilities and to invest our limited resources from government, industry, and our residents, without delay addressing environmental needs including local and regional transit, clean air and water and safe community public places.

“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for their children.”
- German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer

As Mayor, my pledge for this Earth Day is to seek:

• Policies and action, without compromise, for air and water protection and cleanup.


• Policies and actions toward a carbon-free future based on renewable energy.


• Policies and actions toward responsible, sustainable consumption.


• Policies and actions toward expanding our cleantech and greentech businesses and local jobs for our residents.


• Collaboration with Benicia Unified School District to support entrepreneurial environmental programs and prepare students for vocational green job training and careers.