Friday, September 17, 2010

Carbon Neutral Neighborhoods: Getting Clear On Purpose

Seattle City Council asked some point people who were known to be thinking constructively about carbon and carbon neutrality, to reach out to their communities and garner citizen input on the following question:
"Given our commitment to be a carbon neutral city by 2030 (the first in the nation), which goals would be wise to set for within the next 1-3 years?"
On September 14th, 2010, citizens presented recommendations Seattle City Council, garnered from input and processing from over 400 citizens - a good beginning to ongoing collaborations.

http://www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=2331058

At 37 minutes, the first citizens' group presents: Land Use advisory group
At 48 minutes, the second group (including me): Neighborhoods
At 59 minutes, the third group: Energy
At 72 minutes, the fourth group: Green Careers
At 83 minutes, the fifth group: Transportation
(explaining Peak Oil and pointing out that funding mega-projects for cars is taking money from where we need it to go, see minute 139 for THE controversial question regarding transportation, and the council's politically intelligent response.)
At 93 minutes, the sixth group: Food Systems
At 105 minutes, the seventh group: Zero Waste
At 114 minutes, the eighth group: Young People

Start listening at 142 minutes, for (IMHO) the most important response of the evening: how we move forward:
Mike O'Brien said
"There were a lot of ideas that were presented today. There are a lot more ideas which are in the whitepapers, which (...) are on the city council website right now (...) One of the next steps that I think needs to happen is: we need to have council members identify projects they want to take ownership of, and we need to have community members identify council members that they want to work with on this and bring those folks together. I know that some folks have already had conversations, and some of these are projects that people - council members - have been working on for a number of years, and it's just a continuation of that. (...) I encourage everyone who worked on it , and everyone in the audience, and everyone watching it on tv, to take part in that effort, to engage council members, leaders across the city, your neighbors and co-workers, and start to create public demand and start to collaborate so that we can really create the space so we can move quickly on a lot of these (ideas/projects) because we don't have a lot of time."

At 146 minutes, a request to keep in mind that there are professionals and organizations who can help integrate the stakeholders into the process in a meaningful way.

At 148 minutes, a great wrap-up by a council member, confirming that we're all on the same page, and there's collaboration ahead of us.

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