ESTF: Comments re: "Sust Quality of Life" recommendations from James Kempf
Attinger, Steve
Hello Task Force Members,
Below are comments from James Kempf related to the Sustainable Quality of Life working group recommendations. He wanted to share them in advance of next Monday’s meeting, and then he will simply reference them during the meeting.
Note: this is not presented for online discussion, but as one-way communication from James to the Task Force.
Please do not respond to these comments online or among yourselves.
Thanks.
Steve
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Overall Comments
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I think this WG had the hardest task of all the WGs, since the topic was the least well defined. I think that trying to fit this WG's work into 10 actionable recommendations was probably not such a good idea. I think it might have been better for the work to focus on answering questions such as: what is sustainablility? how did Mountain View get to the point of having an unsustainable urban infrastruture? What might a sustainable Mountain View look like in 30 years?
Most of the other WGs have short or medium term recommendations, so this WG could have been the place to focus a more "visionary", philisophical approach. There are some recommendations of that nature in the current set but others that seem a bit misplaced.
Introduction
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I think the introduction needs to be grounded more in the time and place of Mountain View in 2008. Right now, it seems much too geographically and temporally nonspecific. One way to do this would be to look at the transition Mountain View went through from the mid 50's to the late 70's when the current urban infrastructure was put in place. What assumptions behind that transition are now false? What aspects of that transition (livability, emphasis on enhancing natural beauty, etc.) are positive and should be maintained? Basically, the transition to sustainability that the City faces over the next 30-40 years means much must change, and I think it would be valuable to discuss in somewhat broad terms what the issues are and what that transition might look like. But I think it would also be useful to remind the Council that this is not a process that Mountain View has not gone through before. Before and after pictures of Castro Street, in the 1950's such as in the library, and today, would be useful for making this point. It might also be good to remind the Council that there is a limit to what Mountain View can do to fix some of the sustainability problems, and that a transition by the broader society and other levels of government to sustainability at the same time is really the key to embedding sustainability into the nation's and the world's future. Some of the recommendations don't recognize this point.
Recommendation #1
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This is a great recommendation, but I am not sure if it goes far enough. Sustainability will also impact Parks and Recreation which is the other of the City's standing commissions that discusses physical infrastructure. I think a case could be made for having a Sustainability standing commission, or periodically reconvening the Task Force to monitor progress. I think, at a minimum, there should be a Sustainability co-ordinator hired by the city on a full time basis to ensure that the work actually gets done.
Recommendation #2 (and also part of Introduction, #4, and #8)
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The assertion within the introduction, this recommendation and #8, and part of #4 that US population growth above replacement rate is a result of "natural" growth (i.e. woman having babies) is false. The natural growth rate is and has been between 2 and 2.1 children per adult female since around the 1970's. This is more than Italy, Japan, or Russia where it is 1.3 and they are facing the prospect of the population decreasing by half within 45 years. It means that, without any other factors, the US population would be stable, if not perhaps sustainable, due to its current large size. Note that this is completely independent of whether support of family planning is a good idea or not. I happen to think it is, but there are others (such as perhaps the unnamed Council member cited in the report) who don't, for religious or political reasons.
Unfortunately, the only reason that the US population growth rate is above replacement is because of legal and illegal immigration, and it is actually way above replacement because of that reason. Now, I realize immigration is a hot political topic, and, looking around Silicon Valley, I don't think anyone here can argue that the US should severely throttle back on immigration such as was done from the 1920's until the 1960's (full disclosure: my wife is an immigrant). The entrepenural Indian and Chinese students that come to Stanford and form businesses in Silicon Valley have contributed immeasurably to the area's economic development. Illegal immigration is even tricker, and, while there are arguments one could make for curtailing it, some of the proposals for solving the problem are inhumane and rather draconian. Illegal immigrants were deported enmasse from Los Angles in the 1920's and I don't think anybody wants to go back to that. Looking at immigration from a broader prospect, even people who move to Mountain View from the East Coast or elsewhere in the US (full disclosure: by that definition, I'm an immigrant too) could be considered immigrants.
Quite frankly, I don't see any way the City could or should do anything about immigration, though other cities elsewhere in the country have been "cracking down" on illegal immigrants. Making Mountain View a more undesirable place to live would certainly do that, but I doubt whether the Council or anyone else in the City would buy into that. To a certain extent, an escalation in housing prices and rents will cause Mountain View to price out many people and thereby serve to control immigration into the city, and that has occured but to a lesser extent than Palo Alto. However, if many of the vital jobs necessary to keep Mountain View running don't pay enough to allow the workers to live in Mountain View, carbon emissions increase because the workers commute from lower cost areas, as was pointed out in the Land Use WG report.
Finally, I think the quote from the unnamed City Council member was needlessly provocative. We're trying to get the Council to listen to us.
My advice is that this recommendation should be dropped because it has little to do with sustainability, and that the references to population growth should be removed from the other part of the report or, at least, made factually more accurate by including a short discussion of the role of immigration too. In addition to the points cited above, family planning services are widely available in California and I think there are far more important areas where the City could invest its money for sustainability.
Recommendation #3
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This recommendation was kind of puzzling. Basically, groundwater is extracted by the City and mixed with Hetch Hetchy and Santa Clara Valley Water District water. So that means the City would be essentially taxing itself, which doesn't make sense. I got the feeling this recommendation was put in to make a point about the need to tax extractive industries. But I don't see that this really applies to Mountain View, so I would suggest dropping this recommendation.
Recommendation #4
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See comments above for #3.
Also,planning for disasters is certainly important, but I had a hard time seeing the connection with sustainability. The main point seemed to be housing people after a major earthquake, that the city should have enough open land for tents. There are a couple problems with this. The first one is that many if not most buildings in Mountain View are built up to stringently enforced earthquake codes. That's why the City could sustain a 6.9 quake such as Loma Prieta in 1989 and not see much damage, while such quakes in other parts of the world of that magnitude regularly cause massive damage. The second is, given that a quake of sufficient magnitude did occur to cause widespread damage to the point of unihabitiblity, most of Mountain View is suburban landscape with plenty of lawns and other private open space. These could be used for tents. Many townhouse and apartment complexes also have such open grounds. A inventory of such areas seems like a good idea, but I would drop this recommendation because it has little to do with sustainability.
Recommendation #5
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This is an excellent recommendation but I think it should discuss what it means to have 100% renewable energy, be a bit "visionary". The Energy/Renewable Energy WG has focused on short and medium term measures. Here would be the place to talk about long term measures. How about more utilization of wind by replacing the PG&E high tension line towers along Shoreline with combined towers/wind generators? How about small scale geothermal? How about biogas to replace the natural gas used for heating? How does PG&E fit into this picture? What about transportation energy demands? There are a bunch of recommendations rejected the the Energy/Renewable Energy WG that could be bundled up into a more long term discussion of getting Mountain View to zero carbon energy.
Recommendation #6
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This is also an excellent recommendation. How about a yearly Sustainability Report mailed out to residents like the Water Report that describes how the City is doing in meeting the sustainability goals adopted by the Council and what measures are new and up and coming?
Recommendation #7
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This is a great idea too, but most of the practical measures involved telecommunting are probably more in the Land Use area. Having telecommuting centers where people could walk to instead of driving to work would help to reduce carbon emissions from driving, but I'm not sure what the city could do to encourage this.
Recommendation #8
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See comments for Recommendation #2. This should be dropped.
Recommendation #9
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I really don't see much here that is actionable by the City Council. In principle, I think this is a great idea, but it is something that companies and others must do. Maybe if FASBI (the group that regulates accounting standards) were to adopt a rule requiring externalized costs to be internalized, it would help but there is nothing Mountain View can do about that. So I think this recommendation should be dropped.
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Steve Attinger
Environmental Sustainability Coordinator
City of Mountain View
Public Works Department
500 Castro Street
Mountain View, CA 94041
“Intelligence, filtered through the heart, is wisdom.”
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