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HomeMy WebLinkAboutApproved Minutes - 2009-11-16 City of Lake Oswego Sustainability Advisory Board Minutes November 16, 2009 I. CALL TO ORDER AND ROLL CALL Co-chair Craig Diamond called the Sustainability Advisory Board meeting of November 16, 2009 to order at approximately 6:30 p.m. in the Santiam Room of the West End Building, 4101 Kruse Way, Lake Oswego, Oregon. Members present: Co-chairs Craig Diamond and Grant Watkinson, Dorothy Atwood, Bruce Brown, Ron Gronowski, Marshall Kosloff, Paul Lyons, and Gregory Monahan. Matt Briggs was not present. Staff present: Jonna Papaefthimious, Staff Liaison/Natural Resource Planner; Denny Egner, Long Range Planning Manager; Susan Millhauser, Sustainability Coordinator; and Justin Bates, AmeriCorps/Sustainability Outreach Specialist. II. APPROVAL OF MINUTES Gronowski moved to accept the Minutes of August 17, 2009 as amended. Monahan seconded the motion and it passed by unanimous vote. III. ANNOUNCEMENTS The City Council was going to hear the Clean Streams plan the following evening. An Oregonian article reported that local chambers were disagreeing with the sustainability position taken by the National Chamber of Commerce. The City was to be officially recognized as a Green Power Community on December 15th . Brown had testified that the SAB was in favor of extending the Streetcar all the way to Lake Oswego at a recent Lake Oswego to Portland Transit Project Citizen Advisory Committee meeting. Atwood asked Board members to send her their ideas for SAB participation in the Centennial Celebration. The Board welcomed their newest member, Marshall Kosloff, a senior at Lake Oswego High School. IV. PUBLIC COMMENT (None) V. REGULAR BUSINESS Energy Block Grant Millhauser had revised the draft grant proposed since the previous meeting. She advised it would be better to wait to retrofit City hybrid electric vehicles to when the state would fund the necessary charging infrastructure. The School District was considering a project to work with the City and monitor energy use in all the District’s buildings and six City buildings. The City would share some of the funds with Clackamas County in order to accomplish Energy Efficiency on Main Street storefront improvements. The City would use some of the funds to retrofit its outdoor lighting. There was funding for SAM 2010. She added that another grant might be available to fund a multi-jurisdictional, regional pilot revolving loan program for home energy efficiency improvements. The SAB could City of Lake Oswego Sustainability Advisory Board Minutes of November 16, 2009 Page 2 of 4 consider recommending it. Millhauser advised that if the SAB decided not to focus their work program on a climate action plan next year they could shift the funding allocated for the community greenhouse gas inventory to some other project. Board members reasoned that in the unlikely event that the SAB did not take on that project the $25,000 should still be available for the City to use to accomplish it. Atwood moved for the SAB to support the Block Grant proposal that Millhauser had drafted with a revision that said the City should consider the useful life of a building when considering a retrofit and not retrofit buildings that could be torn down in a few years. . Brown seconded the motion and it passed by unanimous vote. Debriefing: City Council discussions • SAB budget recommendations • Sustainability planning Diamond had presented the budget recommendations to the City Council. He reported that he had asked the City Council to support the ambitious goals the SAB had with increased staffing resources. He told them the SAB intended to provide them with more specific budget recommendations in the next month or two. He reported that Councilors had cautioned that the SAB might not get everything they wanted at once and they saw a need for the SAB to prioritize their work program. They wanted to know what a new director of sustainability and additional FTEs would do differently from current staff or consultants. They asked if interns or students could do some of the work instead of AmeriCorps workers. They wanted to know if incorporating sustainable practices into the code could be done in conjunction with the code update process the Planning Department was about to start. Baumann had presented the SAB sustainability planning project to the City Council. She felt the Councilors appreciated the benchmarking work. She had described what another community had done. The Councilors asked to see some examples of finished community sustainability plans and talk with people who had been through the process. They wanted to know if there were challenge grants available that could fund such an activity. They wanted to know if the community outreach program that related to community sustainability could be made part of public engagement efforts the City was already involved in instead of a separate process. Baumann had sent the City Council a response that day and sent copies to Board members. She reported that the Mayor thought it was possible that the City would move toward sustainability even without a special sustainability planning effort due to the influences of the economy, and state and Metro policies and programs. The Mayor and Councilors had invited SAB members to join them in a sustainability training session on November 23rd . The staff related that the City Council had also invited the Planning Commission, the Development Review Commission, the Clackamas County Commissioners and mayors from four other cities. Watkinson observed that the SAB was in a “holding pattern” until the Board decided on a strategic direction later in the meeting and until the City Council clarified whether they wanted to pursue a comprehensive community based sustainability plan or just wanted the SAB to integrate sustainability into other initiatives. Information on upcoming City Council Sustainability/Natural Step training City of Lake Oswego Sustainability Advisory Board Minutes of November 16, 2009 Page 3 of 4 Diamond related that Duke Castle would conduct the training. It would be broader than just the Natural Step framework. Discussion about the strategic direction of SAB The Board acknowledged if was possible the City Council might be hesitant to start a brand new community sustainability planning process. So they considered a suggestion to move forward by working to integrate sustainability into periodic review of the Comprehensive Plan. Denny Egner, Assistant Planning Director in charge of long range planning explained the process. The Comprehensive Plan presented the big picture of the community. Each chapter of the Plan described the community’s policies related to that chapter’s topic. The State mandates periodic review of the Comprehensive Plan. The staff anticipated during the upcoming periodic review each chapter would be examined through the lens of sustainability. The staff had just received Natural Step training. The SAB could help them by suggesting what questions to ask during the public engagement process, critiquing the current Comprehensive Plan, and educating the community during the process. That way the SAB could influence Comprehensive Plan policies. After the Comprehensive Plan was updated the Community Development Code would be revised to reflect those policy changes. The Planning Commission had suggested the visioning concept a few years ago when the Commissioners became frustrated with the neighborhood plans they were seeing. They suggested the City Council initiate a community wide visioning process to help answer key land use questions. The City Council planned to discuss visioning during the next round of goal setting. They could decide to make it broader scope or even to not do it at all. The Council had already approved a periodic review work plan that would address those aspects of the plan the City was mandated to address. A broader or narrower scope visioning process could be incorporated into it. Egner anticipated the process would take up to four years to accomplish. The staff would start by collecting the necessary data and public outreach and visioning could be done in year two. Meanwhile two other related projects were going on. The City had ordered a Community Development Code audit and the Planning Commission was considering a list of housekeeping and technical fixes to the Code. The City had ordered the code audit because they had been hearing for years that the Code was not user friendly and it was hard to understand. A consultant would examine the code and suggest how it could be clarified and reorganized. Then the staff would do that work. Egner related that the Planning Commission had looked at the list of code audit contract responsibilities in the drafted Request for Proposal and modified the one that called for a sustainability audit. The Commissioners reasoned that if the City had just $50,000 to spend on the contract it should focus on fixing the existing code first. But there was still a sustainability element connected to the project. It might be better to wait until the code was better organized and easier to navigate before adding new content. Diamond recalled that other communities had incorporated sustainability as they were updating their comprehensive plans. The approach had been to form teams to work on different elements of it. Board members informally referred to that concept as “piggybacking.” They expanded the concept to one that would look at more elements of the Plan than just those the state required to be reviewed and that would involve individual businesses, churches and other entities they wanted to buy in to sustainability ideals. They called that “Comprehensive Plan Plus.” The idea was that the City would City of Lake Oswego Sustainability Advisory Board Minutes of November 16, 2009 Page 4 of 4 lead the way. Diamond was concerned that if the SAB put all its effort into piggybacking the result might not be as good as they would get in a separate planning project. He suggested they continue to also recommend that the City budget resources for baseline studies and community-wide goal setting. Egner observed the Comprehensive Plan was a guiding document that called for broad goals, policies and action measures, but it did not tie them to a particular time frame or budget cycle or call for benchmarking. Brown observed that the Transportation System Plan was part of the Comprehensive Plan. The TSP did not say anything about greenhouse gases. If it were revised to call for reducing greenhouse gases, the related policies and action measures would reflect that and future decisions would be based on that goal. It would be necessary to have the resources to educate more of the public so they understood the need to change the TSP and it would be necessary to determine what was necessary to achieve that goal. Visioning and the Comprehensive Plan update process would take time. Atwood suggested identifying and offering six interim sustainability goals for the community to the City Council. She asked members to send her their suggestions and discuss them at the next meeting. Papaefthimiou suggested the SAB could encourage the City Council to choose a broader visioning process and allocate the resources for it; she indicated that the staff already supported this as a recommendation. The Board decided to form a subgroup to continue the conversation until the next meeting. They appointed Diamond, Watkinson, Monahan, Atwood and Patrick Rowe (if he would agree when asked). The subgroup was to suggest how to integrate a community sustainability planning and engagement process into the Comprehensive Plan update process. They planned to meet on November 23rd . VI. ADJOURNMENT The next regularly scheduled meeting was December 21, 2009. There being no other business Co-chair Diamond adjourned the meeting at approximately 8:47 p.m. Respectfully submitted, Jonna Papaefthimiou Natural Resource Planner L:\Boards & Commissions\SAB\Minutes\2009\LO SAB2009 11-16 APPROVED.doc