The City Council reviewed the Green Advisory Committee’s Sierra Madre Environmental Accords Work-Plan at Tuesday’s meeting, approving which items the committee should focus their work on.
As part of the review process to elevate the committee’s status to full commission, the council placed the Environmental Accords Work-Plan under intense examination.
Approved at the Feb. 14 council meeting, the committee’s Environmental Accords are based on the United Nations Urban Environmental Accords, a template whose 21 actions were expanded to 25.
“Of the original U.N. template’s actions, only nine were left without a substantial change to more closely reflect the conditions and needs of Sierra Madre,” noted City Management Analyst James Carlson in the staff report.
The council also approved a name change for the committee’s Accords Work-Plan at Tuesday’s meeting, renaming the list “Commitments and Goals.” The vote to approve the name change was approved 3-2, with Council Member Chris Koerber objecting, and Council Member John Capoccia abstaining.
According to the staff report, the committee requested that a new name be chosen as a replacement to “Accords,” explaining that they wanted to eliminate ties to the United Nations Urban Environmental Accords so to make these actions specific to Sierra Madre.
After going through each action item in the work plan, Mayor Josh Moran said that staff would give the committee a list of items that the council does not want them spending time on. The committee was asked to return at a later meeting with cost benefit analyses and SMART assessments on the items approved by the council.
Council Member Chris Koerber raised concerns early on that the SMART assessment and cost benefit analysis on each item were not completed by staff as discussed at an earlier meeting.
Carlson noted in the staff report that the Green Advisory Committee still needed to work out these assessments, and that it would require more time. “Each action item will need to be analyzed individually and many important decisions will need to be agendized at future City Council meetings,” wrote Carlson.
The Green Committee decided to apply the SMART assessment method to each of the plan actions at their Oct. 25 meeting. Introduced in Paul J. Meyer’s “Attitude is Everything” (2003), the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely) assessment is a guide for setting and successfully meeting objectives.
But the City Council decided to review each item of the Accords Work-Plan, providing its own spot analysis and assessment of each proposed action. And the attempt to review all 25 items of the work plan, and parcel out which ones the committee was to focus on, got off to a rocky start.
Opinions were mixed on the top four actions composing the energy section of the plan, which regards goals to increase the use of renewable energy while reducing peak electric loads and greenhouse gas.
However, Council Member John Capoccia dismissed the first four items of the Accords Work-Plan altogether, saying the focus should be on using renewable energy only if it makes the city more efficient from an operational cost perspective.
“Renewable energy is a great thing, but our biggest challenge ahead of us is not to save the world environmentally,” Capoccia said. “Our biggest challenge here is to balance our budget and to make sure that the resources we have in the city are used in the most effective manner whether it’s taxpayer dollars or whether it’s staff.”
After a full discussion of the work plan, the City Council finally directed staff to move forward with the committee’s next report, which is part of the process to elevate the committee’s status to full commission. The third report to reconsider the establishment of a Green Commission is tentatively scheduled for Nov. 27.
