At Tuesday’s meeting of the City Council Budget and Finance Committee, fire chief Mack Bailey shared some statistics that reminded me why it makes sense to live in Oak Ridge. Per capita fire losses per capita in our city are only about 1/3 of the average in the southeastern U.S. (just $15 to $25 per year, versus about $65 in the region) and well below the national average of $50 per year. Also, he said that our Fire Department makes 3 times as many runs as is typical for a town our size — when people call for help, the ORFD shows up to come to their aid.
So this is what we get from the taxes we pay for our professional fire department: efficient fire prevention and response services that help minimize fire losses, plus a helpful bunch of people who will be there when we need them, whether it’s a fire, a medical emergency, or the proverbial cat stuck up a tree.
The morning news on WUOT included a report that the City of Knoxville is phasing out the popular Fort Kid playground near the World’s Fair site. It’s going to be replaced by a new playground on the Fair site, apparently one of the modern plastic and steel variety.
Fortunately for fans of amazing wooden playgrounds designed by local kids, the Cedar Hill Park Playground in Oak Ridge is not going away. The Cedar Hill playground (built in 1987) was the first of these wooden playgrounds in the Knoxville metro area, designed and built by community volunteers with the advice of the Robert Leathers organization, and soon it may be the only one.
The kids who designed the Cedar Hill playground as elementary school students are now well into adulthood, and last year the Recreation and Parks Department told the City Council budget committee that the playground is showing its age and needs continuing repairs, but it’s still open for the enjoyment of all.
The playground photo is from Kris Light’s website. See more of her photos of Cedar Hill at EastTennesseeWildflowers.com.
I expected the state budget to be the main topic Monday morning at the League of Women Voters’ monthly Breakfast with the Legislators, and I was right (as Bob Fowler reported in the News Sentinel). I didn’t predict the discussion that occurred over reauthorization of the Tennessee Plan (the procedure that Tennessee uses to select judges for the state’s highest courts) and proposals to return to the days when most school superintendents were elected, not appointed. When asked about these topics, neither State Senators Randy McNally or Ken Yager gave clear and forthright statements of support for the status quo. Both hemmed and hawed a lot, and Yager’s comments suggested that may be leaning toward returning to direct election of appellate court judges (but only in non-partisan elections — he said he opposed having appellate judges elected in partisan elections) and that he might want to let counties go back to electing school superintendents.
I found myself with the sinking feeling that the Republican majority in the State Senate is committed to restoring direct elections for these positions, and that our two local Senators were reluctant to say anything contrary to their party’s position.
Direct election of senior judges and school superintendents is a bad idea. We need to maintain an independent judiciary that makes decisions based on the law, not on popular opinion or the wishes of big campaign contributors. Also, we need for our public schools to be run by professional educators who are motivated by the needs of children, not the need to be re-elected. I hope the General Assembly members recognize that changing back to direct election of these offices would be a major step backward — no, make that two steps backward — for Tennessee.
If we thought that Oak Ridge should cut back on fuel use by city vehicles, consider Knox County, where it seems (according to today’s News Sentinel) that there are 136 county-owned take-home vehicles (not even including the sheriff’s department), including 52 SUVs, 46 pickup trucks (most of them 3/4-ton Ford F-250s), and 6 “vans or buses.” That’s an eye-poppingly large number of take-home vehicles, and with typical fuel efficiencies in the range of 12-15 mpg, the vehicles that county officials drive are using up more of the county’s taxpayer money and emitting more CO2 and air pollutants than most of us thought possible.
I recognize that some of these employees need to travel to development sites and other areas where 4-wheel drive is needed, and sometimes they need to carry a lot of people or material. But that doesn’t mean that every department head needs to tool around town in a big truck or full-size SUV 7 days a week. I figure that this is mainly a cultural thing — big egos demand big, powerful vehicles. Maybe this is one of those situations where the voice of the people can help bring cultural change.
Once again, Knox County is making the City of Oak Ridge look good by comparison, but I know that our city government also could learn to get by with a less muscular vehicle fleet.
The process used at the Saturday forum was based on the process followed to elicit community input to Chattanooga’s climate action plan, which had been published two days before the Oak Ridge forum. Jim Frierson of the Chattanooga Green Team spoke at the forum regarding Chattanooga’s experience, helping to set the stage for our discussions.
The heart of the forum was a set of six facilitated discussion groups focused on six different general topics. Attendees spent 15 minutes in each topical area, sharing their ideas on things that Oak Ridge possibly could do to reduce energy use or otherwise promote sustainability. Volunteers from the community served as facilitators, and ideas were recorded by EQAB members who volunteered to be scribes. It was clear that the interactions between people stimulated a lot of good thinking. Within about 2 hours, each topical area had a list of roughly 100 ideas. There was minimal discussion of the ideas — the purpose was to generate ideas, not to evaluate them. Evaluation (for example, of cost, feasibility, and potential reduction on greenhouse gas emissions) will come later.
After the small-group sessions, participants were asked to go around the room and give votes (in the form of stickers) to their favorite ideas. Because each person had only two votes and little time to scan the lists, I don’t think this part worked very well — there were far too many ideas for most people to be able to make a meaningful choice of just two “best” ones.
I heard a lot of positive feedback about the process. People enjoyed meeting and interacting with their fellow citizens — this was not a crowd in which everyone already knew everyone else, so people were seeing new faces and hearing new perspectives. I think people particularly appreciated that the request for their opinions was essentially open-ended, rather than being framed in a way that narrows the range of “acceptable” answers (and may not allow citizens to say what they really think). Several people said that this type of format should be used for other City efforts to involve the public in decision-making — such as planning for the Melton Lake waterfront and marina area.
People have been asking me about what ideas that were generated, and which were the most popular. I can’t answer those questions very well yet. The volunteer scribes are not finished typing up the lists of ideas they recorded. Here’s a sample of some of the ideas (and themes of groups of more specific ideas) that I recall:
* Give residents incentives or financial assistance to make their homes more energy efficient
* Provide public transit
* Make the city more bike-friendly and more pedestrian-friendly
* Encourage LEED certification for new development
* “Make lawns unfashionable”
* Restrict tree-cutting in new developments
* Hire a city urban forester
* Convert city vehicles to alternative fuels
* Promote the farmer’s market
* Reduce vehicle idling by modifying intersections to reduce waiting time
* Put photovoltaic solar panels on the roofs of schools and city buildings
All of the ideas need to be reported publicly soon, and there will be more opportunities for public input — as well as evaluating ideas to find the ones that make the most sense practically, economically, and to achieve environmental goals.
By most measures, Saturday’s forum “Greening Oak Ridge: A Community Forum for Shaping a Green Future” was a smashing success. There were about 100 people there, with a diverse variety of perspectives, and those people seemed to be thoroughly engaged in generating ideas about what Oak Ridge needs to do to make Oak Ridge a sustainable community for future generations.
Sustainability is often about the environment, but more broadly it means “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This is no small challenge. The global financial collapse unfortunately means that we are now depending on those future generations to rescue our present economy. This forum was focused, however, on an environment-related sustainability challenge: sustaining the future environment and the future economy in the face of the impacts of the continuing buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — and taking action toward stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations and the climate.
On Friday, I heard the news that a group of 26 big companies and several environmental organizations calling themselves the U.S. Climate Action Partnership had declared their support for reducing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 2005 levels by 2050. That’s a frighteningly ambitious goal facing us, our children, and our children’s children. It’s even more frightening to realize that climate experts say that the goal of 80 percent reduction from 2005 to 2050 is not nearly ambitious enough.
In May of last year, the City Council passed a resolution committing Oak Ridge to take action to address greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions, and to take a leadership role in addressing of climate change as an issue. The Environmental Quality Advisory Board was charged with advising the City in the development and implementation of milestones to accomplish these objectives.
As a first step in reducing Oak Ridge’s impact on the global atmosphere, EQAB needed to figure out how big that impact is and what we do that produces that impact. At the forum, Athanasia Senecal (photo), a UT intern working with the City, told about the inventory of greenhouse gas emissions from City government and from the community as a whole. The biggest source of City government emissions is (surprisingly) the water and wastewater sector — mostly pumping water uphill in our beautiful but hilly terrain. City government emissions are, however, only about 1 percent of the community total.
To help define actions for the community to take, part of EQAB’s task is to make recommendations on city actions and policies to help ensure sustainability in the coming years and decades.
Saturday’s forum was held to gather input and ideas to feed into those policy recommendations. Participants were asked questions like:
* What steps do you think Oak Ridge should take to become a greener community?
* What should the city do to reduce our carbon footprint and build environmental sustainability into our infrastructure?
[To be continued]
As a transplanted northerner (and having spent 9 winters in the icebox region of Minnesota and Wisconsin), I figure that Tennessee doesn’t have “real winter.”
This weekend might be the closest thing we get to a taste of real winter this year. It’s already warned up a good bit since then, but in the cold on Saturday the fountain at the Oak Ridge Civic Center presented a weirdly icy scene.
Good news for families or communities with older drivers — and good news for all of us who expect to get older. It seems that the higher rate of auto accident fatalities for older drivers is not because they are bad drivers, but because they are more frail. This suggests that the number of senior citizens who continue driving past the time that they should quit is smaller than we often hear (or fear).
I’d still feel better if Tennessee required testing (especially of vision) for driver’s license renewals of people over a certain age, and I’d like for Oak Ridge seniors to have more transportation options to make it easier for them to turn in their car keys, but it’s good to know that senior drivers aren’t the “hazard on wheels” that they are sometimes suggested to be.
