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How other cities are going green.
Sure, it rains a lot in Portland, Ore., but that hasn’t stopped the city from installing solar-powered parking meters. This northwestern city of about 575,000 people has earned the right to be called America’s unofficial “Green Capital,” based on SustainLane’s annual rankings of the nation’s most sustainable cities.
Portland, Ore.
Portland tops the green scene for good reason. While many cities, such as Tulsa, are just now shifting toward a greener future, Portland has been working on it for 30 years, leaving no stone unturned in its steady, determined march to sustainability. The city’s list of accomplishments and sustainable agenda grow by the year.
According to SustainLane, Portland’s strengths stem from “strict land-use policies, implementing an urban growth boundary, requiring density and setting a strong precedent for sustainable development.”
Since the 1990s, Portland has been saving $2 million a year by converting vehicles, water treatment plants and other city facilities to sustainable energy sources. Even traffic signals have been re-fitted with power-saving LED lights. By next year, Portland intends to meet its target of operating on 100 percent renewable energy, principally from wind.
The city says it is in negotiations now with a private power supplier to make this ambitious goal a reality in just a few months.
Albuquerque, N.M.
Albuquerque, N.M., a city of about 520,000, also is well on its way to a greener future, ranking 18 in SustainLane’s study. John Soladay, director of environmental health for the city of Albuquerque, says his city has made enormous strides in the last decade.
“The most important thing a city can do is simply make a commitment to move toward sustainability,” he says. “Sustainability is not a switch you can just turn on. It’s a long-term process.”
He says it takes leadership and decisiveness at the highest levels of city government to keep the sustainability ball rolling. Albuquerque found that leadership in Mayor Martin Chavez.
As with much of the American West, Albuquerque’s initial sustainability issue was water supply and conservation. With the San Juan-Chama water diversion project coupled with aggressive conservation practices implemented over the last decade, “our city’s water issues are largely resolved,” Soladay says. “It came down to people thinking, ‘I want my kids and grandkids to have plenty of water, too.’”
Half of the city’s bus fleet has converted to compressed natural gas and the rest are diesel/hybrids. Regulations require all new city buildings to be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver or better in energy efficiency. Plus, there is now a light rail running through the city that connects to Santa Fe, N.M., resulting in fewer emissions. Boardings on the light rail system increased dramatically last year, Soladay says, some routes by more than 50 percent.
Still, Albuquerque struggles in some areas of sustainability, with only about 11 percent of residents in some areas of the city participating in recycling. That’s a problem the city is trying to fix.
“Our goal is to have a 45 to 50 percent diversion (of recyclables) rate by 2015, and I think the key to that is making recycling as easy as possible,” Soladay says.
Albuquerque currently has a pilot program that offers people two recycling containers, one for green waste and the other for manufactured items such as cans and plastic jugs. By making these and a few other changes, the participation rate in the pilot program has jumped from 11 percent to more than 50 percent, Soladay says.
Santa Fe, N.M.
In the greater metropolitan area of Santa Fe, population 130,000, residents are striving for greater sustainability, especially when it comes to water conservation, says Katherine Mortimer, a supervising planner for the city.
“We have an aggressive water conservation program that requires new construction to off-set their water demand by retrofitting existing buildings with water-conserving toilets,” she says. “Consideration is being given to expanding the program to other fixtures as the number of older toilets in the city dwindles.”
Santa Fe buses run on CNG and some stormwater is diverted for passive irrigation. The city has other initiatives in the works and strong backing from the community, Mortimer says.
“There is almost unanimous support for sustainability,” she says. “The biggest obstacle we have right now is the cost of some of these programs. Therefore, we will focus on those activities that have an economic development component to help use these activities to restore our economy.”
While sustainability is good for the long-term health of a city’s environment, economy and citizens, convincing people now to shoulder higher short-term costs and change old habits can be tricky.
“First, you’ve got to make a solid commitment to sustainability and then establish achievable goals,” Soladay recommends. “Second, you have to enable those goals through legislative action. That’s where it can get hard, but you’ve got to push it through.”
