1. Cities Share Advice on Disaster Recovery

    This week’s news that Moore, Okla., had been devastated by another EF5 tornado – the second of that magnitude in 14 years – brought to mind a session at the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference in Kansas City this past February. In that session, titled “Howling Winds and Ominous Skies: Disaster Resilience in the Age of Climate Change,” speakers recounted two extreme weather events and how local officials worked with state and federal agencies to deal with the aftermath and rebuild their communities. A 2007 EF5 tornado that nearly wiped out the village of Greensburg, Kan., and a 2008 flood that spilled over the 500-year floodplain in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, provided lessons applicable to any community that suddenly finds itself up to its neck in mud and mayhem.

  2. Small Town Makes Big Strides in Energy Efficiency

    NORTHAMPTON, Mass. -- When you’re trying to advance sustainability in a small town, it’s important to focus on priorities, pick your battles carefully, and don’t show up in the council chambers looking for a hand-out. Chris Mason, energy and sustainability officer for the small town of Northampton, population 28,500, said prioritization is a key component of a sustainability strategy in a smaller community where manpower and financial resources are often in short supply.

  3. Buffalo 'Green Code' to Replace City's 60-Year-Old UDO

    BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Two years in the making, Buffalo’s new Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) – dubbed the Buffalo Green Code – is about to be unveiled. In a bold and daunting initiative, the city decided in 2010 to completely scrap its 60-year-old development code and rebuild it from the ground up, using a New Urbanism model steeped in smart-growth development principles, green infrastructure, clean energy and sustainability best practices. Working with consulting company Camiros, Ltd., urban design company Goody Clancy and more than 5,000 citizens over the past two years, the city has refined the draft ordinance that officials hope to adopt by the end of the year.

  4. Gulf Coast Slow to Recover from Hurricanes Katrina and Isaac

    Earlier this year, during a long spell of snow and cold, the travel bug bit me. My thoughts drifted to the white sands and blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. My fingers soon followed, and in no time I found myself online, surfing vacation rental homes up and down the coast of Mississippi and Louisiana. Based on my aversion to crowds and casinos, I selected a vacation home half a mile from the beach in the quiet town of Waveland, Miss. It was just small enough and far enough from the water to be affordable, thus perfect for my husband, our dog, and me. It honestly never occurred to me to connect the list of towns I’d researched, including Waveland, Bay St. Louis, and Gulfport, to any specific events in the news. I knew there were frequent hurricanes, such as Isaac, which struck in 2012. I knew the BP drilling rig explosion gushed oil into part of the Gulf in 2010. I knew Hurricane Katrina had badly damaged the Gulf area, most famously New Orleans, about 50 miles west of Waveland. But that was in 2005. Ancient history, I thought.

  5. Community Gardens Flourish in Lawrence, Kansas

    Community gardens have the potential to beautify vacant lots, augment local food supplies and enhance the urban environment in a variety of ways. But, successful program management requires careful planning and ongoing support, according to Eileen Horn, sustainability coordinator for Douglas County and the city of Lawrence, Kan. In the winter of 2011, the city surveyed its vacant and underutilized properties, identified appropriate sites for agriculture, and made these sites available to citizens through an application process.

  6. Power Purchase Agreement Wins in Iowa District Court

    DES MOINES, Iowa – You can call Barry Shear and his Dubuque-based company, Eagle Point Solar, a lot of things – renewable power advocates, solar energy system developers, cutting-edge local business, for example – but the one thing you can’t call them is an electric power utility. So ruled a district court judge last week when reversing an Iowa Utilities Board opinion to the contrary. Polk County District Court Judge Carla Schemmel reversed the board’s 2012 ruling that a power purchase agreement between Eagle Point Solar and the city of Dubuque constituted a breach of Alliant Energy’s protected service territory.

  7. Study: Streams Stressed by Pharmaceutical Pollution

    Pharmaceuticals commonly found in the environment are disrupting streams, with unknown impacts on aquatic life and water quality, according to a new ecological applications paper released by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. The paper, written with input from researchers at Indiana University and Loyola University Chicago, highlights the ecological cost of pharmaceutical waste and the need for more research into environmental impacts. Globally, lakes and rivers are polluted by an array of pharmaceutical and personal care products. Freshwater fish and the invertebrates they eat are increasingly bathed in a weak solution of caffeine, estrogen, antibiotics, and antihistamine drugs – but little is known about the levels at which these compounds become toxic or lethal, or what the effect on our drinking water may be.

  8. Will Vegas be the First ‘Net-Zero’ City in America?

    If you’re one of those people who think the glitter of Tinseltown will never last, Tom Perrigo has some news for you. “Las Vegas will be around for hundreds of years.”

  9. Planning for an Aging America

    “I hope I die before I get old…” That line from Pete Townsend's iconic rock and roll anthem, “My Generation,” might have helped American baby boomers break free from the shackles of a repressive establishment in 1965, but it’s evident today that not many of them got their wish.

  10. Green Infrastructure Passes KC Test

    KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Just last year, workers in Kansas City replaced the last of the city’s wooden sewer pipes, some constructed prior to the Civil War. But, the infrastructure changes having the most impact on one challenged neighborhood are blossoming above the ground, not buried beneath it. Green infrastructure is helping alleviate combined sewer overflows, as intended, in the neighborhood where heavy rains often sent raw sewage spilling into the waterways of the Middle Blue River Basin.

  11. Best Practices for Land Use Planning in Coastal Communities

    Since 1932 the Mississippi River delta in south Louisiana has lost 2,300 square miles of land. Every hour it loses the equivalent of a football field to erosion, subsidence and the rising sea. As the water closes in on the two million people who live and work there, urban planners are busy grappling with a looming crisis. How will humans continue to thrive in a place that is literally sinking beneath their feet?

  12. The Top 20 Biggest Placemaking Mistakes

    A group of urban planners literally sang and danced their way through a presentation that identified the 20 biggest placemaking mistakes and the top 10 tools for making places great. No, we are not kidding.

  13. Conspiracy Theorists Fear Loss of Control

    According to the United Nations, sustainable development is a “mode of human development in which resource use aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come.” Yet according to conservative talk show host and commentator Glenn Beck, “sustainable development means centralized control over all of human life on planet earth.”

  14. Fracking Creates Smart-Growth Dilemma

    You might think it’s odd to be talking about supporting hydraulic fracturing at a smart-growth conference. But, then again, there are some who would say there isn’t anything particularly smart about urban growth of any kind. Yet, growth happens, and someone has to manage it. In areas of the country impacted by hydraulic fracturing – commonly called fracking – it turns out that growth happens a lot, and seemingly overnight, bringing with it a long list of issues reminiscent of the fabled California gold rush of 1849.

  15. PACE Financing - Down But Not Out

    If you thought PACE financing was dead on arrival, think again! Some jurisdictions are still using Property Assessed Clean Energy programs to help finance housing retrofits, despite a controversial 2010 ruling by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, according to speakers at a Jan. 31 webinar hosted by Applied Solutions. PACE financing programs allow private property owners to install small-scale renewable energy systems and make energy efficiency improvements to their buildings and pay for the cost over its functional life through an on-going assessment on property tax bills.

  16. Resilience and Adaptation Key Topics in 2013 Conferences

    The 2013 sustainability conference season is in full swing, starting with this week’s New Partners for Smart Growth Conference in Kansas City. After a year of devastating storms, droughts and wildfires, it’s no surprise that resilience and climate-change adaptation are reoccurring themes at many of the upcoming events. Get out your calendar; chances are there’s a conference, forum or symposium coming to a city near you. If not, you’ll also find a variety of online training opportunities you can attend live or download for later viewing.

  17. Aquaponic Agriculture Holds Promise for Local Foods

    AMES, Iowa -- An aquaponics experiment in Iowa is demonstrating that fresh greens and tasty fish can be produced almost anywhere in an economically and ecologically viable form of agriculture. Aquaponics is a combination of aquaculture and hydroponics in which fish waste is used to organically create nutrient-rich water that allows plants to grow without soil.

  18. Milwaukee Council Considers Green Streets Policy

    Still reeling from back-to-back flash floods in 2010, Milwaukee is hoping green infrastructure will prevent its multi-billion-dollar "Deep Tunnel" system from being overwhelmed again. To lessen the impact of heavy rain on its sewer system, the city of Milwaukee is in the process of adopting a green streets policy, adding landscaping and engineering features to capture, hold and clean stormwater – a more cost-effective alternative to expanding its underground infrastructure.

  19. Passive House Design Brings Simplicity to Energy Efficiency

    Do you think investing in the latest high-tech HVAC and on-site renewable energy systems is the only way to create an energy-efficient building? Well, architects in Europe are suggesting you think again. Passive House, a standard for green design and construction developed in Germany, is now being applied in the U.S. as a simplified and less mechanized approach to meeting rigorous standards of energy efficiency.

  20. Maple Syrup, Moose, and Local Impacts of Climate Change

    MILLBROOK, N.Y. -- In the northern hardwood forest, climate change is poised to reduce the viability of the maple syrup industry, spread wildlife diseases and tree pests, and change timber resources. And, according to a new BioScience paper released by twenty-one scientists, without long-term studies at the local scale — we will be ill-prepared to predict and manage these effects.

  21. Bioneers Define Resilience in Madison, Wis.

    By most definitions, sustainability refers to a community or practice that is stable enough to continue, thus assuring its environmental, economic, and social elements will be available for future generations. Lately another term is being applied by social and scientific innovators who are examining what allows a community to stand up under pressures that might otherwise destroy it: "Resilience."

  22. Microsoft to Build Zero-Carbon Data Center in Cheyenne

    Microsoft, ranked as the third largest purchaser of green power among the Environmental Protection Agency's Top 50 Green Power Partnership organizations, will expand its contributions to sustainability with yet another cutting-edge research project -- the first zero carbon data center powered by a fuel cell burning 100 percent renewable biogas from a wastewater treatment plant. The new, small prototype 300 kW “Data Plant” is being built outside of Cheyenne, Wyo. at the city’s Dry Creek Water Reclamation Facility and will run on methane produced by the facility.

  23. STRONG Act Prepares Local Communities for Extreme Weather

    WASHINGTON, D.C. – Following the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy, Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) today introduced legislation to strengthen existing extreme weather resiliency efforts. The legislation would provide state and local governments with the tools and information they need to develop and improve local infrastructure in an effort to better manage and withstand extreme weather in the short and long term.

  24. HUD-DOT Community Challenge Grant Supports Rural Studies

    Housing planners in West Virginia’s largest county knew the silver tsunami had hit. In 2011, the state edged past Florida as the state with the highest percentage of citizens over 50 years of age -- almost one-third of its population, according to the American Community Survey conducted annually by the U.S. Census Bureau.

  25. Public Health Officials Respond to Climate-Change Impacts

    While United Nations member states meet this week in Qatar on their elusive quest for a global response to climate change, state and local public health departments in the U.S. have been quietly preparing their response to climate change impacts at the ground level. Whether in a coastal region faced with rising seas, an interior state suffering from increasing heat waves and wild fires, or the Farm Belt bracing for more intense and destructive droughts, vulnerable populations bear the worst hardships of climate change.

  26. Creek Restoration Turns Flood Plain into Park-Like Amenity

    In the spring of 1999, residents of a neighborhood on the north side of Dubuque, Iowa, faced a serious dilemma: With tornado sirens blaring outside, they could either evacuate their homes in the middle of a major thunderstorm, or they could risk drowning in their flooded basements as the water continued to rise around them. To make matters worse, it’s doubtful that many who occupied the 1,150 homes in the path of the flooding even knew they were at risk prior to the storm. At that time, not many had even heard of Bee Branch Creek or were aware their homes sat within its watershed.
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