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NEWS

Scottsdale sustainability plan has a ways to go

Posted 3/15/23

After a year of work by city staff and residents, Scottsdale’s sustainability plan still has a ways to go.

That was the consensus at the Scottsdale City Council’s March 7 …

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NEWS

Scottsdale sustainability plan has a ways to go

Posted

After a year of work by city staff and residents, Scottsdale’s sustainability plan still has a ways to go.

That was the consensus at the Scottsdale City Council’s March 7 meeting.

Sustainability Director Lisa McNeilly presented the plan as it currently stands to council for their comments.

Council member Tom Durham had general concerns with the plan.

He felt work on the plan should continue at least another six months, which McNeilly recommended as well.

“I think this is too high a level and obviously somethings such as the general plan are going to be very high level but I tend to agree there needs to be more data in here about where we are now and what we expect through the indicators,” Durham said. “We have a lot of indicators in here but no numbers connected to them right now.”

Vice Mayor Kathy Littlefield had a list of complaints about the plan.

First, she said the plan was not properly vetted by the Scottsdale Environmental Advisory Commission, the McDowell Sonoran Preserve Planning Committee or the public.

“For that reason alone, it should be withdrawn until proper outreach can be done,” Littlefield said.

She also joined voices with councilwomen Betty Janik and Solange Whitehead as well as council member Barry Graham in opposing the plan’s call to reduce traffic lanes in order to create bike lanes.

“It’s anti-car,” Littlefield said. “Scottsdale residents have said for years traffic is their number one complaint about how the city is run, but using personal vehicles is not only part of the freedom we enjoy in this country, in Scottsdale it’s a necessity for many. It is not the job of the city government to push people out of their cars and on to bicycles and mass transit.”

She also took issue with the fact there is no cost analysis for any of the recommended actions in the plan and felt parts of the plan are at odds with other goals the city promotes.

“For example, our water department asks residents to save water by planting desert landscaping whereas the sustainability plan asks residents to plant more trees. Which is it?” Littlefield asked.

Janik also wanted to see the reduction of carbon dioxide per capita a goal.

“The best indicator of if we’re making progress is the concentration of carbon dioxide per person,” Janik said. “It’s the same thing we did with water. Are we using less water? Yeah, per person we are. Carbon dioxide will probably go up because we are growing as a community, but if the per capita use goes down, that would be the best measure because that’s what causes the green house effect. So that should be, I think, the major sustainability indicator.”

Whitehead said it is important to understand what the plan is not.

“The plan is not a zoning document,” she said. “We cannot build apartments based on this plan. It’s not about regulations. This is not a regulation document. We don’t increase any regulations ... It’s not a financial document. It’s an idea of what do we want and if it costs too much it’s probably not going to get approved.”

Councilwoman Tammy Caputi said the plan needs to represent a wide cross-section of the community.

“To me it’s really important that if we’re going to create a sustainability plan, that it not be a silo, that (we) involve every part of the community,” she said. “If you just go out to the usual suspects on a sustainability plan, like the environmental commission, you’re going to get a very particular, narrow view. To me ... it’s essential you involve all the boards and commissions that might be involved in the actual implementation of a sustainability plan.”

Graham also took issue with the language used in the plan.

“Some of the language in here is kind of crafty,” he said. “It’s hard to understand because it’s not in the plainest English ... It uses this nice flowery language that makes me feel good but I want to understand what it means.”

Mayor David Ortega reminded everyone the city is still in the early stages of perfecting the plan.

“We’re not on sustainability (plan) 3.4 or 4.4, we’re on 1.0 basically,” he said.

He also noted people are using different transportation choices, such as Uber and Lyft as well as car pooling these days. He also looked forward to when Waymo driverless cars can take people where they’re going.

Public opinion

Most of the members of the public who spoke at the meeting flat out shot the plan down. Four out of five citizens, including the chairwoman of the Scottsdale Environmental Advisory Commission Ute Brady, spoke against it.

Brady called the plan a good start but urged the council not to adopt the plan on several grounds.

“As a long-time resident of Scottsdale I’m a little disappointed in the lack of vision, direction and a little bit of the haphazard messaging in the current community sustainability plan … it contains very little information on where we are now, why it’s important for us to move forward into a more sustainable future or how I as a citizen can get more involved if I choose to do so,” she said

Brady also noted the Scottsdale Environmental Advisory Commission voted against recommending approval of the plan.

Finally, she said the plan lacks some critical components.

“It has some baseline metrics but not enough to provide a measurement of where we are now related to sustainability,” she said. “It also is missing the identification of goals, where it is we want to be in 5, 10, 15, 20 years. And indicators are missing how we get from the baseline to the goals and strategies and actions that provide a road map of actions that will lead us from the baseline to the goals.”

Resident Alisa McMahon said the plan lacked goals and a means to measure progress and a time frame to meet those goals.

“Ideas were collected from the general plan, staff and citizens,” she said. “Those ideas were grouped into buckets, a heading was stuck on top and those became our strategies and actions. They have not been prioritized or quantified and we haven’t determined the how.”

She added that the plan lacks compelling messaging about why it matters or the challenges it faces.

Resident Anthony Leavy said the plan just isn’t practical.

“Tonight I’m here to speak against the sustainability plan because it’s based on ideas that our citizens will work more from home, they’ll be able to ride their bikes or motor scooters to work or maybe they’ll even be able to take mass transit that doesn’t exist or is very slow and not a very pleasant experience.”

He added that the plan would increase the cost of new homes and the cost to remodel homes.

Old Town Scottsdale art gallery owners Bob Pejman and French Thompson spoke out against the plan’s proposal to turn traffic lanes into bike paths.

Scottsdale’s population is too old and its weather is too hot five months out of the year for bikes to replace cars in town, Pejman said.

“This is the emperor’s new clothes,” Pejman said. “Nobody wants to come out and say this doesn’t work because nobody wants to be labeled as anti green.”

Reducing traffic lanes will only increase pollution as cars will be stuck in traffic,” Pejman said.

Thompson echoed Pejman.

“I just did a U.S. Census report (study),” Thompson said. “It said less than .6% of people ride (bikes) to work. So if you’re taking lanes out, you’re taking lanes from 99.4% of the people to give it to .6% of the people and that’s assuming they’re going to ride year-round, which they’re not.”

Philip David Allsop, a Scottsdale resident and a sustainability scientist with the Arizona State University Global Futures Laboratory, was the lone speaker who did not urge the council to shoot down the plan. Instead, he encouraged the council look at the plan in context of all the other city plans, like the general plan and the transportation plan, and think of it as an “amplifier” of those other plans.

Allsop also added that the plan needs to have measurable benchmarks.