Support for Splash Pads is a Kind of Climate Action: Notes on the Climate Action Plan Committee

Though it has not occasioned much comment at all, last month in the course of the Budget Committee meetings, it came out that the City apparently is shifting formal support for the Climate Action Plan from the General Fund to the Utility Fund.

September 2021

Shifting CAP funding from General Fund

Comments in supplemental reports were not clear that that ending support from the General Fund had a corresponding move to increase funding from the Utility Fund for the CAP. (See comment below for a little more. It would be nice to read more explicit discussion of this rather than having to comb through a line item buried in a set of spreadsheets! In fact, in the folder of agenda and reports for the Budget Committee, there's no obvious document that is the latest version of the budget. It's hard to follow the process. See the addendum below, also.)

Happily, a couple days ago the Committee restored funding for water service and splash pads during the summer in our parks. People flocked to support the splash pads, and several public comments in support of them cited heat events.

Front page today on heat and budget

There could be a stronger thread for climate through the budget conversations.

On Monday the 13th the Climate Action Plan meets.

The City's plan to increase funding for the Committee is good news, but there are still ways  the Committee and the Climate Action Plan still seem regarded with a secondary kind of activity and value. Any boost may not be enough to shift the Committee to a more active role with leadership.

The Committee and Salem's Climate Action has been underwhelming for two years now. The role of the committee has seemed mainly to respond and react to the lead of other agencies and entities. The CAP initiates very little. It and the Committee has not really been structured, it has seemed, to lead. Mostly the Committee hears updates from others and nods in a supportive fashion. And now they don't even post full meeting packets to the City website, instead saying they are "available upon request." The City government as a whole has not seemed very passionate about the CAP.

Last month a reader sent along an interesting note from Eugene. Their transportation advocacy group, Better Eugene-Springfield Transportation, who also is the fiscal sponsor for Salem Bike Vision, was partnering with University of Oregon students for a PR campaign.

From BEST:

the group decided that a perfect campaign will be to design how BEST will participate in the Week Without Driving: September 30–October 6, 2024. That national effort aims to help public officials, transportation professionals, advocates, and others who have the option to drive regularly to understand the barriers and challenges that non-drivers face when trying to move safely in their communities, and to work with non-drivers to create better communities for all. BEST is looking to the students to think outside the box about how to better capture the attention and engage with especially those who decide what transportation options our community has.

It was interesting to compare to the PR campaign the Climate Action Plan had adopted from a different group of UO students, those in the Sustainable Cities residency. That campaign would focus on urging Salem drivers not to idle.

Not-driving is so much stronger than limiting idling. 

You might recall when a Cherriots Board Member and principal of Salem Bike Vision shared the week on social media a couple years ago.

via the former Twitter

How wonderful it would be to have a lot more participation. What if the whole Climate Action Plan Committee and City Council participated?

The Eugene project is evidence that the students could have worked on something with real benefits, not some Potemkin, greenwashy thing on idling.

To be clear, criticism of the idling campaign points to a failure in the adult supervision. It is on the adults in the room, the client, to approve, and even to guide the students to, something meaningful, not to encourage an empty gesture. 

And in fact there were other options!

The Winter Term Recap suggests another of the student PR projects was called "Pump up Salem." It was focused on promoting the installation of heat pumps. That's way more useful and potentially more effective than a campaign on idling.

In the Fall Term Recap there's another interesting bit:

Over winter term 2024, phase two of the project [on sidewalk corridors] will continue through another section of the course to provide city staff a deeper analysis on three priority locations and topics. A student from this course was also selected and received funding through the College of Arts and Sciences to intern with the City of Salem to identify and ground truth regions of Salem where new sidewalks, green spaces, bike lanes, and lighting would be most beneficial to improve pedestrian and biking safety. A GIS equity analysis index will be developed and then ground truthing will be done to verify the data and confirm equity and accessibility considerations by generating an equity analysis index to ensure under-represented communities are receiving services. This project will expand and improve the pedestrian experience, as well as promote emission-free transportation, all to make Salem more sustainable.  

It would be nice to hear more about this!

Back to the CAP Committee meeting, in the minutes for March there's a note on downtown curbside parking. Unsurprisingly, the CAP is a little optimistic on ease of implementation.

Project costs and timelines identified in the Climate Action Plan for this strategy are shorter and less expensive than Urban Division expects this project to entail.

In March the Committee also adopted some tracking metrics, and it will be interesting to see how they publish and discuss them. Vehicle Miles per Day and Transit Ridership will be valuable: They should reflect actual travel behavior, not some potential thing like a theoretical relation between bike lane miles and bike trips.

Tracking metrics from March

On the May agenda are no items of specific interest here: Energy efficiency in city buildings, in-pipe micro hydroelectric generation, and an Environmental Justice screening and mapping tool.

The Committee meets at 10am on Monday the 13th.

Addendum, May 11th

Here's the info Jim refers to in his comment. The shift in funding is first mentioned a little buried on page 94 of the full budget document. The budget document is in a completely different place from the Budget Committee documents. This is non-intuitive!

What appears to be the very first mention
(page 94)

Here's the breakdown.

The line item in the Utility Fund breakdown
(page 100)

It is interesting that work on the Climate Action Plan is understood as distinct from pollution compliance, pollution monitoring, and such. Those are rated as "most" or "more" in alignment with the City goals and values, and the CAP is rated "less." Still we formally carve out an exception as if greenhouse gases were not another kind of pollution.