Newswriting environmental beat project

Sellers/Seltzer 04/24/03 First piece Success of local environmental efforts hinges on economic development Environmental awareness has steadily improved over the past few decades, said Thomas Smith, environmental science professor at the University of Virginia. But new problems continue to surface.

Smith said the growing population, both globally and locally, has had a significant ecological effect.

“Even though on a per capita or per dollar period of economic activity, things have become cleaner or reduced emissions, the growing level of economic activity and the growing level of population demand for services and resources still is running ahead” of environmental efforts, Smith said. “There’s still a rising impact.”

Many environmental improvements were the result of technological advances that showed the need for added environmental awareness, he said.

“I think a critical feature in raising environmental awareness was really the space program,” he said. “It’s no coincidence that the first Earth Day responded to that same period where the photos from the Apollo mission were sending back to us the first images of the Earth lingering there in space, combined with, at that same point, the developing satellite program monitoring everything from climate, to changes in the Earth’s surface, to land use patterns and so on. It’s the first time that humans were really able to stand back and see the big picture.”

Smith added, however, that technology was not the solution to the world’s environmental problems.

Though science helped provide the answers to many current problems, new environmental issues were coming out of advances in areas like genetic engineering, Smith said.

“Hopefully we will reach a day when we’ll say emissions of nitrous oxides or sulfur oxides has been diminished to the point where it’s no longer a major concern for ozone formation or acid rain or so on,” he said.

“But I think what will happen is other things will emerge. And they emerge just because we’re not aware of the problem. Our whole perception of the world around us changes.”

While environmental science pointed out problems to the ecological system, activism also played an important part in affecting policy change, Smith said. One of these changes was the increased regulation on industries like energy production, he added.

“The Clean Air Act and other legislation that’s come out of the era initiated in the seventies has placed restrictions on emissions so that technology has developed, scrubbers for instance, in the stacks, and so on. ”Following legislation like the Clean Air Act, factory emissions of air pollutants are monitored and controlled by the Department of Environmental Quality to meet state and federal standards.

The DEQ requires plants in operation to meet certain guidelines or face prosecution, said Sharon Foley,

air permits manager at the Valley Regional office of the DEQ, which oversees the Charlottesville/Albemarle area.

“Plants constructed are required to obtain permits and to review available control technologies,” Foley said.

This includes devices like scrubbers that filter the air of harmful chemicals coming out of the turbines.

The type of plant also plays a substantial role in the emissions produced, Foley said.

“Natural gas burning plants produce much lower emissions than coal plants” and therefore require considerably lower forms of control technology, she said.

The University of Virginia currently operates a coal burning facility as its central heating plant. Smith called the plant “a disgrace” to environmental efforts.

The plant is a problem for Charlottesville residents worried about the large quantities of greenhouse gases it emits, Smith said. These gasses, such as carbon dioxide (CO 2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N20), released into the atmosphere.

“One of the biggest concerns is the production of nitrous oxides and some other compounds that are precursors in the formation of ozone,” Smith said.

Excess ozone in the atmosphere creates smog and traps in radiation from the sun, resulting in climate change. This, in turn, affects agricultural productivity, water supplies, and sea level. Warmer summers lead to respiratory problems, and an increasing amount of deaths due to heat related causes.

The UVA coal plant also posed the threat of malfunctioning, as it did in January, 2003, covering nearby neighborhoods in soot.

Smith said he was surprised by the lack of response from University officials following the incident.

“Private companies tend to react the other way,” he said. One example was the cleanup following the Exxon Valdez oil spill. “The first thing they did was to say ‘I don’t care what it costs,’ to get in there.

They were concerned about the public perception.”

In spite of the ecological impact, the problem of the plant came down to money, Smith said. “The whole issue is a classic example of the battle between the desire to be a good citizen and the realities of economics.”

Smith said solving the problem would come at a high economic cost to the University. However, he said he thought public perception ultimately would influence them to change over to a cleaner facility.

“They’re incredibly responsive to public opinion, although people in the community don’t always agree with that. They tend to think we side step a lot of these things.”

When compared to other areas in the state, the air quality in Charlottesville is not a problem, according to the DEQ. Foley said that the Charlottesville area currently met the DEQ’s emissions-based standards. “I guess it’s better than other parts of Virginia in that it’s in compliance,” she said.

However, one problem for the area, Smith said, is air pollution from neighboring counties as a result of deregulation in the industry. This allows natural gas burning facilities including the Tenaska plant in Fluvanna County to feed into larger power grids, supplying energy to areas like New York and Chicago, he said.

“Deregulation has added another dimension to [the issue,] a sort of economic and ethical dilemma, in that certain communities are more willing to take on these environmental costs,” he said. “Albemarle country would have flat out denied [the proposed facilities] but Fluvanna County doesn’t have the tax base that we have.”

Smith said growing counties such as Fluvanna were more inclined than the affluent Charlottesville/Albemarle region to take on industrial opportunities that benefit their economies and to disregard environmental impact.

“Fluvanna needs the money. It’s harder for them to say ‘no’,” he said. Even though the plant would be in Fluvanna County, Albemarle and Charlottesville would be affected, he added.

“We share the same water systems and watershed. What you do upstream influences us even though we didn’t have a say in the matter. We’re going to feel the same impacts in terms on air and water quality that Fluvanna does.”

Smith said plants that produce energy to be sold commercially to other areas were not accountable for the pollution damage in neighboring regions.

“We don’t have the mechanisms. As a matter of fact, the law restrains the Department of Environmental Quality from looking at [ozone emissions] collectively,” he said.

“We need to wake up to the fact that one plus one doesn’t equal one.”

The DEQ restrictions are based on individual plant emissions and not on the accumulated pollution in an area, Foley said.

A human resources representative for the Tenaska project declined to comment on the matter.

The plant also would impact area water conservation efforts. “The Tenaska plant would use three times the amount of water to cool its engines every day than the entire city of Charlottesville uses in one day,” said Charlottesville City Council member Kevin Lynch.

Development and increases in population have put a strain on local resources, Smith said, resulting in problems like last fall’s water shortage. “This time, we ignored a potential problem until it became serious.”

Smith said the lack of public awareness and of long-term insight contributed to the drought.

“We have a tendency to view things in the short-term,” he said. “We need to maintain public awareness going into those dry summer months.”

The measures taken by the city to curb water usage and encourage conservation came too late, Smith said. “The whole situation wasn’t handled very well,” he said. “Making all those cuts and restrictions was

OK, but making them all at once like that creates an economic crunch.”

The state of emergency demanded that mandatory restrictions be placed on water usage with stiff fines of up to $500 and misdemeanor penalties for noncompliance. Conservation efforts and less demand for water created a shortage in reservoir operating fees, requiring them to boost their wholesale rates to the city. Over the course of five months, consumer water rates in the city increased by 225 percent.

The urgency of addressing issues like factory pollution and water shortages did have a positive impact in that they increased concern for what needed to be done, Smith said.

“I think we’re beginning to see, that is, what people are becoming aware of, is that we don’t have the infrastructures, social, political institutions to actually address some of these,” he said. “I think we went through a period where awareness was raised.”

Drought rate-increase timeline Winter 2002 – City water rates were not affected by the shortage.

The cost was a flat rate of $1.25 and a usage rate at $22.52 per 1000 cubic ft.

July 1, 2002 – The city began charging its standard summer rate for water usage. The price per 1000 cubic feet increased to $24.77.

August 30, 2002 – Governor Warner issued an executive order declaring a state of emergency and issuing mandatory restrictions. Restaurants stopped serving drinking water except on request. Pools were not allowed to be refilled from the public water supply. Fountains were turned off. Watering of lawns was prohibited.

September 17, 2002 – Reservoir capacity dropped to below 60 percent. The city implemented Phase II restrictions, prohibiting the washing of cars and watering of athletic fields. Businesses were required to put up signs encouraging the conservation of water. Consumers were allowed 600 cubic feet of water at the normal rate (2.477 cents/ft3) before the rate increased by 150 percent.

October 7, 2002 – Council voted for a flat rate increase of 150 percent, eliminating the 600 ft3 cap, effective at the start of the next billing period. It was agreed that Phase III restrictions would be imposed when the reservoir reached 45 percent capacity.

November 4, 2002 – Though rains had filled one reservoir back to 78 percent capacity, reduced usage had impacted the cost of water. Following a 125 percent wholesale water rate increase by the Rivanna Reservoir to the city, Council tabled a notion to increase the usage rate to $55.47/1000 ft3, almost 225 percent above the original consumer rate. It was put into effect at the following meeting, November 18.

March 3, 2003 – The Reservoir lowered its wholesale charge to the city. Council lowered city rates to $24.89/1000 ft3.

Water Rate Increases

60 55 50

Dollars per 1000 cubic feet

45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 Winter, 2002

September 17, 2002 July 1, 2002

November 18, 2002

October 21, 2002

Time

March 3, 2003

Glossary of Terms Fossil Fuels- decayed animal and vegetable materials that have been compressed by the earth’s geological cycle. Examples are coal, peat, lignite, petroleum and natural gas. These materials can be burned or otherwise consumed to produce heat. Nearly 90% of the world’s electricity demand is met by the consumption of fossil fuels.

Greenhouse effect- Small amounts of gases are found naturally in the earth’s atmosphere. These gases help to regulate the earth’s temperature and climates. These gases are collectively known as greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases include, water vapor (H20), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N20), and synthetic chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These gases allow light from the sun to enter the earth’s atmosphere and reach the earth. The earth’s surface absorbs some of this light energy, which warms the earth. Some of this warmth escapes the earth in the form of thermal radiation.

-Some of this thermal radiation escapes into space, while some of it is trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases. This natural warming of the earth’s atmosphere is called the greenhouse effect.

Burning fossil fuels releases high amounts of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.

Deforestation also releases carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.

-The increased amount of greenhouse gases means that more heat is trapped in the atmosphere, raising the average global temperature and causing climate changes. This effect is called global warming.

Ozone- the formation of ozone gas occurs naturally in the atmosphere’s second layer, the stratosphere.

Ozone acts as a “sunscreen” for the earth, blocking about 95% of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation. This ozone layer protects people, animals, and plants from sunburn, skin cancers, and other damage.

-increased amounts of ozone in the atmosphere result in industrial and photochemical smog, which hinder respiratory abilities and cause the “haze” around cities that limits visibility.

-CFCs used by humans as coolants and propellants are released into the atmosphere. The CFCs react with the present ozone and deplete it. This allows more harmful UV radiation to reach the earth’s surface, making skin cancers and burns more common. Plants and crops are also damaged.

Watershed- a region of land that is crisscrossed by smaller waterways that drain into a larger body of water, such as a river or ocean. As a local example, hundreds of streams, creeks, and sources of groundwater ultimately drain into the Rivanna River. The land that these waters drain is known as the Rivanna River basin or watershed.

Runoff- when the precipitation rate exceeds the ground’s ability to absorb water, the soil becomes saturated. Water begins to move down slope on the ground’s surface, depositing the water and sediments that it picks up on other surfaces or in bodies of water. Problems include erosion and water pollution.

Runoff also occurs in developed areas when water isn’t able to enter the ground due to impervious surfaces such as concrete.

Urban sprawl- the trend of low-density expansion of large urban areas into surrounding, undeveloped agricultural areas. Development occurs in patches and is scattered. This increases the dependency on the automobile, due to the increased distance from the suburbs to the urban area. This type of development often includes little planning and high amounts of green field development.

Sellers/Seltzer 4/24/03 Second piece Development and sustainability a balancing act for city officials Since the mid-1990s, Charlottesville’s population has increased by several thousand people. This rise in population has made it more difficult for the city’s policy makers to balance increasing development and the detrimental effects it has on the environment and local resources.

“We’re doing a better job as stewards of our local environment, but we’re not as good as we could be,” Charlottesville City Council Member Kevin Lynch said.

Lynch is a member of Charlottesville’s Democrats for Change, which formed in 1999 before the City elections of 2000. At the time of their formation, the Democrats for Change hoped to “create and implement a vision for sustainable and balanced growth,” according to an on-line source.

Lynch said local Democrats were concerned about developing environmental trends in the Charlottesville area.

“Increased traffic in area neighborhoods and on the [proposed Meadowcreek] Parkway were issues where people didn’t think we were working effectively,” Lynch said. He added that many citizens had become concerned with the pace of development.

Lynch said these problems were “a vortex that brought people together who were dissatisfied with environmental problems.”

One of the problems that many people in the Charlottesville community were troubled by was the coal towers managed by the University of Virginia, Lynch said.

Lynch said that the towers, which border University Avenue and Jefferson Park Avenue, became such a problem that the city had to get involved in the issue. Several adverse effects, such as health and respiratory problems, can result from operating a power plant such as the University’s, which emits high amounts of pollution, he said. The towers, “emit more than five times the amount of sulfur dioxide than the Tenaska plant would” he added.

Although it may cost considerable amounts of money to fix the problem, the coal towers were “enough of a concern to the community to fix now,” he said. “We’ll find the money somehow.”

The city has been working on the problem with University Director of Utilities Cheryl Gomez to help the plant switch from burning coal over to natural gas, Lynch said. Though it costs more, natural gas burns cleaner than coal does, releasing fewer pollutants into the air.

Despite the problems the city is facing, the quality of Charlottesville’s air is still undetermined, Lynch said. The city was given the option a few years ago to install an ozone monitor that would measure the amount of pollutants in the air, and which it could use for comparison with other areas in the state, he said.

The city chose not to install the ozone monitor because “we were afraid that if we put one in, we

wouldn’t be in compliance,” he said. Previous studies had been inconclusive in determining the region’s air quality, he added.

Lynch said background air quality monitors had been installed nearby in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The data they receive will be compared with previous studies on Charlottesville’s air to determine the amount of pollution that actually comes from the city.

“Most of the pollution in Charlottesville comes in from the Blue Ridge, from Pennsylvania and Ohio,” he said.

Various cooperative groups and local officials also were working to address water issues, including shortages and contamination.

According to Rochelle Garwood, Senior Environmental Planner for the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission (TJPDC), “water shortages are problems beyond building more reservoirs. They are also land management issues.”

The TJPDC is an organization that works with the city of Charlottesville, Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa, and Nelson counties to help the areas develop while maintaining their natural and historic resources.

Garwood said one cause for water shortages in urban areas was the absence of groundwater reserves.

“Development leads to an increased amount of hard surfaces which hinder recharge abilities. We need to find more creative and environmentally friendly ways to conserve water,” she said.

Lynch, who is also a commissioner at the TJPDC, said there should be an incentive for taxpayers to use water-conserving methods. The lack of everyday conservation habits contributed to the problems during the severe drought of last summer, he added. “We realized we had a problem, and then we told people to conserve.”

In retrospect, Lynch said, he would have managed the crisis differently. As a result of water capacity dropping below 50 percent capacity, the City Council voted to increase water rates of Charlottesville residents from $27.77 to $37.16 per thousand cubic feet. The resulting conservation forced the city to raise rates even higher, to $55.27 in order to maintain operating costs, Lynch said.

“The way we did it, everyone got hit with a double whammy. We should have raised water prices immediately and tied that to conservation. We then should have told everyone to conserve. That way, revenue would still be the same,” he said.

The region’s water supply was critical to the future growth of the city and county, he added. “If we continue our conservation, we can accommodate more growth.”

Garwood agreed that water conservation was not just for emergency situations. “In order to avoid a crisis such as a drought, you need to do something all the time. However, it can be difficult to get people to care if it’s not an immediate crisis.”

The city is already thinking of water conservation methods to prevent a water shortage for next summer.

“The Mechums River pump station over on Ragged Mountain can be utilized better. We can top the

reservoir there off longer going into the summer. That way, if one runs out, we can shift over to the other reservoir,” Lynch said.

This method “is less expensive than building another reservoir and less environmentally harmful than dredging a current one or flooding a wetland,” he said.

Garwood said in addition to water quantity problems, water quality problems also were a problem for Charlottesville’s water systems. Moore’s Creek, which forms the southern boundary between the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle County, is on Virginia’s Impaired Waters List, she said. The creek contains amounts of fecal coliform bacteria that exceed the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) of bacteria allowed by the federal government, she added.

The TJPDC is in the process of cleaning up the creek, and has received full funding by the Department of Environmental Quality to clean up the stream and remove the harmful bacteria and pollutants.

Garwood said the majority of her work dealt with projects that worked to improve the water quality of the Rivanna River and Lake Anna. Recently the TJPDC released a “State of the Basin” report, which listed many strategies to improve water quality improvement.

The Rivanna is “highly polluted from run-off from farms and development. There’s a lot of bacteria and a lot of stuff in there. But since the report was released, they’ve been following some of those wide range of recommendations,” Garwood said.

The TJPDC is working on a water summit for later this spring to “determine whether a large scale plan is needs to be implemented to clean up the Rivanna,” she added.

Charlottesville policy makers such as the city council also have taken notice of the Rivanna problems.

Lynch said city officials realize that the benefits of a clean river provide incentives to remove pollutants from the Rivanna beyond meeting the standards of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“We’re not just trying to be ahead of the curve for the EPA. That’s why we put in sustainability metrics.

We want every fish you catch out of the Rivanna to be edible. We want to go beyond EPA standards,” he said.

Lynch added that due to runoff from farm animals and farms in the southern party of Albemarle County, that the Rivanna is actually cleaner downstream than it is upstream.

Albemarle and the surrounding counties are among the fastest growing areas in the state, he said. All of these counties also share the same watershed, which makes problems more difficult to solve.

“The County is growing really fast, and they are having less success with sustainability. This is a problem for us, too, because we share water infrastructure. If we were to build a new reservoir, who pays for it?

It’s hard to say,” Lynch said.

According to Garwood, Fluvanna and Greene counties also were two of the fastest growing in the state.

“Rural development and sprawl results in more impervious surfaces and more people driving longer distances,” she said.

Garwood said the north fork of the Rivanna has terrible sedimentation pollution caused by runoff from

development in the counties. “In Greene County, we could stand to lose a lot of the rural character that everyone loves so much.”

Lynch said he hoped to see the industrial corridors on the Rivanna and Meadow Creek converted for recreational uses such as fishing, biking, hiking, kayaking and water sports.

“I don’t see a reason why we can’t clean up our waters and tie that into entertainment at the same time,” he said.

For example, he said, dams on the Rivanna River could be timed to release more water during prime recreational times. “Rather than have a fixed daily release on a timed schedule, we can mimic Mother Nature and fluctuate the water releases so that it’s like a rainfall. We’ll release a lot on Saturday morning, so that people can paddle, kayak or fish, and it still meets Stream Flow Release Requirements.”

Garwood said it was challenging to balance local rivers and streams as sources of pleasure and activity, places of commerce, and places of residence. “It’s hard, and not only with direct uses, but also with indirect uses of the river, such as development. The most important thing is to preserve water quality. If you do that, the rest of those things will follow.”

Garwood said people were working to solve local environmental problems, but that there was room for improvement. “I don’t feel confident yet that we have something in place to solve the problem, but efforts are being made,” she said. “Regional cooperation is very important.”

The city of Charlottesville was trying to grow but at the same time shrink the ecological footprint so that resources were not overused, Lynch said. The ecological footprint is the amount of land an average person needs to produce the resources necessary for life.

Instead of more development, the city is trying to redevelop many parts of the city such as old coal yards on Tenth Street, and warehouses on the downtown mall, Lynch said. “This way, we limit our green field development.”

One important project that the city is working on was the Green Belt Trail around the city, Lynch said.

Council was planning to extend parts of the trail and make it more complete, he said. He added that he hoped developing the trail would encourage environmental efforts among residents. “When more people use these things like the green belt trail, it creates a constituency of environmental support.”

Lynch said new environmental regulations should be passed by the council in May or June to ensure that Charlottesville’s environmental regulations are “as high as they can be.” Charlottesville hopes to become a model city for dealing with sustainability and solving environmental problems, he said. “We want a national reputation for being an environmentally friendly city. If good environmental stewardship continues to happen, we’ll continue to enjoy what this area has to offer.”

In time, Charlottesville could potentially be the model environmental city that its leaders and citizens are striving for, Garwood said. “In ten years, I hope we’ll have gotten smarter about clustering development and not using any more land for pavement than we have to,” she said.

“Public awareness is coming along. The TJPDC’s executive director’s mission has been smart growth.

It’s hard to balance cynicism against hope that people will work together more. People are more environmentally aware than they were ten years ago, so hopefully the trend will continue.”

Charlottesville-based environmental group takes preventative action The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) is a regional organization that serves six states in the southeast. According to Catherine McCue, Media Relations Manager for the SELC, “we try to stop bad environmental ideas from happening.”

The SELC tries to toughen environmental protection laws and encourage good environmental policy to preserve the region’s natural beauty and resources, McCue said.

The majority of the staff at the SELC is environmental lawyers. McCue said these lawyers provide legal advice and service to non-profit environmental groups and organizations of all sizes. The SELC doesn’t usually work with individuals, she added. “We try to find issues that will have precedent setting impacts and that will have a broader impact on regulations and current policy.”

McCue said “the SELC is never a plaintiff in cases. We help a combination of environmental groups that are in legal suit with someone else, such as the federal government.” She also said the SELC works with legislators in Congress to inform and educate politicians about environmental problems.

The SELC seeks to improve federal and state laws regarding the environment, or “get laws in the books where there are none,” she said.

The SELC serves Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

The SELC currently is helping environmental organizations and groups of citizens to defeat the Virginia Department of Transportation’s plans to build a bypass of Route 29 that would go around Charlottesville.

The proposed bypass would destroy rural landscape in Albemarle county and could have serious effects on drinking water sources, McCue said. “The bypass would stretch out into the county, causing urban sprawl, which we don’t want.”

McCue said the SELC is very concerned with the effects of urban sprawl. “Sprawl has a definite impact on air, water, land use, and wildlife habitats. We’re seeing the disappearance of farmland and wild habitats. It has a tremendous effect on water in terms of runoff and affecting water quality and quantity.”

Development and sprawl also have detrimental effects on the quality of air. McCue said sprawl leads to an increased amount of driving, fuel consumption, sitting in traffic and amount of distance driven.

As an alternative to the bypass, the SELC supported the Commonwealth Transportation Board’s proposal to build an overpass on Hydraulic Road in Charlottesville. This overpass would help alleviate some of the traffic, McCue said.

“Growth is ultimately inevitable,” she added, “but it’s not a question of if growth will happen, but how it will happen. We need to focus on how to grow better.”

Sellers/Seltzer 04/24/03 Third piece For housing solutions, developers must think outside the box City planners and architects said that for Charlottesville to become a more ecologically healthy city, it needed to promote mixed-use development and high-density housing.

“When you look at an average American city, we spend an awful lot of our space on cars,” said Timothy Beatley, associate professor of urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia. “Forty to 45 percent of an average city is devoted to cars in one way or the other, when you look at the roadways, parking, gas stations. If we can creatively find ways to reduce the dependence on cars, we’d have room for a lot more other things.”

Building up instead of out helps reduce dependence on automobiles through access by proximity, Beatley said, “creating a land pattern where things are close by and the first and easiest option is to walk somewhere.”

Such projects already were underway in the city, including a plan to put residential areas above the Barracks Road shopping center, he said.

In addition to reducing the amount of air pollution and traffic in the city from cars, high-density land use would safeguard against unnecessary sprawl and excessive development, said Maurice Cox, Charlottesville mayor and associate professor at the UVA Architecture School.

The city is in the process of revising its zoning laws in order to allow for higher density units, Cox said.

“The big change will be that residential emerges as an integral part of the equation. So we’re gonna try to house more people on less land in closer proximity to the places where they work and shop,” he said.

Preserving an attractive environment was one of the city’s biggest goals, he added.

“Environmental issues probably would rank at the top of priorities for this community. It’s a question of how it gets articulated, because when I think of environmental issues, I think about the complete environment that we live in. So it’s not just testing water and air quality. It’s the quality of life, the livability of your community,” he said.

One way planners hoped to improve the city’s appearance and livability was to plant trees, Cox said.

“When I think about tree plantings as a part of the sidewalk infrastructure, I think about that as an environmental protection. It’s increasing the supply of green space in the core of the city,” he said.

Beatley said tree planting was a simple but practical way to improve the urban environment. “One of the most effective things we could do is to plant trees in cities,” he said.

Planting trees addresses many of the problems an urban environment faces, he added, including providing natural cooling against the urban heat island effect, retaining storm water to prevent flooding and providing habitat for animals.

“They are also rewarded in the market place,” he said. “A house with trees in front of it will tend to

bring a higher price than a house without trees. The same is true for cities as a whole. The more trees we have, the higher the quality of life, the greater the perception of the place.”

Finding ways to promote a livable environment within a high density setting in Charlottesville was the subject of a forum Beatley organized this spring. He invited Berkeley, California author and activist Richard Register to speak on March 27 as part of what he called this “global-local dialogue.” Register used a slide show presentation to address how Charlottesville could become an “eco-city,” a term he himself popularized.

“Not many people see the city as the potentially healthy, living organism that it is,” he said.

Register talked about his own efforts to plant fruit trees in Berkeley, which had given added aesthetic value and provided a free source of food to neighborhoods. He said some European cities like Vienna, Austria had incorporated trees into the designs of buildings.

Register also recommended rooftop terraces in places like the Downtown Mall, designed to maximize the solar economy of buildings, create a pleasant social environment and add space to commercial areas like restaurants and coffee shops.

Register said Charlottesville could follow the example of Curitiba, Brazil to encourage access by proximity. Planners there had built five high-density arms, interspersed with low density areas and green space. Another city, Bogata, Colombia, had implemented a “dedicated and efficient bus transportation system,” that allowed passengers to board at tube stations instead of bus stops. The system cost one three-hundredth of the price of a subway system, Register said.

Register also presented sketches of how cities might adapt to the environment in the future. One of these was a terraced city built to look like a hill, with a commercial interior and residential exterior.

Other plans included sketches to transform existing cities like San Francisco. This involved adapting the area with its natural, pre-existing environment.

“You look at what you actually have, find the centers of the most vitality, and augment those centers,” Register said.

It took a lot of effort to overcome the political and legal barriers to many of these plans, he added. “I think you have to have real cultural changes to make most of these ecological features work.”

Register said it was first necessary to start with a base group of support and expand on it through public awareness efforts. “You’ve got to change public opinion, to make them want to build ecocities,” he said.

“Try to get people to be imaginative, to look into the future. Build buildings that are fun, exciting, and look good.”

Beatley said the problem corresponded to a cultural resistance of Americans to changing their lifestyles.

“A lot of Americans are very sort of light green. They are committed to the rhetoric of it, but not very deeply,” he said. “I think what we probably need to work on is the follow through, dedication and commitment on a personal level.”

Cities and organizations needed to take small steps in order to gain acceptance in the public, he added.

“Grand scale would be nice, but not very realistic. The way that we have to go is incrementally.”

Beatley listed Chicago as one city that had succeeded in following a “green agenda” through incremental steps. “They have done it through lots of demonstration projects, lots of seed money, lots of leading by example,” he said. This included putting a green rooftop on City Hall and a competition to design the best green single-family home, he added.

Beatley also said concerns over the cost of implementing these environmental measures were misdirected.

“We tend to overstate conflict between those goals,” he said. “They often are ways to make the city more economically strong and viable.”

He added that Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley had managed to attract many businesses to the city through his environmental projects.

Cox said one of the big setbacks to local environmental progress was an economic issue. The development of natural gas-fired plants in nearby counties, including the Tenaska plant in Fluvanna, was the result of insufficient funding from the state, he said.

“I’m really sorry to see Fluvanna and surrounding counties having to go to high tax generating businesses that have a detrimental effect on the environment. I think that’s a product of the state not having alternative ways for counties to remain rural or cities to be able to absorb urban population, and I say that because part of what’s fueling the surrounding counties’ going to these rather desperate measures is suburban growth,” he said. “They’ve gotta be able to build schools, they’ve gotta do roads, they have to provide all these services and the state taxing structure really doesn’t help.”

Cox also expressed doubt over the rigor of State Department of Environmental Quality standards, saying it must be left to each area to make its own standards.

“I think a locality has to have its own standards and that they possibly should be more stringent than even the state’s,” he said. “It’s important for localities to develop their own standards that they are willing to live by and monitor.”

Charlottesville also was rethinking how to deal with future issues of water conservation following last Fall’s shortage, Cox said.

“We take this natural resource for granted, that there’s an unlimited supply, just turn on the tap. We now know that’s not the case. It brings home the issue that we have to live and plan within our means.”

He added that the city will have to take issues like the water supply into consideration when projecting future growth plans.

“I don’t think in the past we’ve made the connections, that growth is just limitless,” he said. “I think the water crisis showed us that actually, no, water will dictate the rate of growth.”

Again, he said, the solution lay in development strategies like high-density housing and access by proximity that would scale back on the number of people watering their lawns and washing cars.

“Part of the strategy of increasing density in the city is that you have more people living on less land. So that in itself is an act of conservation,” Cox said. “The big difference in water consumption has to do with the lifestyles, not just the fact that everybody takes long showers. It has to deal with what are the ways that you’re consuming water. And it’s been shown to be much more efficient when people are living in apartment buildings than if they’re living in single-family, detached houses on a suburban lot.”

Charlottesville in many ways served as an example to towns for how they could flourish both economically and environmentally, Cox said.

“There is a growth that is more sustainable than another,” he said. “Should the city, that arguably practices smart growth, be penalized because the county is growing and sprawling and consuming more water than the same kind of growth” in a comparable portion of the city, he asked.

Parts of Albemarle County were basing their development patterns on Charlottesville’s downtown area to avoid sprawl, he said.

“Charlottesville clearly is a model. Obviously there are things about Charlottesville that make it so unique that you can’t just pick it up and take it to Petersburg, like the University of Virginia. But certainly in terms of its downtown economy and the mixed use development.”

Beatley said Charlottesville had developed a set of sustainability measures a decade ago to promote ideas benefiting the environment, such as establishing a European eco-sister city. “What we should do is go back and pull out those accords, look at them, and should somehow return to that,” he said.

At its Feb. 3 meeting, City Council passed unanimously an Environmental Sustainability Policy. The city hired an environmental manager “to make sure we are in compliance in everything we do,” Cox said.

Though Charlottesville may not be ready for more futuristic environmental changes, Cox said the city had already begun planning ahead. “What is the future? In my mind, I try from a public position to live in the future,” he said. “The future’s kinda now. And so I am allowing my decisions to be guided by the fact that we will become more dense.”

Rating system measures projects' “greenness” One of Charlottesville’s most recent environmental initiatives was to adopt the LEED (Lead in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System for city construction projects, Mayor Maurice Cox said.

“It’s a pretty rigorous standard and goes for everything from the materials, to the systems being used, even whether you allow smoking in the building,” Cox said.

The first building to follow the LEED standard will be the new transit center in development at the East End of the Downtown Mall, he added.

Members of the United States Green Building Council developed LEED as “a voluntary, consensus-based national standard for developing high-performance, sustainable buildings, according to the USGBC web site.

The USGBC objectives are to define what a green building is, raise awareness of their benefits and promote competition in the building industry to develop green buildings.

The system rates buildings on a scale of 69 possible points. It rates the buildings in the following categories:

Sustainable Site Conform to EPA standards on erosion and sedimentation control to prevent soil runoff and sedimentation in streams as a result of construction.

The building should not be located on the site of prime farmland, wetlands, parklands or the natural habitat for an endangered species.

Help channel development to areas that are already urban and require no additional infrastructure.

Located within walking distance of public transit stations and provide bicycle storage and changing facilities.

Reduce the Heat Island effect by providing shaded areas and either a thermally graded roofing material or a green roof covered by vegetation.

Minimize light pollution to the night sky through lower light levels and covered exterior lights.

Water Efficiency Avoid using drinkable water to irrigate landscapes or should use captured rain water.

Limit waste water production, using fixtures like composting toilets, waterless urinals and occupant sensors.

Energy and Atmosphere Commissioners should ensure that all systems operate as planned and use the minimum amount of energy.

Avoid heating, cooling and refrigeration systems that use ozone-depleting chemicals.

Provide non-polluting, renewable energy sources such as wind, solar or hydroelectric generators.

Provide equipment to measure energy and water consumption.

Materials and Resources Designate convenient areas for recycling collection and storage.

Consider reusing existing structural components to limit wasted materials.

Use recycled materials in construction and divert surplus materials through donation or recycling.

Use regional materials to support local economy and limit environmental impact from transport.

Use rapidly renewable raw materials and Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood to reduce depletion of natural resources.

Indoor Environmental Quality Prohibit smoking in building or designate an area with a separate ventilation system.

Design ventilation systems and building envelope to optimize air flow and comfort.

Minimize use of contaminates or irritants in paint, carpet and sealants.

Maximize the amount of daylight and view opportunities in frequently used spaces.

Innovation and Design Process Develop innovative methods or strategies that exceed LEED performance standards.

Use a LEED Accredited Professional.

Comprehensive plan touts 'sustainability' In 2000, The Charlottesville Planning Commission commenced developing a comprehensive plan that would follow the goal of conserving neighborhoods and areas while promoting proper economic growth over the next 25 years.

“A buzzword among planners today is ‘sustainability’,” the plan said. “Simply stated, this means meeting human needs with the carrying capacity of the earth. On the local level, it means meeting the growth needs of Charlottesville within the limits and capacity of Charlottesville. It means realizing that there is a reason God put streams, wetlands, plants, and animals on earth here with us.”

The plan provided an inventory and assessment of the existing patterns of growth, a statement of goals and policies for future growth, and how to implement those strategies. It also included minicomprehensive plans for each of eighteen neighborhoods in the city.

Many of the efforts at sustainability in the plan related directly to preserving a healthy, natural environment within the context of proper growth. It addressed issues like consumption, pollution, development patterns, traffic congestion and smog.

Included in the plan was a Future Land Use Map, developed from the existing patterns of land use that emphasized preservation of existing communities and natural resources while correcting problems of sprawl and substandard housing.

It suggested creating well-defined edges of communities. The plan emphasized high-density housing in what qualified as the University Precinct.

It listed specific parcels that needed to be rezoned in order to bring housing units up to standard and to protect the single family character.

The plan also proposed to extend the historic atmosphere of the Downtown Mall by making Market and Water Streets pedestrian only and to enhance the pedestrian appeal along West Main Street, increasing the amount of mixed use development in the area between the University and the Mall and putting a small park at the corner of Seventh Street and West Main.

The plan suggested, among other things, taking action by 2005 years to create a mater plan for all city parks, discussing greenway easements along the Rivanna River and conducting a light rail feasibility study.