Minutes of Sustainable San Rafael meeting 6/26/06
(Held at Tam Bank San Rafael - 17 People attending)

Green Building -Bob Brown has scheduled a Study Session with the City Council members for Monday July 24 at 7:00. He will be bringing in a number of outside GB experts to talk and has reserved a 10-15 minute slot for us to present. We have a pre-meeting with Bob on 7/13 to work out how we could best use this time to supplement his presentation and other speakers. Denise Bellas will be our point person for the study session, and Sue & Bob Spofford will, unfortunately, be out of town on that date.

In discussion, we discovered that Kevin Beck is a certified Green Point rater and graduate of the Sonoma State program, so he could speak both as a green-oriented working builder and as someone who understands the point system.

Bikeways - Eric Anderson of Marin Count Bicycle Coalition (MCBC) gave us a briefing on the coalition's activities and the state of bikeway development in the county. He also filled people in on the upcoming stakeholders meeting on the Canal Transportation Plan, scheduled for July 20 at Pickleweed. (See Events page)

Related to this, Sue reminded everyone of the Forum on Transportation Issues being put together by MarinLink (no date yet) and urged people to sign up for the steering committee.

Climate Protection - We brought the group up to date on the city's decision to sign the US Mayor's agreement. We reviewed the agreement itself and noted specific items that relate to campaigns we are pursuing, such as tree management and waste reduction. With regard to the latter, Carolyn Lenart told us that Coldwell Banker is planning a big take-back day for electronics and such on Saturday July 29.

There was general discussion of "An Inconvenient Truth," both the movie (all but one of us had seen it) and the book (many had not.) There was a suggestion to hand out literature on our issues at the Sequoia Theater as well as the idea that if a major public figure, like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were to start hammering the issue at this juncture, it might break through to a higher level of public concern.

Community Choice Aggregation - Bob Spofford and Roger Roberts provided an update from the 6/22 County-run CCA workshop for city council members. The overall feeling was that the answers these electeds were getting from the county staff and consultants was taking them in a positive direction. However, it was also clear that are a lot of fears of a political downside if rate-payers perceive that CCA is costing them more than PG&E. Roger noted that the possibility of a public vote (which would be strictly advisory) came up, and that this might be very attractive as providing political cover. It would also create a big need/opportunity for us to do a lot of public education.

4th Street Trees - Sandra Sellinger and Daniel Sonnet brought us up to date on their efforts to convince the city to spare some of the mature trees in the upcoming improvement of the west end of 4th st. They have completed a survey of the trees and are in the middle of a survey of the merchants in the area. The city is continuing discussions with them, but there's no evidence yet that anyone is shifting from their approach of total scrape and re-plant. One new development is the discovery that funding for the trees part may have to come from a separate source, since the Measure A funds that are being used for the main project are not supposed to be spent on "beautification." It isn't clear yet whether this helps or hurts our efforts.

July 4th Parade - Katherine DeSilva Jain has reserved space for us to march in the July 4 parade on Corte Madera. The goal would be to gain visibility for SSR and to promote sustainable living. Ideas include some sort of "float" illustrating the dump expansion problem and/or several Pruises promoting fuel efficiency. It's not clear how far this can go, since the parade is supposed to be "non-political." Interested members should plan to meet at Katherine's house Saturday (7/1) to work out details and prepare whatever we're going to do.

New issue - Ted Posthuma brought up the recently-announced plan to move the Marin Community Clinic from Kentfiield to a bunch of buildings in the canal area that were abandoned when LucasFilms moved to the Presidio. This will be a very visible, much debated project, and a great opportunity to promote green building and healthy design. There will be a public meeting on this July 22 in the Canal (Location? Pickleweed?)

Next meeting - Not set. August doesn't look good with vacations, etc. We'll probably try to schedule one in early September.