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Case Studies Seattle and Austin
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Seattle The city that stands at the top of virtually every list of sustainable cities, particularly those cities that have developed major indicators projects, is Seattle. Located in Western Washington on the Puget Sound, Seattle is the largest city in the state, with a population of about 539,000 in a metropolitan area of over 3 million people. It is a city of approximately 84 square miles, giving it a population density of 6,453 people per square mile. Although the population of Seattle declined from about 530,000 in 1970 to a low of about 490,000 in 1980, it has experienced steady growth since then. Seattle has a mayor-council form of government, with the full-time mayor, who serves as the city’s chief executive officer, elected at-large every four years. The City Council consists of nine members all elected at-large. The sustainability efforts in Seattle are found in both the non-profit and governmental sectors, but the City’s early efforts are primarily associated with the activities of a single organization. “Sustainable Seattle,” the name of this initiative, was founded in 1990 and began its operations in 1991. The Sustainable Seattle initiative was conceived of as an operation defined as a non-profit organization (it currently operates under a 501(c)3 tax status designation), and its origins are significantly more “grassroots” than are the sustainability initiatives in most other cities. The organization, which is governed by a board of directors and has a small staff, describes itself as a “volunteer-based civic network and forum…with a focus on the metropolitan city/county area” of Seattle. Its mission is to “protect and improve [the Seattle] area’s long-term health and vitality by applying sustainability to the links between economic prosperity, environmental vitality, and social equity.” (Sustainable Seattle, 2000a) Out of the mission has grown some six specific goals that include influencing individual and collective local actions that are thought to move the city towards greater sustainability, preparing and publishing sustainable community indicators, providing extensive information about sustainability to residents and local leaders, putting issues of sustainability on the “agendas” in peoples’ homes, neighborhoods, places of employment, schools, and in civic life generally, providing an open forum for “cross-community dialog” on issues of sustainability, and to serve as a general resource center. Perhaps the key defining characteristic of Sustainable Seattle, the characteristic that gave this initiative national notoriety and attention, is its Sustainable Indicators Project. (AtKisson, 1996) The Indicators Project developed a wide array of indicators for the city, as sample of which is shown in Inset 2 in Chapter 2. This Project’s notoriety grew not only out of the resulting indicators themselves, but also out of the processes that were used to produce them. As described in Chapter 2, and consistent with Sustainable Seattle’s goal of providing a cross-community forum for discussion of sustainability issues, the Indicators Project sought to derive its indicators through a fairly participatory process. As impressive as the Sustainable Seattle organization and its Indicators Project have been, they tell only part of the sustainable city story in Seattle. The organization certainly articulates a goal of influencing local collective actions, but the organization does not itself have any sort of legal authority for adopting or implementing policies that promote sustainable growth. The organization can use (and has used) its sustainability indicators as a political weapon by, for example, reporting the non-attainment of specific environmental goals, but it cannot directly establish public programs that will ensure that the goals are met or that progress is made toward meeting the goals. In other words, Sustainable Seattle can measure progress toward achieving greater sustainability or the lack thereof, but it cannot directly change the City’s policies and programs that affect this progress. Yet what makes the Seattle experience most impressive is the way that the City’s leaders, particularly the City’s administrative agencies, have begun to internalize the goals of sustainability. In 1994, the City adopted its “Comprehensive Plan,” called “Toward a Sustainable Seattle,” that provides a statement of a “20-year policy plan that articulates a vision of how Seattle will grow in ways that sustain its citizens’ values.” (City of Seattle, 2007) This comprehensive plan represents a sustainability effort that is about as well-developed and coordinated as found in any U.S. city. The plan outlines policies that affect land use, transportation, housing, capital facilities, utilities, economic development, neighborhood development and planning, human development, and cultural resources in a fairly integrated way. A brief description of some of the major elements of this comprehensive plan provides a sense of the magnitude of this effort. The Land Use element, for example, provides a full strategic plan for how to manage development in various kinds of urban villages within the city, where the plan specifies the kind of “village” each area of the city constitutes, and what kinds of land uses, employment, and housing densities are appropriate for each. Urban centers villages, hub urban villages, and residential urban villages each carry different functional land uses. An urban centers village has the densest land use, with high concentration of employment. Residential urban villages have the highest concentrations of low to moderate density residential development with a comparable mix of support services and employment. The Land Use element outlines numerous specific goals for each type of area, identifies the policies and legal authority governing the uses contained in each goal, and frequently sets specific targets and dates to be achieved. The established goals are driven, at least to some degree, by the overall goal of becoming more sustainable. For example, one of the land use goals is to “promote densities and mixes of use that support walking and use of public transportation.” (City of Seattle, 2000a) Through the operations of the City’s Office of Sustainability and Environment (2007), the comprehensive plan also incorporates efforts to make the City government’s internal operations more sustainable by fashioning something akin to a private sector company’s internal environmental management system (EMS). (Skinnarland, 1999; City of Seattle, 2000b) Designed to comply with the international ISO 14001 environmental standards, this effort focuses on making all of the City government’s internal operations consistent with sustainable practices. In Seattle, this EMS, referred to as an Environmental Management Program, was developed in two stages starting in 1996, where the first stage required all city operations and agencies to assess their environmental impacts and the legal requirements of the operations. With this assessment completed, a set of citywide standards was established, and each city agency was required to prepare its own plan for how to implement these standards. Each agency’s plan had to address thirteen specific areas, including how it handles hazardous waste and hazardous chemicals, waste dumped on city-owned property, communication of workplace hazards to employees, the operation of petroleum storage tanks, energy and water conservation measures, waste reduction and recycling, environmentally-responsible purchasing, the management of city fleet vehicles, and other areas. The path breaking sustainability efforts in Seattle have made the City both a model for other sustainable indicators initiatives, and a target of criticism. According to a recent study of over 170 state, regional, county, local, university, and ecosystem indicators projects conducted by Redefining Progress, a policy development organization in Oakland, California, at least 90 of these efforts apparently used Sustainable Seattle’s indicators project as a model for their own projects. (Sustainable Seattle, 2000b) Yet the effort to pursue sustainability in Seattle has not been immune from criticism. As discussed previously in Chapter 4, Seattle’s land use policies, which flow from its comprehensive sustainability plan, have been attacked as unwarranted government regulation. The Sustainable Seattle “model” or “approach” is one that prescribes the creation of a grassroots non-profit organization that begins its initiative independent of city government or city agencies. The basic idea seems to be that once the organization takes hold, once it embarks on an indicators project and shows that it has the support of significant segments of the local population, then it can appeal to city policy makers -- the mayor and city councilors – and city agency administrators to make the case that sustainability, as defined by the organization, should be on the city’s agenda. To local advocates of sustainability, this model or approach seems to make perfect sense. Yet nothing in the mandatory strategic planning process in Seattle ensured that sustainability would become the cornerstone of the effort. Indeed, without the efforts of the Sustainable Seattle organization, it is entirely possible that sustainability would have played no more than a minor part in the City’s planning. References and Links for Seattle AtKisson, 1996, “Developing Indicators of Sustainable Community: Lessons from Sustainable Seattle,” in Environmental Impact Assessment Review, Vol. 16, pp. 337-350. Skinnarland, Kirvil, 1999. “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: The Role of Cities in Sustainable Development – A Case Study of the City of Seattle,” Paper presented at the 1999 meetings of the Greening of Industry Network, Chapel Hill, NC. Found at: http://www.greeningofindustry.org/gin1999/Skinnarland.pdf Sustainable Seattle, 2000b.
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Austin In conjunction with the surrounding Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties that constitute the greater Austin metropolitan area, Austin has created an important sustainability initiative. It is important not just for its programmatic and policy elements, but also because of its accomplishments in a state that does not make the pursuit of sustainability easy. Austin, the state capitol of Texas, is a fairly large and rapidly growing city with a current population of nearly 643,000 people in a metropolitan area of over 1.1 million. The city has nearly doubled in population since 1980, when its population was about 346,000. Much of its growth is attributable to a combination of the presence of the University of Texas’ main campus, the growth of a variety of technology-based companies, and an aggressive annexation effort. The major employers other than the University and government are Dell Computer, Motorola, and IBM. In geographic size, Austin is the second largest of the eight cities profiled here, with land area of over 228 square miles. This gives the city a gross population density of a little over 2,800 people per square mile, well below the average for the eight cities. The city has a “weak mayor” form of government, and is governed by a seven-member city council, all elected at large. The council selects the mayor from among its ranks. The city’s chief executive is a full-time city manager who is appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the council. The sustainability initiative really has two related parts. The first part is associated with the “Sustainability Indicators Project of Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis, and Williamson Counties” (Central Texas Indicators 2001, 2001), the counties that constitute the metropolitan area for Austin. This indicators project, first developed in 1997, focuses on a comprehensive array of some 42 indicators in four major categories – community and children (including public safety, education and education equity, civic engagement and volunteerism), workforce and economy (including the cost of government, unemployment, the cost of living, household income, availability of affordable housing, and diversification of the employment base), health and environment (including air quality, hazardous materials, energy use, and solid waste), and land and infrastructure (including public open space, density of new development, and time spent commuting). Table 7-2 provides a reproduction of a page from the 2001 indicators report showing the content and form of the effort to measure progress toward improving the amount of hazardous materials released into the environment. The indicator presented in this Table, from the Toxics Release Inventory, shows a reduction of hazardous materials between 1992 and 1997, and an increase since that time. It also provides a comparison of the three counties and with other counties in Texas and other states. Additionally, the City of Austin operates its own indicators project. Called “Sustainable Community,” this project has since 1999 become part of a citywide initiative to manage city government by results, and to provide comprehensive reporting on government performance. The city’s sustainability indicators cover public safety (fire and medical services, police, and the courts), youth, family and neighborhood vitality (including health services, housing, libraries, and parks and recreation), sustainability (traffic and road maintenance, air quality, recycling and waste diversion, drinking water quality, lake and stream quality and water conservation, energy conservation, and inspections and site plan/subdivision review), and affordability. These indicators are used as measures of the performance of local government, and results are reported annually in the City of Austin “Community Scorecard.” Much of the contents of the Scorecard and indicators themselves are based on the semi-annual “Voice of the Customer Survey,” a telephone-based survey of about 500 randomly selected city residents. The sustainability initiative in Austin goes well beyond the development and use of these indicators. A brief review of some of the programs and projects developed in Austin provide a sense of how extensive Austin’s sustainability initiative is. Conceptions of sustainability, particularly with respect to the environment, have filtered into many of the programs and policies pursued by the City. For example, as part of its smart growth efforts, and its land use planning, Austin uses a system to assess and rank proposed capital improvement projects according to their relative contributions to sustainability, as determined by a multi-attribute utility matrix. (City of Austin, 1999) The effect of assessments using this matrix is that it privileges proposed projects for city funding that rank higher in their contributions to sustainability. Moreover, private contractors and developers can, at their discretion, participate in a program whereby they apply the same utility matrix and submit an application documenting the ways in which their projects contribute to the sustainability goals of the city. After formal review and consideration by the city council, a particular development project might qualify for a substantial city “incentive package” which can include fee waivers, reimbursement of fees already paid by the applicant, and property tax abatements. Another major component of Austin sustainability effort is associated with its publicly owned electric utility, known as Austin Energy, and the recommendations of The Sustainable Energy Task Force. The sustainability efforts on energy use stem from the city council’s resolution that five percent of the city’s electricity should come from renewable sources by the year 2005. The utility operates a program that allows customers to elect the “GreenChoice” option where they receive electricity generated from renewable sources (wind, solar, and biogas from closed landfills) at a fixed rate guaranteed for ten years, while traditional customer’s rates are not guaranteed and fluctuate with the market price of fossil fuels. (Austin Energy, 2001) The utility plans to construct new wind turbine generating facilities in West Texas to provide additional renewable sources to power up to 20,000 homes. Additionally, the city has developed a “green building program” to provide technical information and guidance to developers concerning how to build more environmentally and energy-efficient construction. The green building program, which has residential, municipal, and commercial components, includes an effort to encourage developers to engage in smart development. The Austin conception of green building, as noted in program description, is that it “…is based on a market-pull mechanism whereby the Green Building Program promotes green building practices, rates buildings that feature these practices, thus creating more demand from the public because these buildings are perceived as more attractive products for people to buy.” (City of Austin, 2001a) As of early 2001, the program has rated 1,800 homes, 1,400 apartment units, and 10 commercial buildings and has consulted on 85 other commercial projects. Austin also engages in “transit-oriented development” land use planning to minimize reliance on private transportation (City of Austin, 2000), has engaged in the development of a “sustainable purchases protocol” for the municipal government that sets standards for city purchases of good and services that are environmentally friendly, (City of Austin, 2001b) and a public private partnership, called Greater Austin@work, designed to foster economic development and job growth in sectors that produce fewer environmental impacts. References and Links for Austin Central Texas Indicators 2001, 2001. Sustainability Indicators Project of Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis, and WilliamsonCounties: Annual Report on the Economic, Environmental and Social Health of the Central Texas Region. Austin, TX. Found at: http://www.centex-indicators.org/annual_rept.html City of Austin, 2001a. GreenBuilding Program: Fostering GreenBuilding Through Local Government Initiatives. Austin, TX. Found at:
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