[Dialogue] FW: Making Chicago the greenest city in the nation

[Ann Stewart]

John and John, Thank you both soooo much. How exciting. Our Chicago! Larry Henschen, did you read this?! Ann

-----Original Message-----
From: John Cock <jpc2025 at triad.rr.com>
Sent: Jun 28, 2004 12:54 PM
To: dialogue at wedgeblade.net, 'CES LIST' <CES at listserv.unc.edu>
Subject: [Dialogue] FW: Making Chicago the greenest city in the nation

>From my son John:

-----Original Message-----
From: Cock, John [mailto:jcock at ci.charlotte.nc.us] 
Sent: Monday, June 28, 2004 1:05 PM
Subject: FW: Making Chicago the greenest city in the nation

If you haven't already seen it, A VERY inspiring/impressive article and
great pictures, too.  Check out the Green Map, especially. . .

http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0704/chi/index.html



(Title) Mayor Daley's Green Crusade
The longtime Chicago mayor has vowed to make his city the greenest in
the nation.

CHICAGO, IL . . . Daley has been working for years toward his oft-stated
intention to make Chicago the greenest city in America, no small matter
given its size and industrial past. Turning Meigs Field (now known by
its original name, Northerly Island) into a park is just part of his
ambitious vision.

First elected in 1989, Daley has since built the first municipal rooftop
garden on City Hall and opened one of only five LEED (Leadership in
Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum-certified buildings in the
country. A dozen more city buildings are expected to be LEED certified,
including three libraries, several fire stations, a police station, and
a refueling station for the city's newly purchased fleet of natural-gas
vehicles. The Department of Environment, established under Daley in
1992, has overseen the remediation of 1,000 acres of brownfield sites.
Chicago has lured green technology businesses, such as solar-panel
manufacturers, by using the city' s purchasing power. An entire
sustainable landscaping industry has sprung up around the city's
beautification initiatives. Daley has even hired a cadre of ambitious
young assistants who answer directly to him on everything from improving
wastewater management to overhauling the city's recycling program to
restoring one of the largest wetland areas in North America, on the
southeast side of Chicago.

"I've lived in the city all my life," Daley says at Chicago City Hall, a
place he was quite familiar with even before taking office. His father
was, of course, Richard J. Daley, the longest-serving mayor of Chicago,
from 1955 to 1976. "My belief is that environmental initiatives should
not just be out on the West Coast, in Alaska, or by the ocean, but in
cities. If we don't do this, the expansion will be overwhelming: more
cars, more concrete, more pollution in the air and water. They won't
have any environment left out there, and no one will want to live here
either."

Seated at a long conference table surrounded by reports and memos, Daley
covers topics that ricochet from a grand vision of environmentalism to
the vexing minutiae of urban life: the damaging effects of rock salt,
poor drainage, abandoned gas stations; how to properly dispose of
batteries and aerosol cans; and getting homeowners to disconnect their
downspouts so rainwater can be returned to the earth rather than
funneled into an overtaxed wastewater system.

"I like to say he's a janitor with a vision," says Barry Burton, a zoo
horticulturalist from Detroit who came to Chicago's Department of
Planning and Development in 1998 (he is now assistant to the mayor for
landscaping initiatives). "It starts with him noticing the trees are all
gone and having them replanted. Suddenly life springs up, and there are
cafés and people where there were none before. Then it becomes, let's
not just make it attractive but a healthier place. Trees reduce the
heat-island effect and clean the air. Landscaping is labor intensive, so
we provide a lot of jobs. That has turned into a model of economic
development based on green technologies, attracting renewable-energy
companies, and creating a sustainable landscaping industry."

As the legendary story is now retold, shortly after taking office Daley
asked the Bureau of Forestry what had happened to all the trees he
remembered from his childhood. Told they had been devastated by Dutch
Elm disease, and that the bureau's entire budget went only to tree
removal and not planting, he ordered the agency to redirect its
resources. Despite some ridicule-this is still a meat-eating blue-collar
town, after all-people's reaction to Daley's tree-planting initiative
was mostly to applaud it (to date 400,000 trees have been planted,
although that's still half the number Chicago had in the 1950s). Like
any politician, Daley saw an opportunity to build on his success.

The next step might be called the 'Planter Phase.' Median strips with
planters were built into city streets and filled like cornucopias with
flowers, plants, shrubs, and of course, more trees. So far 63 miles of
medians have been built and landscaped . . .



The most remarkable aspect of Daley's consciousness-raising green
crusade is that, after stumbling into it, he has committed major
resources to developing a holistic approach to greening the city.
Nothing illustrates this better than the Chicago Center for Green
Technology (CCGT), the first and only municipal building in the United
States to be awarded LEED Platinum status by the U.S. Green Building
Council. (Only six buildings in the entire world have achieved this
ranking, all but one in the United States.) . . .



Many of the lessons learned from renovating CCGT have been incorporated
into a comprehensive building standard based on LEED but adapted to the
unique conditions of Chicago. So rather than have one fantastic building
that sits like an island in a sea of inefficient and outmoded
architecture, all new city buildings are mandated to use green building
technologies, and millions have been committed to retrofitting existing
buildings.

"It's not just about the Department of Environment over here going, 'Hey
guys! Do these environmental things,'" Reynolds says. "It's the mayor
saying, 'This is so important to me, I'm going to hire someone whose job
it is to make sure all the departments are doing this.' Sadhu being
hired is an indication of just how committed the mayor is to this." . .
.



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