A revealing city report

Critics of the Chico City Council like to poke sticks at its efforts to promote sustainability, charging that they’re a waste of time and money and that the council should be focusing its attention on jobs and the budget instead.

To which we say: They should take a look at the city’s first annual Sustainability Indicators Report.

Introduced at the council’s June 5 meeting, the report is an addendum to the city’s Annual Progress Report on implementation of the general plan. That report is a compendium of the major actions the city has taken since adoption of the general plan last year and is useful reading for any citizen who wants to know what city government is doing in that regard.

The Sustainability Indicators Report is required by the Sustainability Element of the general plan. Its purpose is to gauge progress in advancing the plan’s sustainability-related policies and goals. These, it turns out, are substantial.

The report looks at three key areas: natural systems and agriculture, the built environment, and socioeconomics. “Sustainability,” the report reads, “involves aligning the built environment and socioeconomic activities with nature’s constraints and opportunities. … These components are interdependent and equally important.”

Each of the three components is broken down into four or five indicators, such as air quality (under natural systems), housing (under built environment) and public safety (under socioeconomics). Each indicator’s progress is then ranked in one of three ways: “clear progress,” “moderate performance” and “improvement area.”

For 2011, the first year of the program, only one indicator, community participation, showed clear progress. Six indicators showed moderate performance, and six were classified as an improvement area. The ratings “are intentionally conservative,” the staff report states, “to reflect the significant work ahead to achieve the City’s lofty goal of achieving a sustainable community.”

Most important, though, is that the city’s efforts to foster the goals of the indicators are spelled out for each one. Whether it’s building affordable housing or bike lanes, helping to obtain a biodiesel-production grant, or extending sewer lines into Chapmantown, the city is working in numerous ways to make Chico a sustainable community—and creating jobs in the process. We challenge anyone to read the Sustainability Indicators Report and then argue that all this work is a waste of time and money.

Go to www.chico.ca.us to view both the Annual Progress Report and the Sustainability Indicators Report.