Focus on environment garners planning award for Green Cincinnati plan

Published March 31, 2009 at 12:00 a.m.
The City of Cincinnati, Mayor Mark Mallory, and the visionaries behind the Green Cincinnati Action Plan have been awarded the Frank F. Ferris II Award for Planning Excellence from the Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission.

Theaward is presented annually to a planning commission or committee forprojects demonstrating planning excellence and civic, economic,aesthetic or environmental significance.

Vice Mayor David Crowley and climate protection coordinator Ginnell Schiller accepted the award on behalf of the city.

"It'sgreat for the City of Cincinnati to be recognized for planningachievement," Crowley says.  "I think that it's the combination ofplanning around environmental issues that makes this very exciting tous."

Crowley says that the plan ultimately resulted from hismeetings with Mallory about restoring the environmental focal pointthat was lost when the Office of Environmental Management was disbandedin 2003 due to budget cuts.

Mallory appointed Crowley as chairof the plan's steering committee, with much of the staff work beingdone by Larry Falkin, the current director of the Office ofEnvironmental Quality.

"At that point it was constituted ofabout 20 organizations and people," Crowley says.  "Not justenvironmentalists…there were business people, there were government,citizens, institutions, labor.  We had some really key players involvedin this overall effort."

The steering committee assembled morethan 150 experts and concerned citizens into five task teams – energy,transportation, land use, waste management, and advocacy – to compile alist of ways by which the city could reduce its greenhouse gasemissions by 2 percent annually.

In April 2008, the 212-pageplan was finalized with 82 specific recommendations, and, in July 2008,it was approved by city council.

To Crowley, the value of all of that hard work lies in the "action".

"Thisplan says that we don’t just want this to sit on the shelf," he says. "We want to make this thing work.  So we started with some of theactivities that the city itself can do, and of the 82 recommendationsthere's work being done by somebody, somewhere, on 60 of them."

Writer: Kevin LeMaster
Photography by Scott Beseler
Mayor Mark Mallory


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