30th January, 2012 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
The City is hosting another forum on the plastic bag ban tonight at 6PM. If you can’t make it to city all, you can participate in an online forum or call in (888-886-6603 using 18004#) to give feedback. Check out this link to find out more about the forum tonight. The newest draft of the proposed bag ban can be seen here (it pushes back the start date of an all out ban till March 2014).
12th January, 2012 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
The Statesman today reports that City Staffers may alter the bag ban draft proposal a 3rd time, after getting more input. There are two main changes. Unlike the 2nd draft, which would have called for a non-reusable bag ban to go into effect January 2013, the 3rd draft pushes that back slightly to March 2013 (the first draft called for January 2016). The 3rd draft would also have a $1 per transaction fee in the interim before the ban goes into place, rather than a 10 cent per bag fee (2nd draft) or 25 cent per bag fee (1st draft). I think both changes are reasonable. There’s no need to drag the switch out till 2016, but having it go into effect March 2013 rather than January 2013 isn’t a big switch. Further, I can understand store owner’s concerns that a per bag charge for the interim will be cumbersome to implement, and that a per transaction charge for those who forget their reusable bags will be more efficient – it still gets the point across without making things complicated. Staffers are also considering adding back in some few exemptions to the ban that were in the first draft, including bags for prescription drugs and restaurant carryout bags, due to concerns about privacy and food safety.
A final draft should be ready by the end of this month, and council will vote on it in March.
Read the Statesman article here.
9th January, 2012 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
The Statesman had this article last Friday stating that after receiving input from retailers, residents and others after releasing the first draft (which would have the total one-use bag ban go into effect in 2016), city staffers have released a new draft bag ban, which moves up the ban of non-reusable bags to 2013. Here’s an excerpt:
The City of Austin might ban disposable plastic and paper bags at checkout counters three years earlier than originally planned.
A revised draft of the ban, released Friday, moves up the date the ban would take effect to January 2013 from January 2016 .
The new draft would require retailers to charge customers 10 cents per disposable bag — paper or plastic — from June to late December, as a precursor to the outright ban. Under the old draft, retailers would have had to charge 25 cents per disposable bag from January 2013 to late 2015 .
A city commission will discuss the revised draft Wednesday. Austin Resource Recovery, the city department that wrote both ban drafts and oversees trash and recycling, also plans to hold a public meeting Jan. 23 to gather feedback.
The changes reflect input from retailers, residents and other advocates since the first draft was unveiled last month, said Austin Resource Recovery Director Bob Gedert. Some wondered why the city couldn’t enact the ban sooner than 2016. And retailers, as well as advocates for low-income people, complained that the 25-cent interim fee was too high.
The draft could be changed again before the council votes on it in March , Gedert said.
I didn’t attend the public meeting about the first draft, I only read about it in the Statesman, but it sounds like city staffers were convinced that there is a lot more support for the ban than against, so they came up with something that moves faster toward a total ban. Exciting!
16th December, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
ABJ has this article, which states that the Austin City Council Approved a plan to reduce landfill waste by 90% in the next 30 years. It’s the same plan discussed here, and includes some of the following proposals:
• Establishing reuse centers and drop-off facilities throughout the city to recover a variety of recyclable, reusable and repairable materials, including batteries, motor oil, paint and anti-freeze
• Enhancing the Single Stream Recycling Program by accepting additional material types
• Conducting a pilot program to collect yard trimmings, food scraps and compostable paper at the curb, and possibly rolling out a new citywide organics collection program based on the pilot program results
• Developing and operating a new Household Hazardous Waste Facility in North Austin
• Phasing in universal recycling and composting requirements to all waste generators — both residential and commercial — within the city
Check out the ABJ article for more details.
15th December, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
The Statesman has a short article today about last night’s public meeting about the city’s bag ban proposal, which you can read more about here. The article doesn’t go into a whole lot of discussion about the arguments made at last night’s meeting, but does say that “Opponents raised concerns about elderly bus riders carrying reusable bags, which are larger and therefore heavier when full. Others worried about health issues that could arise if families don’t wash the reusuable bags.”
Neither of those arguments sound like such great points as to negate the benefits of a bag ban. Just as people will have to learn to remember to carry their reusable bags into the store, they will also have to remember to make a point of washing their bags every few weeks (more or less depending on what you’re comfortable with), and if you aren’t able to lift large bags, you’ll have to remember to ask the bag boy or girl to not fill your bags over X pounds, and if they do fill them over X pounds, you’ll have to ask them to re-do it. I can remember back in the day when I was little my mother preferred paper over plastic, and often she would have to watch the bag boy/girl when they were bagging our groceries into paper bags and make sure they didn’t over-pack them so they got too heavy. It wasn’t that big of a deal.
12th December, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
City employees have spent several months drafting a plastic bag ban proposal, and that proposal will be presented to the City’s Solid Waste Advisory Committee this Wednesday at 6:30 PM at city hall. The public is welcome to come and share comments. According to the Statesman, under the proposal, from January 2013 to December 2015, single-use plastic and paper bags still available at stores, but only upon customer request and at a 25-cent fee for each bag. Starting January 2016, there would be a complete ban for single-use paper and plastic bags, with no option to charge from single-use bags. The 2 stages of the ban is an attempt to try and phase in the change. Under the proposal, there are also several exemptions, including restaurant carryout bags; dry cleaning bags, yard waste and newspaper bags; bags for produce, fish, meats, frozen foods, bulk foods and prescription drugs; bags for beer, wine and spirits. Stores may also request permission to deviate slightly from the ban if they think the terms of the ban would cause undue hardship to their clientele. The Texas Retailers Association, is, as they have been all along, unhappy with the proposal to ban plastic bags in Austin:
The Texas Retailers Association, which represents grocery stores, pharmacies and other retailers statewide, has resisted a ban and said it is disappointed with the details of the draft.
Ronnie Volkening, the group’s president, said Friday that the 25-cent fee would be one of the highest in the nation.
“It will have a hugely regressive impact on low-income citizens and families,” he said.
He also said the ban unfairly exempts some plastic goods, such as dry cleaning bags, while targeting large retailers that have worked hard to cut down on plastic bags by promoting recycling and reuse. Enacting a ban would be a disincentive for retailers to continue to accept plastic bags and other plastic products for recycling, meaning many more of those products could end up in landfills, he said.
I for one am very happy with what I’ve heard about the proposal and look forward to learning more!
7th December, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
I received an Austin Climate Protection Program newsletter today, which had this story:
Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell started his re-election bid in November with an announcement that it is his intention to find a way to provide energy to the City of Austin without the use of any coal-generated electricity.
“Starting immediately, I’m going to begin a dialogue with the community, with Austin Energy, with the LCRA, and with state officials, about how to make Austin coal-free–and aggressively plan a date to achieve that goal,” the mayor said during his announcements.
Currently, Austin obtains coal-based energy from only one source, the Fayette Power Project in La Grange.
The 600 megawatt plant provides nearly 20 percent of Austin’s power, while the rest comes from natural gas, nuclear
and an increasing amount of wind power. As a start to getting off coal, all City of Austin facilities and operations are 100% powered by Greenchoice® energy, derived from entirely renewable sources.
8th November, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
The Statesman had a really detailed article recently in which Austin Resource Recovery Director Bob Gedert was interviewed. Gedert talked about plans to expand recycling in Austin, and I thought these were exciting ideas to get Austin to zero waste by 2040. Here’s an excerpt from the article (I’ve highlighted some interesting suggestions):
The city started a program in 2008 that allows owners or renters of single-family homes to put all their recyclables, unsorted, in big curbside carts. Gedert recently signed deals with two local firms to sort and process those goods well into the future.
In the next few years, Gedert wants to add more goods — such as durable plastics, aluminum foil and small scrap metal items — to the recyclables accepted at the curb.
Austin already collects yard trimmings at the curb and turns them into Dillo Dirt at a city facility. But the plan calls for starting a program in 2015 to collect more organic goods — food scraps, yard trimmings and untreated wood — at the curb in a cart separate from recyclables. The city would compost those goods or hire a company to do so.
Currently, organic materials make up more than 40 percent of the trash Austin sends to landfills. That means a lot of material that could have another life as rich soil is going to waste, Gedert said.
The city collects recyclables every two weeks and trash carts once a week, but Gedert wants to swap those schedules about 2016 — in the hope that if Austinites are recycling and composting more, they’ll have less trash that can be hauled away less often.
The city also plans to add a second location, in North Austin , where residents can drop off hazardous items such as paint, cleaners, batteries and pesticides for the department to dispose of properly. The current location is in South Austin .
Aiming to make reuse simpler, Gedert wants to set up four “eco-depots” run by nonprofits where residents could drop off or take items that could be reused or repaired, such as furniture and toys, and creating a resource center where people could bring goods suitable for classrooms that teachers could retrieve for free.
These are all really great ideas I think. Adding durable plastics to the list of things that could be recyclable would be great, and I’ll admit, I thought aluminum foil was already accepted so adding that would be great too. Making it easier to get rid of hazardous materials correctly would also be a huge improvement. The eco-depots sounds like a great idea although some aspects of them may duplicate the efforts of Goodwill, but I think other cities have similar programs despite also having Goodwill/the Salvation Army.
Gedert also talks about possibly implementing a per-gallon trash fee, rather than the current rate configuration which is a base rate plus a rate for whatever size trash cart you use. I think getting rid of the base rate and more directly assigning costs based on causation also makes a lot of sense. Check out the whole article!
1st November, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
I came across this article “Plastic Bags are Killing Us” by Katharine Mieszkowsi and found it very interesting and a good reminder of why Austin would consider banning plastic bags. Here’s just an excerpt, but I encourage you to read Mieszkowsi’s full article as it’s very educational and well written. I’ve left in the hyperlinks she included, which are interesting to explore as well, and I’ve highlighted some parts I found most intriguing:
The plastic bag is an icon of convenience culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions. They’re made from petroleum or natural gas with all the attendant environmental impacts of harvesting fossil fuels. One recentstudy found that the inks and colorants used on some bags contain lead, a toxin. Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they’ve been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It’s equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.
Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide — about 2 percent in the U.S. — and the rest, when discarded, can persist for centuries. They can spend eternity in landfills, but that’s not always the case. “They’re so aerodynamic that even when they’re properly disposed of in a trash can they can still blow away and become litter,” says Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. It’s as litter that plastic bags have the most baleful effect. And we’re not talking about your everyday eyesore.
Once aloft, stray bags cartwheel down city streets, alight in trees, billow from fences like flags, clog storm drains, wash into rivers and bays and even end up in the ocean, washed out to sea. Bits of plastic bags have been found in the nests of albatrosses in the remote Midway Islands. Floating bags can look all too much like tasty jellyfish to hungry marine critters. According to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic. The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic. There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. In theNorthern Pacific Gyre, a great vortex of ocean currents, there’s now a swirling mass of plastic trash about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, which spans an area that’s twice the size of Texas, including fragments of plastic bags. There’s six times as much plastic as biomass, including plankton and jellyfish, in the gyre. “It’s an endless stream of incessant plastic particles everywhere you look,” says Dr. Marcus Eriksen, director of education and research for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation,which studies plastics in the marine environment. “Fifty or 60 years ago, there was no plastic out there.”
Following the lead of countries like Ireland, Bangladesh, South Africa, Thailand and Taiwan, some U.S. cities are striking back against what they see as an expensive, wasteful and unnecessary mess. This year, San Francisco and Oakland outlawed the use of plastic bags in large grocery stores and pharmacies, permitting only paper bags with at least 40 percent recycled content or otherwise compostable bags. The bans have not taken effect yet, but already the city of Oakland is being sued by an association of plastic bag manufacturers calling itself the Coalition to Support Plastic Bag Recycling. Meanwhile, other communities across the country, including Santa Monica, Calif., New Haven, Conn., Annapolis, Md., and Portland, Ore., are considering taking drastic legislative action against the bags. In Ireland, a now 22-cent tax on plastic bags has slashed their use by more than 90 percent since 2002. In flood-prone Bangladesh, where plastic bags choked drainage systems, the bags have been banned since 2002.
The problem with plastic bags isn’t just where they end up, it’s that they never seem to end. “All the plastic that has been made is still around in smaller and smaller pieces,” says Stephanie Barger, executive director of the Earth Resource Foundation, which has undertaken a Campaign Against the Plastic Plague. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade. That means unless they’ve been incinerated — a noxious proposition — every plastic bag you’ve ever used in your entire life, including all those bags that the newspaper arrives in on your doorstep, even on cloudless days when there isn’t a sliver of a chance of rain, still exists in some form, even fragmented bits, and will exist long after you’re dead.
And further down in the article:
The only salient answer to paper or plastic is neither. Bring a reusable canvas bag, says Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist for the Natural Resources Defense Council. However, if you have to make a choice between the two, she recommends taking whichever bag you’re more likely to reuse the most times, since, like many products, the production of plastic or paper bags has the biggest environmental impact, not the disposal of them. “Reusing is a better option because it avoids the purchase of another product.”
31st October, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
Elections are November 8, and early voting is ongoing throughout Austin. One of the propositions on the ballot, Proposition 8, involves water conservation. Check out this wiki article on Proposition 8 and read about the pros and cons, educate yourself, and take the opportunity to vote. Check out this link for a list of early voting locations.
28th October, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
In discussing Austin possibly implementing a plastic bag ban, a question that comes up is why the City of Austin just doesn’t expand our curbside recycling program to include plastic bags. KUT had this article which explains why the City doesn’t offer this (basically because it’s difficult and costly), and gives some insight on how even some companies that are able to recycle plastic bags (making, for example, decking material) require that the bags be very clean first, because it’s too costly for those companies to clean and dry the bags prior to recycling. Here’s an excerpt:
Unlike other plastics, the city does not accept the plastic bags in its single-stream recycling program, although some big-box stores collect them.
The main reason you can’t recycle plastic bags in your blue bin is that they clog up the processing equipment.
“The plastic bags wrap around anything that rolls and turns,” said Bob Gedert, director of Austin Resource Recovery, the city’s department for both solid waste and recycling.
“The workers have to shut down the line and actually pull and cut and remove all the plastic bags from the line,” he said. That costs the city $175,000 a year.
Gedert says that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to reuse and recycle the bags. Some stores such as H-E-B, Wal-Mart and Randall’s collect them.
That free service really took off three years ago, when major Austin retailers voluntarily cut back on plastic bag use as a way to stave off a city ban then.
Another reason Resource Recovery doesn’t collect plastic bags is that ensuring that the bags are clean and dry is pretty labor-intensive, says Eric Lomardi, executive director of Eco-Cycle, a nonprofit recycler in Boulder, Colo.
Eco-Cycle works with the city of Boulder to accept plastic bags. But Lomardi says they do not process them.
“When you come here you have to talk to an Eco-Cycle staff person before we let you leave us anything, because the materials that we recycle here — plastic bags, Styrofoam — a lot of things that don’t make money,” Lomardi told KUT News. “We can’t afford to clean it up for industry, so you have to do it correctly. And we educate you face-to-face about how plastic bags have to be prepared for us to be able to recycle them.”
And while you can currently take your bags to large stores like an HEB or Walmart and recycle them there, given that the bags need to be clean and dry in order to be recycled, it would be interesting to know what percentage of what is collected in Austin is actually in usable condition for the companies collecting bags from those large stores….
The article also notes that “Retailers argue that if plastic bags are banned, stores will no longer have any incentive to accept them.” Hmm…I doubt the distribution of bags is in any way comparable to the number collected through the local large stores…I’m guessing there’s not such a huge amount of participation in the recycling program to begin with compared to the thousands of plastic bags in Austin that are distributed each month.
26th October, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
The Statesman had a recent article I was reading today about how some other cities have implemented a plastic bag ban. It’s pretty interesting to see how cities in Texas, California, Oregon, etc. have handled this. Below is a summary of what the Statesman found by interviewing representatives from cities across the U.S., but you can read the article to find details about specific cities:
Cities and environmental groups say the bags clog drainage systems, jam recycling machinery, are ingested by marine life and take eons to decompose in landfills. Plastic bag producers counter that the bags are convenient, reusable and can be recycled into other bags or materials such as decking.
The American-Statesman spoke to officials in a dozen cities about the scope of their bans and whether they’ve been effective. A few patterns emerged:
• The bans are varied, some applying to all stores, and some covering only large retailers.
• Several of the cities have also imposed a fee on paper bags, which some say take more fuel and energy to make and transport than plastic.
• Most cities put their bans in effect months or years after passing them, to give retailers time to phase out their stock of plastic bags and retrain employees.
• Several cities did outreach and education efforts, such as airing radio ads and giving away reusable bags, to alert customers to the change.
• Because many of the bans are less than a year or two old, there isn’t much data available on whether they’ve worked well.
On Monday there was a public meeting for Austinites to comment on the proposed ban, but this even more recent Statesman article notes that before that meeting, Mayor Lee Leffingwell stated that “The decision to (have a ban) has basically been made,” and that “[W]e want to do everything we can to minimize the impact. We don’t want to create a hardship.”
City Council staff should have a proposal ready soon for a December or January vote by City Council.
29th September, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
The Austin Business Journal is reporting that as of October 1st, when all remaining City of Austin facilities are switched to green power, Austin will become the largest government to be 100% green powered. The city is able to do this through Austin Energy’s GreenChoice program, a program by which customers can opt to have their energy come from renewable sources. Check out the GreenChoice website if you would like to explore supporting more renewable energy use in your home here.
3rd August, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
Recent discussions among city council members about possibly banning plastic bags at retail stores in Austin reveal that they may be considering banning paper bags as well as plastic bags, and are also considering a surcharge per bag rather than an outright ban of all disposable bags. No decision has been made yet, but council is expected to vote tomorrow to direct city staff to come up with a proposal on how to implement a ban. KUT had a nice story yesterday on the new developments here. Here’s a short excerpt:
“If we ban plastic, we force paper,” Council Member Mike Martinez said.
“But if there is an option for you, and that options is a potential surcharge if you don’t have your bags, that could more comprehensively achieve our policy goals,” he said.
The paper and plastic industries have long debated the merits of their competing bags. The essential argument is that paper bags require more natural resources to produce, while plastic bags are harder to recycle….
The Mayor says there are 263 million plastic bags used in Austin every year. The estimated cost to the city is $850,000 in litter cleanup, and landfill and recycling management..
Because of the cost, Council Member Bill Spelman floated an idea during the meeting of a one-cent City of Austin surcharge per bag. The money would mitigate recycling and litter cleanup costs.
“We would only charge whatever amount we would need to clean up the after effects of having the bags in circulation and on our streets and so on,” Spelman said.
But City Attorney Leela Fireside told Spelman that might not be legal. She said fees are supposed to reimburse the city for running a program or providing a service.
Click on the tag to this post “plastic bags” to learn more about the debate on banning plastic bags in Austin.
25th July, 2011 - Posted by katherine - 1 Comment
Front page news today in the Statesman was about the Mayor’s efforts to ban plastic bags in retail stores in Austin. On August 4th, city council will vote on a resolution that would direct city staff to come up with a proposal for phasing out the bags. That proposal would be done sometime in November, if the August 4th initiative passes. Here’s an excerpt:
Leffingwell said Sunday that plastic bags pollute waterways, harm wildlife, clog drainage systems and take up landfill space, where they don’t biodegrade. A January report from the city’s Solid Waste Services Department said Austinites use 263 million plastic bags a year, and the bags cost the city $850,000 a year to put in landfills and to clean up as litter.
“I think there will be a cost benefit and a benefit to the environment of going down this road and coming up with a reasonable ordinance” that bans the bags, Leffingwell said.
To stave off a possible ban in 2008, six large retailers agreed to try to voluntarily reduce the use of plastic bags, but that program hasn’t been effective enough, Leffingwell said.
The City Council will vote Aug. 4 on a resolution from Leffingwell and Council Members Mike Martinez and Chris Riley that would direct staff members to propose a scope for the ban and a timetable for phasing it in. Staff members would have to present a plan to the council in November.
City staffers will work with retailers and other stakeholders to write that plan, the mayor said.
Details such as whether small retailers should be exempt, what penalties retailers could face for not complying and when the ban should take effect will be worked out over the next four months, he said.
“I’m sure many retailers have a lot of plastic bags on hand or (long-term) contracts with bag companies. We want to take those things into consideration,” Leffingwell said. “Our goal will be to develop a reasonable ordinance that doesn’t cause hardship. It would be a hardship to enact a ban immediately.”
Leffingwell said he thinks paper bags should still be an option at checkout counters because they’re included in Austin’s curbside collection program for recyclables and they don’t gum up recycling machinery as plastic bags do.
But he said retailers may want or need to charge a fee of a few cents per paper bag to compel customers to get in the habit of bringing canvas or reusable bags.
The mayor said he would prefer that compostable plastic bags not be allowed because they can be tough to distinguish from other plastic bags, which might make a ban difficult to enforce.
Leffingwell said he expects there will be exceptions to the ban, such as allowing grocery stores to put fish and meat products in plastic bags at checkout counters.
Only a handful of other U.S. cities have enacted bans on plastic bags, including Brownsville , San Francisco and Portland, Ore., which passed a ban last week .
Exciting news from our Mayor! Check out the whole article for more info.
18th April, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
Several weeks ago, I got an email from a reader stating:
I was just having horrible images of downtown austin alleys at 2:30 am so I started wondering if there has ever been an initiative to start recycling for downtown austin bars. most of everything they throw away is recyclable. i would imagine several, local, environmental non-profits would get behind this idea and there would be some philanthropists around who would donate for this cause. Ecology Action would probably help, too.
I looked into it and found this post from downtownaustinblog.org that explained:
All buildings within the Downtown Refuse Contract District (6th Street, Warehouse District and Congress Ave) can currently recycle paper and cardboard products. There is a voluntary program that bars can opt-in to for glass recycling. This includes several dumpsters placed throughout the alleys of East Sixth Street. Only 10 bars participate in this program.
I want to emphasize this point: The vast majority of beer bottles and cans in downtown Austin bars are NOT recycled. They’re just thrown away. Take a moment an envision how many beers are consumed during a given week. Now, imagine those beer cans and bottles piling up at the dump. Next, imagine that they’ve been doing this for decades.
Since that post was from last year, I contacted Solid Waste Services and asked if there were any updates on glass bottle recycling in downtown Austin/6th Street, as last I had heard, only 10 bars participated in the voluntary program. The response from a Solid Waste Services employee was prompt and friendly, but not extremely encouraging:
Currently, the situation has not changed. That doesn’t mean that change isn’t right around the corner, though. We’re working on finishing a new service contract for the Central Business District, and it should go into effect later this year. It sounds like it will be an expanded version of what is offered right now, and should take most of the materials that our current Single Stream program takes (plastics, tin and steel, all types of paper). I believe that will be a “win/win” for them.
I don’t have any specifics on when this will be rolled out, as there are some logistical challenges to look at. Look for new dumpsters in the downtown area!
So it sounds like it could be quite some time before there’s single stream recycling downtown, and even then it may not accept glass bottles and participation will be voluntary. Just as with recycling by home owners or apartment renters, I’m guessing that unless access to recycling bins is made as readily available as access to traditional dumpsters, there’s little motivation for bars downtown to recycle their materials. I’ve asked a follow up question for the names of the 10 or so bars that voluntarily recycle their bottles, so look for that update in the near future, but when you go out, also be mindful of the lack of recycling downtown when choosing your drink of choice and try to opt for a draft beer or mixed drink, and avoid wasting a bottle altogether.
8th April, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
I attended one of the light rail public discussions this week, which I wrote about earlier here. I went on my lunch break and didn’t have a lot of time to spend there, but it wasn’t as informative as I expected. I went to the meeting at the AT&T conference center – there were probably about 30 people there, but about half of those people were dressed in suits and mingling, talking about transportation, so I assume they were in some way expected to be there - not really the “general public” of Austin. Then there were roughly 15 city (or Cap Metro?) employees there to answer questions. And then there was myself, 3 other people who seemed like regular, non-city of Austin visitors there to fill out comment cards, and one reporter.
A small conference room was filled with large poster boards explaining the process of updating the public transportation system (such as environmental reviews the city will have to conduct), and there were several posters about different options the city was considering for improving public transportation. One option was the no-build option (basically doing nothing except minor additions to current bus system as needed), one was the better-bus option (making due with the bus system but making it “smarter” such as allowing lights to turn green as buses approach, making commute times via bus faster and more convenient) and the last option was the urban rail proposal, which would create a system of street cars mostly in the downtown area with extensions into the Mueller development and to the airport. There were also maps of different proposed station locations for the urban rail option. I didn’t learn anything about the city’s ideas that I hadn’t already learned just by reading the news and the public meeting website, so I was a little disappointed. Plus I felt like the whole meeting was somewhat pointless -I suppose if I owned a house near a potential site for a new station to be built and I didn’t want a street car driving past my house all day I could have filled out a comment card asking that the station be built elsewhere. But I don’t own a house or business downtown, so really all I could write on my comment card was which of those 3 options I thought was best. And the City already paid for a study which recommended that Austin build an urban rail to decrease congestion, so it’s not as if me and the other 3 attendees of the event had gone in there advocating for the “no-build” option, the city would decide to drop the urban rail proposal. So I suppose I felt like the public meeting was mostly a PR event for the light rail proposal. I’m still glad I was able to check it out, and I do think the city needs to improve the public transportation system (I’m anti No-build), I just wish I had gotten more out of the event.
If you’re interested in filling out a comment card, click on the above link and you can find a link to the City’s website where you can submit one online.
4th April, 2011 - Posted by katherine - 1 Comment
There are several opportunities to attend a public meeting this week to talk about the city’s preliminary light rail proposal:
*Monday, April 4, 2 to 5 p.m., at the Austin Convention Center (meeting room 3 on the first floor), 500 E. Cesar Chavez St.;
* Wednesday, April 6, 5 to 8 p.m., at the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (first floor conference room), 4700 Mueller Blvd.;
* Thursday, April 7, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center (classroom 103 on the first floor), 1900 University Ave.;
* Thursday, April 7, 5 to 8 p.m., at the George Washington Carver Museum (museum foyer), 1165 Angelina St.; and
* Saturday, April 9, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., at the Ruiz Branch Library (meeting rooms), 1600 Grove Blvd.
One of these is near my workplace during lunch so I may try to attend part of it.
The Statesman had this editorial in the paper over the weekend urging people to attend:
Last week, the city offered up a proposed light rail plan that includes more than 40 stations, including a possible spur heading up Red River Street from the University of Texas to Hancock Center. Among the many decisions to be made is where the rail line will cross the river.
Overall, we are talking about 16.5 miles of tracks running electric-powered trains on or alongside city streets. It would link downtown, UT, the Mueller neighborhood and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Any form of additional public transportation to our airport would be a great thing.
Estimated price tag, for now: $1.3 billion. The city is looking to a $200 million or more bond issue — to cover the project’s first phase — in November 2012. The Austin City Council this week will consider a plan to seek federal money for the project. Federal money seems crucial for this project.
There’s a lot to talk about and question –— especially financing — before we get anywhere near heading to the ballot box.
The environmental study, of which this week’s hearings are a part, hinges on three potential choices. One is “no-build.” Do nothing and stick with the current, limited transit options. We believe doing nothing is a feasible option only in the sad event that it turns out we can’t afford to do something.
The City of Austin’s website states:
Submit a written comment online, or via e-mail at transportation@ci.austin.tx.us. Written comments may also be submitted in person at the Public Scoping Meetings or by mail to Urban Rail Project, Austin Transportation Department, P.O. Box 1088, Austin, Texas 78767.
Comments should be postmarked before April 29, 2011 to be included in the public record.
The Federal Transit Administration and the City of Austin have officially begun the process of preparing an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the city’s proposed Urban Rail system, including scheduling a series of meetings in April for the public to learn about and comment on the proposed Central Austin transit system.
If you are interested in public transportation, it should be interesting to learn more about the proposal.
21st March, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
ABJ had this article today that stated:
Austin city staff plans to start a study in spring 2013 that could clear the way for a law requiring construction and demolition companies to recycle debris and materiel at job sites.
Staff would then report back to the City Council in fall 2013, according to city records.
The ABJ gets there info from a memo from the Solid Waste Services Director to City Council, which you can find by opening the ABJ article. The memo states:
“[T]he City adopted the Zero Waste Strategic Plan and established the goal of achieving a 90% reduction in the amount of waste sent to landfills by 2040. C&D (construction and demolition)recycling is a key component to achieving the City’s Zero Waste goals. According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s (TCEQ) 2008 approximately 20% of the waste going to local landfills consisted of C&D debris. As a result, preliminary analysis from the SWS Master Plan includes recommendations to increase C&D Recycling as means of significantly affecting the City’s diversion rate.
Read more: City study to look at mandating construction site recycling | Austin Business Journal
15th March, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments
Today KUT and the Statesman both have articles about the nuclear disaster in Japan and the implications it has for the use of nuclear in Texas. The Statesman article focuses in a little more detail on the financial uncertainty of Japanese investment in the South Texas Project (a nuclear power plant near Matagorda Bay that currently has two reactors, with the building of another two additional reactors under consideration) while the KUT article is more general (the KUT article states “Currently Austin gets about 27% of its power from the nuclear plant. Over the years the city has flirted with the idea of increasing nuclear power’s percentage in Austin Energy’s portfolio. Karen Hadden is executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development or SEED Coalition. Her group has been battling against nuclear expansion in Austin and Texas. She points to the earthquake as an example of what can go wrong. ‘In Texas we may not have the risk of earthquakes at least at the South Texas Project site, but we do have hurricanes and we do have droughts that could impact our ability to cool reactors,’ said Hadden.”)
Click on the above articles for more details. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, with some arguing that when all goes as planned, nuclear can be a much cleaner energy source than other options such as coal , but can obviously have very disasterous consequences when things go wrong.
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