Defining Sustainability and Meeting Its Goals

By Gene Williams
Staff Writer

May 6 -- Santa Monica prides itself in being a “sustainable city.” The word is used repeatedly in municipal documents, such as the General Plan, and regularly uttered at City Council and commission meetings.

But what exactly does “sustainability” mean? And what criteria must be met to deserve the designation? The Planning Commission got some answers Wednesday night from the City's senior environmental analyst.

Santa Monica's Sustainable City Plan "addresses pretty much everything that goes on in the community," said Dean Kubani. "You cannot do what we have done for years, which is address environmental issues, separately from economic and other social issues."

"Sustainable solutions will come from integrated planning," Kubani added, explaining that "looking at issues in isolation will solve some problems but create a whole lot more."

The plan, which Kubani said, is "not really a plan," but "more of a vision statement or vision document," outlines eight "goal areas":

• Resource Conservation
• Environmental and Public Health
• Transportation
• Economic Development
• Housing
• Open Space and Land Use
• Community Education and Civic Participation
• Human Dignity

The plan goes on to set targets -- measurable achievements to be reached by 2010 -- and the Environmental Programs Division collects data on a variety of "indicators" to track its progress toward reaching them, Kubani said.

For example, five years from now Santa Monica residents may hope to see at least 25 percent of their electricity come from renewable resources and 70 percent of their solid waste recycled or otherwise diverted from landfills, according to the plan.

Seventy percent of their tap water will come from local sources and there will be bike lanes on more than a third of the city's arterial streets, according to the plan.

Santa Monica has been making progress and is doing much better than many other cities in areas of sustainability, Kubani said.

"The health of the Bay has significantly improved since the early nineties," he said. "On the whole, we're doing pretty well in this area."

Also, although emissions of greenhouse gasses have risen slightly in recent years, they are still lower than they were ten years ago, Kubani said, adding that greenhouse emissions in other cities have increased by as much as a third during roughly the same period.

In addition, some 62 percent of the city's trash gets reused or goes somewhere other than landfills, a significant increase from only 14 percent a decade earlier, Kubani said.

However economic issues seemed to pose some tougher challenges.

"We don't have any long-term economic plan in Santa Monica," Kubani told the commission.

While data shows the income gap narrowing between residents, Kubani attributed the trend in large part to "gentrification" -- poorer residents being forced out of the area by market forces -- rather than a rise in the standard of living.

After Kubani's presentation Commissioner Jay Johnson worried that rising property values were "pricing middle income people out."

"Are we at risk of becoming a victim of our own success by gentrifying the city?" asked Johnson, who owns several apartment buildings in the city.

Although other towns actively try to promote gentrification, Kubani said, discussions with City leaders have led him to believe that this is not what they want for Santa Monica.

Yet, there is no policy to guide staff in dealing with the issue, he said.

The Sustainable City Plan was adopted in 1994 and updated in 2001. Kubani hoped to have pragmatic strategies relating to the plan to present to the City Council by late this summer, but he will probably not be ready to do so until sometime this fall, he said.

Later during Wednesday's session, commissioner Arlene Hopkins asked for increased communication and cooperative efforts between the Environmental Programs Division --which developed the plan -- and City planning staff.