No doubt, building bridges is an adult endeavor. The nuts and bolts, the girders, the EISs and RFPs, and then the responsibility inherent with carving a form that people will or will not take pride in as they negotiate a city that is or is not sustainably evolving. Yes, building bridges is not for the unserious, the depthless. And so its ironic (yet not unsurprising) that ODOT has reacted to the latest round of Inner Belt discussion with a bit of childish unsophistication; in effect, hijacking the conversation by not allowing one—not unlike the kid refusing the rest of us the game by taking their ball back home with them.

At least that is how it felt when word broke last Thursday that ODOT would in fact not be ready to reply to the Planning Commission’s formal resolution asking ODOT to reconsider the addition of a multipurpose path, then waking up the next morning to see that ODOT was in fact ready to make a statement—in a vacuum, to a reporter. The answer: leave us alone, we have serious work to do that does not involve amending paperwork that could allow for the betterment of the designs we’re paying $3 million to request.

What could you do with hundreds of professionals in 220 hours? Apparently ODOT thinks between now and March 2, it’s not enough to amend electronic documents that can vastly improve the future for Greater Cleveland’s citizens. The documents, which include ODOT’s environmental impact statement, would allow thousands to choose to ride a bike or walk on the new Innerbelt Bridge and catch views of downtown on the way to an Indians game or to dinner in Tremont.

“When you design a bridge, you don’t design it just for cars you design it for people,” Cleveland Councilman Matt Zone told ODOT Innerbelt Project Manager Craig Hebebrand at today’s Cleveland Planning Commission. “Why should the citizens of Cleveland settle for second class? We should demand (a multi-use path on the bridge) from the design phase. We should demand something better. Let’s see what the prices come in. In Shanghai and in Portland they are designing bridges for people.”

Hebebrand said it’s too late from ODOT’s perspective to make any changes. “There’s no way to physically amend the documents to add the addendum in time.”

Planning Commission member Lillian Kuri, however, got Hebebrand to admit that there will be many addendums to the Environmental Impact Statement before the end. Adding an addendum to that EIS for a bike/ped multi-use path now should not be used an excuse, Kuri said.

• In late breaking news, ODOT will not discuss the multi-use path on the Innerbelt Bridge at tomorrow's Cleveland Planning Commission meeting, even though they were confirmed on the agenda. ODOT representatives will be at the Planning Commission meeting anyway, presenting plans for the West Shoreway, but will not respond to a resolution approved by the Planning Commission inviting ODOT to address questions and concerns on the possibility of a multi-purpose path on the new Inner Belt Bridge. The local office is waiting as "ODOT Central (Columbus) formulates a response," writes an ODOT 12 staffer. Bicyclists, joggers, walkers and sustainability advocates are still expecting to have a conversation with ODOT about this at a future Planning Commission meeting. To support a bike/pedestrian path on the Innerbelt Bridge, click here.

• Winners were announced last Friday (January 29th) for the third annual Cleveland Design Competition. This year’s project focus was the Lakefront Station (the current Amtrak site), which required contestants to design a multi-modal transit center that could double as a pedestrian path bridging the Mall with North Coast Harbor. The winners—Mario Caceres and Christian Canonico of France—were among 83 designers who submitted proposals for the project. The top designs can viewed here.
• Although winter is traditionally a downtime in the local fresh food market scene, several farmer’s market sites—including Shaker Square and Kamm’s Corner—have indoor hours of operation. Click here for more information.
• A new report out of Policy Matters Ohio suggests that the presence of a clean energy sector is not a matter of if but when, and Ohio will only benefit if it prepares its industrial workforce in accordance with the renewable energy and efficiency industries. While the report states that Ohio has many components of a green training infrastructure already in place, there are gaps that still exist. The report, then, recommends a few ways to further integrate the green training infrastructure, including: re-investing in existing vocational/tech programs rather then creating sometimes unnecessary programs, and eliminating silos between government and business so that investments in training programs are driven by actual demand.

Last week the Yale Climate Project and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication released the results of national survey that follows up on their 2008 survey, Climate Change in the American Mind. 

The survey focused on the public’s belief and attitudes about global warming and how they’ve changed since 2008. The results are alarming. In the past year public opinion on the topic has cooled; Americans are less convinced that climate change is happening.

The following summary of the survey results is from an email release by Anthony Leiserowitz, PhD, Director of the Yale Project on Climate Change and a principle investigator on the project.

• The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening has declined 14 points, to 57 percent. 
• The percentage of Americans who think global warming is caused mostly by human activities has dropped 10 points, to 47 percent.
• Only 50 percent of Americans now say they are “somewhat” or “very worried” about global warming, a 13-point decrease.

In line with these shifting beliefs, there has been an increase in the number of Americans who think global warming will never harm people or other species in the United States or elsewhere.

State officials and sustainable transportation advocates cheered today's announcement of $400 million of federal funding for development of Ohio's "3C" passenger rail corridor linking Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati. 

"With today’s historic announcement by President Obama, Ohio takes a major step toward modernizing our state’s transportation infrastructure," said Governor Ted Strickland. "The 3C Corridor will create economic development opportunities and serve as a model of environmental sustainability. Most importantly, it will put thousands of Ohioans to work over the next few years."  

See more on the 3C passenger rail plan here.

While the current plan will offer modest service at first -- a handful of trains a day at speeds up to 79 miles per hour -- it will be a vital downpayment on a transportation alternative that will begin to rebalance the state's transportation system after decades of automobile-oriented development. Go here for more on how the funds might be spent from an analysis by All Aboard Ohio.

• GreenCityBlueLake is now covering the progress of the work groups formed at the Sustainable Cleveland 2019 summit. The latest post looks at last week’s Vacant Land and at the Advanced Energy groups' meetings. Stay tuned for more updates on the 2019 blog.
• Mark Tebeau, director of Cleveland State University Center for Public History and Digital Humanities, is an urban historian teaching his students the art of oral and written histories on Rust Belt cities. His classes have interviewed descendents of the founders of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens, of the American Civil War, to this semester, the leaders of the 58 pilot projects of the ReImagine a More Sustainable Cleveland project. Tebeau will turn his class loose on 30 of the projects aimed at turning vacant lots into community gardens, connected green spaces or experiments using plants to remove toxics from the ground. They will document who lived on these empty blocks, and what life was like before the sub-prime fiasco eviscerated whole Cleveland neighborhoods. With the help of photographer and documentarian Helen Liggett’s CSU urban history class, students will document the impact that small-scale efforts to repair the land through green strategies may have on neighborhood health and its self-image.

After months of working in the trenches to re-imagine an Innerbelt Bridge with access to all (with a bike/pedestrian path and scenic overlook with panoramic views of the city), cycling and sustainability advocates took another step forward today as the Cleveland Planning Commission approved a resolution of support.

Commission member and former director of Cleveland Public Art (where she fought the battle to put a bike lane and promenade on the Detroit-Superior Bridge) Lillian Kuri led the charge that ODOT include language inviting alternative designs including a multi-purpose path atop the bridge as part of its Request for Qualifications bid packages. Commission members Anthony Coyne and David Bowen agreed that an alternative in the sealed bid process would invite engineering firms to provide a design for a bike/ped path.

“A design-builder should be able to put in an exception for a design improvement,” Bowen said. “What if it costs less and it’s a design exception? Why shouldn’t that score higher?”

Planning Director Bob Brown, who along with City Sustainability Manager Andrew Watterson and City Engineer Rob Mavic were added to the Innerbelt Bridge RFQ process after the Planning Commission and the cycling community took up the issue, said ODOT at a recent meeting to discuss the bridge RFQ threatened the loss of $85 million in Stimulus funds if any delay comes into the process. Brown said that FHWA signed off on the Abbey Avenue alternative and suggested that ODOT will reject the bike/ped on the bridge by citing the federal approval.

It's not often that public officials get to do something truly transformational for Greater Cleveland. The board members of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) did so on Jan. 7 as they voted to approve the creation of a new stormwater program.

This program is one of the most important developments for local water quality that I have seen in the past 25 years. At last we will have an agency with professional staff and construction budget to deal with stormwater on a watershed basis. We will be able to make real progress on the region’s most serious remaining water quality problems, getting to the root of problems instead of sending them downstream.

This program can be our green infrastructure agency. It can help our region become a leader in retrofitting the urban landscape to reduce stormwater runoff and restore ecological functioning. This is one of our best opportunities for creating the green city on a blue lake that we all dream about. 

Capacity to redesign the urban landscape

The NEORSD stormwater program was just one of the big organizational capacity additions in the past year that will allow Greater Cleveland to rethink the urban landscape. The second was the creation of the Cuyahoga County Land Bank, which provides new legal and financial capacity for acquiring and accelerating the reuse of vacant properties.

“We think we have an energy policy now," observes Ohio Partners for Affordable Energy on the rules for the state’s alternative energy portfolio standard in Senate Bill 221. "It is renewables and efficiency that will dominate the industry during the next 25 to 30 years."

"As a result of a 45% decline in demand (from industrial users)," OPAE continues, "power capacity prices in the regional wholesale markets that service Ohio have declined from around $100/kW to $16/kW. No one will build new power plants other than to meet renewable mandates when that is the market price. Efficiency is cheaper than generating kilowatts.”

The rules call for at least twenty-five percent of electricity for retail sale from all electric utilities to come from alternative energy resources (.5% by the end of 2010).

One way Ohio’s utilities could meet their energy efficiency mandate to reduce energy demand is smart grid technology (like they’re doing out West). In five states in the Pacific Northwest GridWise Demonstration Project, IBM and U.S. Department of Energy investigated how customers responded to real-time information and with smart appliances.