The 2019 Work Groups continue to meet and hone their projects. Here are some of the upcoming meetings:

The 2019 Vacant Land Reutilization aka “Emerald Tapestry” group meets Wed. (3/31) at 4 p.m. On the agenda:

• Brainstorm ideas for 2019 presentation at EarthFest (The Communications ‘G5’ is coordinating 2019 at Earth Fest)
• Updates on ‘Re-Imagining 2.0’ from Terry Schwarz, interim director, Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative and Sonia Jakse, city of Cleveland’s consultant for vacant land reutilization.
• Case’s Mark Chupp will present the plan for ‘Re-Imagining’ community engagement that will include an education phase and preparation for supporting the catalytic projects produced from the 2.0 process.

The 2019 Green Building subcommittee tasked with developing goals and metrics for retrofitting Cleveland’s homes for energy efficiency meets Thursday (4/1) at 4 p.m. at the offices of Cleveland Housing Network, 2999 Payne Avenue Suite 306. This group, and the larger Green Building effort, will take the role as advisory committee when Cleveland announces the consultants to develop the city’s $10 million Energy Efficiency Block Grant home retrofit project. The metrics subcommittee will report to the larger Retrofit Working Group on Thursday, April 8, from 6 - 7:30 at the Cleveland Environmental Center, 3500 Lorain Avenue.

Do recent moves by Ohio indicate a willingness to adapt to ‘triple-bottom line’ economic development?

First, Ohio raised the bar for recycling— setting a goal of 25% for municipal (residential and commercial) and 66% of industrial waste. And today Senator Sherrod Brown announced new legislation that would "spur research on potential offshore wind projects, expand incentives for offshore wind development, and require the Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a comprehensive roadmap for the deployment of offshore wind"— giving a boost to the Lake Erie wind farm pilot project (more about that in a later post).

The new recycling goal moves the dial slightly above the 2001 standard (25% municipal and 60% industrial) with a new combined rate of 50%. In Ohio, recycling has been a boon for business. In fact, a 2001 report, “Ohio Recycling Economic Information Study,” issued by Ohio Department of Natural Resources noted that recycling has been a billion-dollar success story for the state. Back then, the industry generated $22.5 billion in direct sales annually, employed more than 100,000 people and accounted for $650.6 million in state tax revenues.

• GreenCityBlueLake has launched a new section of the site to cover the Northeast Ohio Ecosystem Consortium: Scientific research at the edge of cities and nature.

  In the new section, Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative’s Terry Schwarz compiles an impressive list of efforts to reutilize vacant property coalescing in Cleveland. 

  And GreenCityBlueLake Institute’s David Beach comments about the loose confederacy of groups working to reutilize vacant land: “All of these exciting initiatives are evidence of a growing interest in transforming the old industrial landscape. By retrofitting vacant land, we can build a new kind of sustainable city that works with nature.”

With the recent announcement of the three design-build teams now officially competing for the right to streak steel and rock across Cleveland’s skyline, time is ticking. And the ball, suffice to say, is in ODOT’s court.

On WCPN’s Sound of Ideas this morning, Kyle Dreyfuss-Wells, coordinator of the Northeast Ohio Sewer District’s new regional stormwater program, squared off with local attorney Sheldon Berns whose clients are suing over the new fee imposed on property owners—$4.75 a year per 3,000 square feet of impervious surface. David Beach, director of GreenCityBlueLake Institute was also a guest, and offered his take: The new stormwater program begins to treat a problem that’s on a watershed (read: stretches for miles and crosses many municipal boundaries) scale.

The best initiatives utilize the benefits from one outcome as a means for another. Think: re-utilizing vacant land into urban gardens as a way to fight blight (outcome 1) as well as a method to combat health disparities (outcome 2). To that end, Cuyahoga County’s computer recycling initiative is a program that disrupts e-Waste from entering the waste stream, and then re-uses the computers as a means of increasing capacity in underserved populations.

Here is how it works: this April, it is Recycle Your Computer Month in Cuyahoga County. Folks can drop off their old computers (as well as mice, monitors, etc.) at one of 40 plus sponsoring city service departments countywide. In itself, recycling of e-waste is important, as it represents 70% of all hazardous waste in landfills despite making up only 2% of the total waste. But it gets better. Because after the computers are collected, they are given to RET3 Job Corp, a Cleveland based non-profit dedicated to e-Waste recycling. There, over 20 RET3 employees work on erasing stored data, and/or refurbishing or recycling the computers based on the model and condition.

• Did you know that 10% of Americans don't have access to clean drinking water? To raise awareness of the global need for clean water—and the tremendous resource we have in Lake Erie—local rock outfit, Waterband, will appear three times in a (rain soaked) Cleveland today. The Sustainable Cleveland 2019 Water group arranged for the band and its foundation, Wishing Well, to celebrate World Water Day, and to kick off a ‘Drink Local. Drink Tap’ campaign. The last concert is from 3–4 pm at Tri-C, which will be recorded for live streaming here. Events will continue throughout April.
• How does water matter to you? "If we can develop a deeper sense of water, then we will understand connections, interdependence, responsibility, and change. We will know what really matters," GCBL director David Beach writes in this blog post. 

Today is World Water Day, a day to reflect on the importance of water. I've been trying to think deeply about our relationship to water here in the Lake Erie Basin. Below are some thoughts. Please add your own thoughts in a comment.

Deep water

I am mostly water, so I am mostly Lake Erie. The cells of my body also could contain water from the blood of dinosaurs. I probably just inhaled a thousand water molecules given off by the person next to me. Tomorrow I will be a new person because of the water flowing through me.

Water is the ultimate public good. You can’t own water or even possess it very long. Water just passes through everything — rising, falling, boiling, condensing, evaporating, transpiring, precipitating, infiltrating, seeping, vaporizing, freezing, melting, cycling, flowing. Along the way, it makes all life possible. (Or could it be the reverse? Did life evolve in some mysterious way to serve water?)

As people of the Great Lakes freshwater miracle, we have the luxury of being complacent about water. We don’t know the desperate thirst of the world. We even spend a lot of time and effort trying to avoid water, trying to stay dry. Some day we will throw away our raincoats and water-proofing materials, and we will figure how to work with water in a more intimate way. Our clothes will be like permeable cell membranes. Our buildings will be grown out of organic, water-based materials. Buildings like trees. Cities like forests. You won’t have to be one of the fortunate few with lakefront property to have a biophilic relationship with water.

• Cleveland isn’t the only city ‘ReImagining’ vacant land – dozens of U.S. cities are updating rules to enable food production on abandoned properties. “Zoning for Urban Agriculture,” a new report in March's American Planning Association publication "Zoning Practice", is a fine summary of cities removing restrictive zoning or policies to growing and selling food or raising livestock. Cleveland is mentioned in the article – for its urban garden overlay zoning – among the dozen or so cities that either have a zoning overlay to protect gardens from being plowed under for development or have changed their zoning to allow agriculture as a permitted ‘use’.

  Just one of the many, good suggestions from the report: To promote widespread urban food production, planners should reconsider provisions limiting height of vegetation growing in yards or in rights of way. Madison, Wisconsin did the latter, and that opened the way for the Atwood Community Garden and a prairie restoration project alongside the Capital City Bike Trail (pictured above). Madison also added urban agriculture as an open space requirement to its Planned Unit Developments: As a result, Troy Gardens completely integrates community gardens, an organic farm and a CSA into a housing development – that’s smart planning, leveraging your vacant land when developers decide to come calling.

• The City of Cleveland has signed on for Earth hour, a global observance for the planet where participants turn off lights for an hour (at 8:30 p.m.) on March 27. Sustainability Chief Andrew Watterson suggests that participants in the Sustainable Cleveland 2019 organize to raise awareness.
• The 2019 Sustainable Water group is organizing a local celebration for World Water Day on March 22. The “Drink Local. Drink Tap.” Campaign kicks off that night with a performance by Waterband and at events throughout April. The goal is to encourage Northeast Ohioans to recognize the abundance of clean drinking water in Lake Erie and to kick the bottled water habit.
• The Urbanophile blog has a good idea how to save Detroit’s crumbling but stunning Michigan Central Depot and other industrial-era gems: “What if instead of spending a huge amount of money to try to save one building, the city found a little bit of money to do basic maintenance to preserve the structural integrity of many buildings – and create a safe path through parts of them that tourists could walk through similar to how ancient ruins are displayed in Europe.”