While the idea sounds appealing, it is hard to see how any single person could have any authority over the 19 boroughs that share the island. Perhaps a better idea would be to create a green committee to share information and build cooperative relationships amongst all the “green” city leaders from each borough.
Via: Financial Post
As CEO of the third largest city in the United States, Sadhu Johnston is responsible for implementing Mayor Richard M. Daley’s environmental initiatives across city government.
“My role is to bring the department of environment into each department,” Johnston, who is also the mayor’s deputy chief of staff, has said of his job.
Similarly, in Calgary, the role of spurring environmental action across city government belongs to Dave Day, the city’s director of environmental and safety management.
Day leads a team of 60 people who oversee green programs and targets for municipal departments under the city’s internationally-certified environmental management system.
“I’m the environmental champion for the city,” Day says.
Unlike Chicago and Calgary, Montreal has no civil servant perched atop the municipal bureaucracy making sure the green tint runs to its core.
So while Montreal has a new 20-year transportation plan aimed at boosting public transit and decreasing car use, it’s moving ahead with a redesign of Notre Dame St. E. that’s expected to increase the number of cars and trucks using it.
And while the city has raised its annual contribution to bus and métro service by 40 per cent, or $95 million, since 2002 to woo riders, it has hit riders with the other hand by hiking the price of a monthly transit pass by 40 per cent, or $20, in the same period.
To its credit, Montreal has developed green bylaws restricting pesticides and car idling, built a park over a former landfill in St. Michel and has become a leader in soil decontamination.
But the city and its 19 boroughs also engage in contradictory actions, critics say, leading them to conclude that Montreal is rudderless on the eco wave.
What if someone in Montreal’s community of 23,000 civil servants were a designated eco chief, forcing Montreal to improve its green record? Imagine the progress that could be made in transit, building, pollution and waste management.
“We have lots of policies in Montreal, but it’s not all coherent with what the city is doing,” André Porlier, executive director of the Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal, said.
For Porlier, the city’s most maddening contradiction is on green-space protection.
On the one hand, Montreal has a four-year-old policy for preserving natural habitats, which targets protecting six per cent of the island’s land mass and two per cent of waterways.
On the other hand, Rivière des Prairies-Pointe aux Trembles borough voted last year to build a borough office and cultural centre in René Masson Park, an area comprised of marshland, a creek, mature trees and fields. Ironically, construction will incorporate Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) guidelines.
And Côte des Neiges-Notre Dame de Grâce voted last year to raze several hundred square-metres of green space to replace an outdoor pool in Benny Park with a new LEED-standard indoor sports and community centre.
CRE-Montréal helped the city prepare its 2005 sustainable development plan, and devised 20 indicators to help a cell of five civil servants in the city’s environment department track progress by the city and its 160 business and community “partners” on the plan’s 36 goals.
But nothing requires the city or boroughs to attain those goals, Porlier said with frustration in his voice. “You need a concerted effort, and we don’t have that right now in Montreal.”
