Green Goes a Mile High
by John Spizzirri

Kermit the Frog often suggested in song and dance that “It’s not easy being green.” Since the green movement started some 35 years ago, many people, organizations, products, and entities have claimed to support and/or promote a green agenda. Many of these claims, as we have discovered, are, well, just a lot of song and dance.

The truth is, it’s not easy being green. It many cases, it means sacrifice. And, as Americans, we’re not so eager to surrender those things that might diminish “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

But we’re getting there. After several decades of warnings by scientists and former politicians and even well-meaning rock stars, we’re beginning to finally understand what aboriginal people have understood since time immemorial—don’t mess with Mother Nature.

Despite a president with a not-so-respectable record on the environment, many individuals, corporations and municipalities throughout North America are taking it upon themselves to right many of our past environmental wrongs.

Municipalities large and small, from New York to Kenosha, have introduced wide-ranging initiatives to revitalize their communities from the inside out, whether through brownfield redevelopment, near-term sustainability plans or both.

Denver is no exception.

Greenprint Denver was initially launched in 2005 by Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper to further advance Denver’s Comprehensive Plan, which had already incorporated brownfield and sustainability components. In his introduction letter to the Greenprint Web site, Hickenlooper calls the plan “an action agenda for sustainable development for the City and County of Denver that demonstrates local government can be an effective force for innovation and leadership to improve the environment.”

For Hickenlooper and his staff, the first order of business was to make internal operations as sustainable as possible. To help accomplish this, they developed a set of guiding principles that would help them chart a course for city government and, eventually, the people, communities and businesses of Denver.

In part, the principles promote sustainability as a public value; recommend a balanced economic, social and environmental approach to all city policy and program decisions; advocate the pursuit of activities that support environmental equity and health for all citizens; and suggest the development of an annual report card to rate the city’s progress in these areas.

“Basically, what the city did at the beginning was to take an inventory of what it was doing already (in terms of sustainability), and they found out that it was actually doing a lot. So the next step was to figure out how to take it further,” says Stacey Eriksen, brownfields coordinator in the Department of Housing and Neighborhood Development, Office of Economic Development.

“Last year, the city brought in people from Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Oakland to talk about the sustainability programs in their cities. They also put together a Greenprint Council, which included environmental people, business people and personnel from the EPA, who really pushed the city to commit to certain things.”

An Action Agenda for Sustainability was developed as a key component of Greenprint to help put the guiding principles to work. Under the agenda, Denver plans to reduce its “per capita greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2010.” This was a direct result of Hickenlooper’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a pledge he signed with 49 other members of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in June 2005. (Since then, 425 mayors representing some 61 million Americans have lent their signatures to the document.)

Another core agenda item is aimed at increasing the city’s tree canopy from its current 6 percent cover to a total of 18 percent. To accomplish this, the city intends to plant thousands of new trees each year in areas that include 14,000 acres of mountain parks, 2,500 acres of urban parks, and private properties throughout the city.

At the mayor’s inaugural address on July 16, the mayor announced that the city already had planted 65,356 trees over the past year. And when Hickenlooper isn’t driving a scooter, he drives a hybrid Ford Escape SUV, part of the city’s Green Fleet, which currently boasts 81 hybrid vehicles. The agenda proposes that all of the city’s diesel vehicles operate on biodiesel by this year, and that other city vehicles eventually be replaced by hybrid or high fuel-efficiency vehicles.

Principle to Greenprint is a series of green building and industry goals that focus on green business development, high performance building and brownfield redevelopment.

Goals include increasing high performance building practices in the private sector and working with the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation to “attain a 10 percent annual increase in new, privately-built LEED or Energy Star-certified buildings constructed or renovated in Denver over 2005 baseline through construction incentives and support.”

Eriksen, who works on Denver’s brownfield objectives, chairs the Sustainable Green Building Subcommittee of the Mayor’s Housing Task Force, which was tasked to develop an affordable green housing policy for the City of Denver.

“One of the things that we tried to do was educate ourselves as to all of these different green programs,” says Eriksen, who has been on loan to the city from the EPA since early 2005. “Ultimately, what everybody really agreed on was that we want something that’s doable, but we also want to push people. We had a couple of affordable housing developers who were on the subcommittee, and they said, ‘You know, it shouldn’t just be something that everybody can do without any effort.’”

While details are not yet finalized, the subcommittee did recommend a policy and develop a standard by which builders, who obtain funding from the city to build affordable housing, would have to comply. According to the Greenprint Web site, energy efficiency standards were developed for city-supported affordable housing to assure equity among all of Denver’s residents. And as part of the green business development efforts, the city would also train builders to help them meet green standards.

“In the green building program that we will be rolling out, we’re basically trying to look at energy conservation, water quality and indoor air quality. We’re also trying to locate housing near light rail or a bus system, and place affordable housing where people have jobs so that they don’t have to get into their car every time they need to go somewhere,” explains Eriksen.

“So it’s not just about the economics. You have to look at the environmental and social aspects of it, too. Some people call it the triple bottom line.”

Brownfield redevelopment also plays a direct role in the Greenprint plan, with goals set for 2007 and 2011. The city has already exceeded its 2007 goal, and Eriksen believes that redevelopment of a 35-acre site will be completed earlier than the 2011 deadline.

Additional brownfield initiatives, not tied directly to Greenprint, continue to revitalize the city and intersect with other Greenprint goals. A proposal for a new light rail system called FasTracks, considered one of the biggest mass transportation projects in the country, has jumpstarted infill redevelopment along the proposed rail line.

All told, Greenprint Denver is an ambitious undertaking that dares to address the city’s socioeconomic impact on the environment. With municipal budgets ever on the decline, Denver still seems to manage a balanced approach that appears equitable for all of its citizenry and allows for achievable and sustainable practices.

“I think a lot of people who worked here at the beginning said, ‘Well, that’s that environmental stuff, and we don’t do that,’” says Eriksen. “But when you look at all of the programs that we do here as the Office of Economic Development—help redevelop neighborhoods that have a lot of issues in them, help provide jobs for people and help provide job training—that’s economic, environmental and social. And I think all of that affects sustainability.”