How green is my city?

The San Mateo City Council has yet to adopt as policy the recommendations of its sustainability task force. The advisory committee presented a series of initiatives to reduce carbon initiatives in December. Action is expected sometime next month. According to Vice Mayor Brandt Grotte, a member of the team which made the recommendations, some will take longer than others to implement. It is easy for the city to mandate high energy and water efficient lead silver standards for its own new public buildings than it is to mandate these same goals for private and commercial builders. The recommendations say to take a year or so for educating, then mandate lead sliver standards for new private building permits by 2009. It will be interesting to see if there are at least three council votes for some of these mandates.

One of the more interesting recommendations is to reduce single automobile school trips by 50 percent. Anyone who lives near a school knows traffic congestion reaches a peak each week day morning when it seems that every single child is driven to school. Even children who live a block or less away from their neighborhood school don’t seem able to make the trip by foot anymore. Parents say they are off to work and want to make sure their child arrives safely; they are afraid to let the children walk alone, even if it is a short distance. No sympathy from those of us who walked more than a mile each way in snow, sleet and pouring rain and survived. Of course, there wasn’t as much traffic in those days and at least one parent was at home in case we met trouble along the way, which we never did. The city hopes to change this by encouraging "walk pools”— students walk in a group with a parent or two to chaperone; increased school carpooling and making local buses more available for student travel. This city goal may get support from pediatricians. One of the causes of increased childhood obesity comes from too much sitting in a car seat and not enough time spent walking.

Another strategy is to increase pedestrian and cycling by 30 percent by 2020. Many people drive to the Sawyer Creek Trail to walk and bike the six-mile round trip but would never think of walking just a mile or two to downtown. People used to walk to school and walk downtown because they had to. Today, I guess we need to. Another initiative, another no brainer, is to concentrate future development near transit, or to put it more strongly, not allow future development that is not within walking distance of rail and bus. I hope the City Council takes a strong leadership position on this one. There are many more initiatives which you can check out on the city’s Web site, including one to increase measured waste recycling by 50 percent by 2020. Right now the city is at 30 percent.

The City Council and staff deserve credit for going this far in making San Mateo green. Let’s hope they go all the way.

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One of the most surprising endorsements of Jackie Speier’s congressional bid comes from Mayor Gina Papan. It has been a long time since Speier and the Papans have joined forces. Gina’s dad, the late Assemblyman Lou Papan, was a foe of Speier in the Legislature. Speier urged current Assemblyman Gene Mullin to run for the Assembly and defeat Gina Papan’s bid to follow in her father’s footsteps. But in politics yesterday’s enemy is tomorrow’s friend. My guess is that Gina made the endorsement because State Senator Leland Yee, who is endorsing her for the 2008 run for the Assembly, is not going to run for Congress. And because Alex Tourk who got his start in politics working as an aide for then Assemblyman Lou Papan and is a close friend of the Papan family is now Speier’s campaign manager. Does this mean Jackie will support Gina in her bid for the Assembly when Mullin is termed out? Probably not, because she is close to Supervisor Jerry Hill, who also has his eye on the seat.

Sue Lempert is the former mayor of San Mateo. Her column runs every Monday. She can be reached at sue@smdailyjournal.com.