What Kind of Footprint Will We Leave Our Children?

By DAN MALLOY

Every day of every year there are important gatherings, like our own JJB Dinner being held tonight in Hartford, that bring people together in a community of common purpose.  But by the time we get home, we will have left a permanent imprint on our planet.

The JJB Dinner leaves a carbon footprint of 44.21 metric tons, created by the driving and flying to get here and the electricity needed to pull off this event at the Convention Center tonight.

I have gone to TerraPass, the leading consumer retailer and marketer of greenhouse gas offsets and consumer energy efficiency products, and purchased the carbon offset for this event.  TerraPass carbon offsets fund clean energy and carbon reduction projects throughout the U.S., including wind power, farm power and landfill gas capture.

It’s a little bit, but I think we live in a different time now when the little bits make a big difference for the future.

To learn how you can purchase a carbon offset credit, for your car, your home or as a gift for someone, visit www.terrapass.com.

It’s an environmentally friendly and rewarding way to help make a difference.

New Activism Era

By DAN MALLOY

Today, I walked to work.  Granted, it’s just three miles, so it was no marathon.  But I did it in my City of Stamford because it’s Earth Day and I wanted to make a point about individuals going the extra mile for the environment.

It gave me a chance to reflect on what we’ve been able to accomplish together here, how much more there is to do, and how I think we are entering a new era of environmental awareness and activism at the micro level where individuals are taking action in small personal ways to make a big collective difference.

For instance, Robert Redford is hosting a special called “Mayoral Moments” on the Sundance Channel to run tonight, where Stamford is featured as the only East Coast city in the series, along with Sacramento, Calif., Toronto and Albuquerque, New Mexico.  The special focuses on our “green” efforts as a result of my participation last year in The Mayors Summit on Climate Control, hosted by the Sundance Preserve.

In his opening, Redford explained why he focused at the municipal level to talk about environmental activism:  “The mayors are the ones closest to the people, they are the ones closest to the problems, and closest to dealing with the solutions.  I think the mayors at the moment hold the power in their hands to create change.”

In Stamford, we’ve launched a comprehensive environmental plan for the city called “Stamford Cool & Green 2020.”  We looked at every motor and every air conditioning unit and air circulator in our buildings, and we’ve upgraded deficient units.  We are saving millions of dollars AND preventing thousands of tons of particulate from going into our air – it’s where the green of money and the green of our environment come together!

Our plan includes an innovative waste-to-energy sewage program to generate up to 15 megawatts of power from dried sludge.  We call for less taxes on hybrid cars and lower permit fees for buildings with heat-reflective roofs, solar panels and other sustainable features.  Just last week we launched a program to recycle new energy-saving light bulbs, which we hope will encourage their use.  We now have 13.5 acres of green roofs from our requirement that new buildings have a certain level of foliage roof coverage.  And we are building a grade school that will have a windmill, solar energy, and a science focus so that children will learn about the environment.

But we have to do more and get creative because every little bit helps.  Here’s a good example:  next week I will be attending the Connecticut Democrats’ big annual event, the Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey Dinner, which attracts over a thousand of our party’s faithful to talk about the future of our great state.  But it also places a strain on our environment – transportation to the event, power to the facility, materials, etc. So, to help encourage clean power development, I will be purchasing the carbon footprint for the event in renewable energy credits through Connecticut Clean Energy or another source.

I hope to see many of you next week at the JJB event.  In the meantime, I urge you to make at least one change in your life that will help pass along a clean and green legacy for generations to come.  Happy Earth Day, and please keep visiting www.danmalloy.com to help spark a dialogue for the future of Connecticut!

Gas Prices Got You Down? Just Think of the Truckers…

By MICHAEL NORRIS

This week, a story from WTNH caught my attention; it was about the truckers who were planning to protest the high price of diesel fuel. The article also mentions a AAA study which showed diesel prices in Connecticut averaged $4.24 a gallon, up from $2.91 a gallon a year ago. Truckers were planning on parking their trucks or driving very slow on the highways; the latter if we’re all lucky.

If you own an SUV and complain about the extra $20 a week you’re spending on gas now vs. a year ago, here’s something to put it into perspective:

“Most independent truckers don’t get reimbursed by their employer for the cost of filling up. One driver who filled up his tanks (the morning of April 1) spent more than $720.”

We have to reach WAAAYYYY back to find the start of this problem: the deregulation of the trucking industry in 1980 lowered the barriers to entry and created competition, but it also put the kind of pressure on wages that has led to truckers watching their take-home pay fall with every penny diesel fuel rises. Without reimbursement by their employers, the independent trucker who paid $720 got about 167 gallons. Last year, that same quantity of fuel might have cost about $485, or $235 less.

Something’s not right when people who drive thousands of miles per year to make sure we all have everything we need are being driven into the ground financially. We owe it to the truckers to look for answers or we could soon be looking at empty shelves at the grocery store.

Place Matters

By DAN MALLOY

This past Friday I had the opportunity to speak a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Conference titled “Reinventing Older Communities: How Does Place Matter?”, along with Mayor Mike Nutter of Philadelphia and Mayor Jay Williams of Youngstown, Ohio. The audience included the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, community development practitioners, bankers and researchers.

Stamford certainly qualifies for the panel discussion – it is nearly 370 years old and has deep historical roots in the industrial era. As I said to the Fed participants, however, Stamford today is a very different city. It is a growing – not shrinking – urban area that still enjoys tremendous diversity across religion, race, and socio-economic segments of the population. It has become a hub of clean industry activity, with a huge presence from the financial sector, as well as a film production center for the state.

I talked about Stamford’s affordable housing initiative, where developers are required to construct affordable housing in conjunction with building projects or pay into a special fund that goes toward affordable housing initiatives.

The great thing about having a vision for your community is it is a constant work in progress. Stamford’s harbor-front South End, for instance, is still a highly industrialized area ready to be brought into the 21st century. Thanks to a $3.5 billion investment led by developer Antares, we are entering a new era for the city, where there will be mixed-use commercial, residential, and retail along a waterfront that will connect the rest of the city for the first time.

I was pleased and honored to have been included in the discussion, and learned a great deal about other communities, as well. As a number of people told me after the presentation, they were going to take the Stamford experience back home, and hopefully make a difference in their own communities. You can listen to a nine-minute segment of the program by clicking here.