Former CB 4 chairperson Lee Compton (far right) speaks at the inaugural meeting of the board’s Environmental Task Force. John Doswell (at left, in foreground) listens along with (from left to right) Renee Schoonbeek, Jean Preece, Eric Muise and John Weis.
Green in focus and form, a CB 4 task force is born
By Chris Lombardi
Lee Compton leaned forward across the conference table at the Community Board 4 office, with a glint in his eye. “I just thought of a way that we could be a kind of useful thorn in the side of government. What about asking NYCHA [the city Housing Authority] specifically what they’re doing to reduce energy?”
“Wait a minute,” said Robert Trentlyon, like Compton, a longtime member of the board’s Chelsea Preservation and Planning Committee. “You’re saying you don’t want to be a thorn?”
Laughter skittered around the table. “That’s what we are!” said John Weis of the Transportation Committee.
Compton grinned in agreement. “The people who supported the stadium will never forget us,” he said, referring the failed Jets stadium proposal for Hudson Yards. “That’s kind of our role.”
The exchange occurred at the Feb. 5 inaugural meeting of CB 4’s Environmental Task Force, a new team of board members established to advise the board’s standing committees on environmental aspects of the issues before them.
The task force will also consolidate information on “green” topics that can be easily accessed by community members, and will develop a comprehensive environmental policy statement to be voted on by the board in the future. In order to so, the group agreed, they first need to become better versed in the terms of the debate—in particular, given CB 4’s responsibilities in evaluating new development projects, the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) building standards set by the U.S. Green Building Council (See “On the Record,” page 12).
“We need to know not just the technical details of LEED but what it’s about, what it means to accomplish,” said task force chair John Doswell.
From trash and trucks to sustainability
According to Trentlyon, board members have long contemplated the formation of such a task force. “For years now, I’ve been trying to get the board to be thinking more about green buildings,” he said. Given the efforts of Mayor Bloomberg’s Office on Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, he added, “the city has been way ahead of the community boards. As a board, now, we need to say much more firmly that developers who come to us have to use green principles.”
But the spur to actually form the task force came when the board’s Waterfront and Parks Committee became concerned about issues surrounding the proposed Gansevoort waste transfer station.
Eric Muise, a biologist and Hell’s Kitchen resident who joined Board 4 only last year, told Chelsea Now last week that the committee realized there were issues surrounding the station that had almost nothing to do with parks. They included traffic problems from “all those trucks,” whether or not Gansevoort is the final choice, and issues associated with recycling. Muise, a native of Montreal who is also on the Transportation Committee, said he saw a crossover—and a gap.
“I said to John Doswell that we should tackle this problem,” Muise said. “But where did it belong?”
Environmental committees at other community boards have also sprung from local issues, often involving sanitation. Manhattan’s CB 8 has an Environment and Sanitation Committee, whose Website lists “the water supply infrastructure and the proposed marine transfer station at East 91st Street” among its concerns. The Village’s CB 3 has two environmental subcommittees—one, the super-specifically named “Con Edison Environmental Settlement Fund Subcommittee.” Many are beginning to integrate the newer vocabulary of sustainability: The Website for Queens’ CB 3’s committee mentions Earth Pledge’s Green Roofs Initiative, which promotes technologies that catch and reuse rainwater instead of losing it to the city’s storm-water system.
For CB 4’s new task force, the issue at the inaugural meeting was less the particular, West Side-centric issues to take on, but how its group can help the board better tackle them.
Beyond compact fluorescents
Sitting around the table with co-chairs Compton and Doswell were Trentlyon, Muise, Board 4 staffer Renee Schoonbeek, and two public members of the Waterfront and Parks Committee, Gwen Billig and Jean Preece. To start the discussion, they’d all been instructed by Doswell and Compton to come in with some ideas stimulated by PlaNYC 2030, the mayor’s sustainability blueprint.
Preece walked in with an article about CSOs (Combined Sewer Overflow), and concerns about sustainable approaches to sewage. Billig spoke both about green roofs, and building design “with floor-to-ceiling windows, so it collects the sun and doesn’t cost as much to heat.” Compton spoke of trends he’d noticed looking at newer development projects, saying with approval: “One thing we’re seeing is the use of gray-water systems,” in which water is purified and then reused.
“Are we going to get into healthy buildings?” asked Trentlyon.
Compton leaned back with a big smile. “Bob—we can do anything you want.”
But first, Compton added, the group needed to resolve two questions: “The facetious one is, what are we going to call ourselves? The second, less facetious, what role is it going to play?” He also reminded that the group initially constituted only a “task force”—not an official committee—and therefore did not count toward the members’ obligation to serve on two other committees.
Compton then added, only half-jokingly, “One thing we are not going to do, I think, is tell people where they can buy compact florescent light bulbs.”
The group laughed in agreement. “Plenty of others do that!” said Preece, while Schoonbeek added, “That’s the kind of information we could put on the CB 4 Website.”
Everyone agreed that the Website was key to providing information. “Con Edison will come and do an energy audit of your home. We could put that sort of information on the Website,” said Compton. “We want to collect all kinds of such resources, and make them come alive for use by the committees.”
They could also organize, said Trentlyon, pointing to an East Village initiative called The Third Street Project. “They got a whole block’s worth of building owners to agree to work together to reduce energy use. Now that’s ambitious for us right now, but...”
Trentlyon’s suggestion then sparked Compton’s idea about pressing NYCHA on its energy plan. The authority has long had 10, five and one-year energy conservation plans, and repeatedly announces new sustainability projects. “We have Fulton Houses and Elliott Chelsea Houses right in our board,” Compton said. “That’s a way to be a useful thorn.”
“Would we develop a policy statement on something like that?” Doswell asked.
“Whatever you do on NYCHA,” said Trentlyon, “you have to involve [the Houses’ tenant association presidents] Jimmy Pelsey and Phyllis Gonzales.”
“We wouldn’t be the ones to do it,” Compton responded. Given that the task force’s role is to advise board committees around environmental aspects of their work, he said, “It’s a project we could advise the Housing, Health and Human Services Committee about.”
Schoonbeek then proposed that the task force develop similar pilot projects for each committee, “to sort of get their feet wet.” But others, like Doswell and Muise, said that enough of these actions would naturally arise out of the board’s ongoing work, especially in projects that concern development and land use.
“Someone from ‘X’ committee might come to us with an issue,” Compton said. “We get information. We get members and the public to ask questions of the people who [have answers].”
Muise speculated, “Would we evaluate proposals and letters about to come out of committees, and evaluate them for their green aspects?”
“That wouldn’t make a lot of sense,” Doswell replied. “To put everything through two reviews? What we can do, though, is slowly develop principles based on projects—and eventually we’ll have an environmental policy, voted on by the full board.”
Not too cool for school
First off, members agreed, they had to learn more in order to have some authority on the subject. For one thing—given the board’s responsibilities in helping regulate development, and the fact that 80 percent of New York’s air and water pollution comes from buildings—they needed to engage fully with the complex subject of green construction and rehabilitation standards.
“We need to know not just the technical details of LEED,” Doswell said. “We need to understand what it’s all about.”
“We can teach ourselves,” Compton said. “One of my ideas was to ask Dan Kaplan, of [the development firm] FxFowle, since I know him.”
“We could get architects to talk to us,” Schoonbeek said. Also mentioned was the firm Cook+Fox, the subject of this week’s “On the Record,” which had expressed enthusiasm about the committee to Chelsea Now and offered to host them.
“I like either idea. One of the things we do so well is build personal relationships,” Compton said.
But Doswell added gently, “I have a problem with that. These are people who might come to us for approval of a project.” It’s better, he said, to go with city resources or the Green Building Council over private interests.
“Can we get some resources on CSOs?” Preece asked. “I could look into who could come speak.”
Eventually the group decided on what Compton called “a series of seminars for ourselves, widely publicized, on important environmental topics.” Doswell warned that they shouldn’t become as open and unwieldy as recent public forums on such topics as solid waste and traffic. “There were so many people asking questions, there was a limit on how deeply you could learn,” Doswell said.
As the meeting wound down, members agreed the real work—making sustainability a consistent CB4 priority—would begin at their next meeting on March 4. They then began to brainstorm what else the group could urge the city to do.
“The city should be able to come up with a way of grading how green a neighborhood is,” Trentlyon said. “So they can compete.”
“Like a report card?” chorused the group with a shared laugh, referring to the Department of Education’s controversial school report cards.
“That’s how community pride comes in,” Trentlyon added. “People start to realize—they need to do better.”
