Richard Conlin

Richard Conlin

Former Councilman, Seattle City Council

“So change is tough, and people fear that they’re going to have losses when you change something, and so you have to find a way to get people beyond the fear and into hope. And that’s the most challenging thing that you can do. Finding a way that really allows people to feel encouraged, and to get really enthusiastic and excited about what the future is going to be.”

 

Sophie Todd: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

 

Richard Conlin: I started at Metrocenter YMCA, which was the community development branch of the Y and what I did there was do environmental education and action programs for young people. We had a program called the Earth Service Corps, which engaged high school students, and I also organized environmental projects around the community such as household hazardous waste collections. I founded an organization called Sustainable Seattle, which got the issue of sustainability on the Seattle agenda. After leaving Metrocenter I became the founder and publisher of YES! Magazine, but then I decided that publishing wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do, and I’d been involved in politics off and on thought my life, and decided to run for City Council. It was something I thought about for a while and I’d done a lot of lobbying on Seattle City Council and thought it would be nice to be on the other side of the table. So I ran for council and was elected in ’97 and served for 16 years. I had a lot of things that I was involved in. The growth management was one of the main things I worked on as part of my sustainability orientation, getting our neighborhood plans is place, working on getting good housing and jobs for people in the community, and transit connections that would connect communities and neighborhoods throughout the city. Lots of other efforts like that, lots of environmental work, Zero Waste Strategy for Seattle, local food action initiative. We were one of the first cities to start working on local food. Commitment to a carbon neutral Seattle by 2050 – we were working on carbon issues back in 2000, 2001. So I could go on for a while, but we should get started.

 

ST: Looking back, what would you identify as some of the most important programs or initiatives that you’ve worked on, in terms of sustainability, change, or impact in the community?

 

RC: If I were going to list the most important I would probably hit a number of them, I mean I was on the Sound Transit board, I was very involved in getting our light rail program going in Seattle, the neighborhood planning process, which got growth management organized in a way that would work for Seattle, so that we got denser, more walkable development in the city, the Zero Waste Strategy, which we adopted in 2007, which essentially committed Seattle to reducing it’s wastes on top of our very effective recycling program, and then the local food action initiative, which I’m continuing to work on in my new private capacity, and basically what we did was create a local food strategy for Seattle. That started in 2008. We wound up creating a regional food policy council that I continue to co-chair and I’m continuing to do work on that issue in local government, and then of course our carbon neutrality policy. We created an office of sustainability in about the year 2000 and then started working on moving that concept of sustainability forward and adopted a climate action plan and by 2010 we were comfortable adopting a plan to make Seattle carbon neutral by 2050.

 

ST: What are some steps that might go into help making Seattle carbon neutral?

 

RC: Well, the core issue that we’re working on is the issue of getting dense, walkable communities connected by transit and good walking and bicycling connection. That’s really the key way in which you address climate change from a local perspective. There are a lot of other things that are involved with it. For example, we have an adaptation strategy – knowing the change is going to happen, we’ve put together a strategy for how we adjust and adapt our services in order to manage change effectively, for example we’re re-building a sea wall right now, and we are building it higher than we would have built it before, because we expects rising sea levels. We are diversifying our water and energy resources because we know that we’re going to face earlier melt of the snowpack in the mountains, which we depend on for our water and power. So we’re diversifying and getting more wind and other renewable energy resources to supplement our hydro resources and we also have embarked on an aggressive water conservation program, and the results of that have been very effective. In Seattle and a large part of our suburbs, since the 1950’s we’ve expanded about 50% in terms of people and about 200% in terms of economic activity, and we’re actually using the same amount of water as we did in the 1950’s.

 

Emma Gosliner: Can you tell me how you got into local politics? Did you always have an environmental focus?

 

RC: OK, so two questions. I actually started getting involved in local politics when I was 14. A friend of mine, his mother was the chair of our local democratic party, and she got me involved in working in campaigns, so I did that off and on for most of my life. I was always engaged in politics, since high school really. Deciding to run for office, I think its something that people should really think about very seriously. In my case I knew a lot of the council members. I knew a lot of the issues that I really thought the city needed to take up and I wanted to have the opportunity to try and make the decisions myself. In terms of environmental issues, I was involved in the initial earth day as a college student and that was what really got me started on environmental issues. I had some orientation towards it because of my general political interest before that, but that was what really got me started. Then I went to work for Michigan PURG (Public Interest Research Group), and worked on energy issues for them, and that was a continuation of the environmental focus.

 

ST: So as a political change maker, what are some of the main struggles that you faced in trying to implement these new policies or create programs?

 

RC: I’ll mention several things that you might want to think about with this. The first is – anything new is always a challenge for people and elected officials in communities. So for example, when I started working on food issues, the reaction of my fellow council members was, well food is not something that local government gets involved in, so why should we do this, why should we get started on it? When I pioneered the Zero Waste Strategy the reaction of some people in the community was, we’re doing everything we should be doing to reduce our garbage by recycling, why should we be thinking about this whole new strategy? So change is tough, and people fear that they’re going to have losses when you change something, and so you have to find a way to get people beyond the fear and into hope. And that’s the most challenging thing that you can do. Finding a way that really allows people to feel encouraged, and to get really enthusiastic and excited about what the future is going to be. I think a second thing that’s really challenging is that it’s very easy to get caught up, when you’ve really studied issues, is the intellectual challenge of sort of coming up with new, something that really works. Something that can be very esoteric in some cases, and then dropping back from that to communicate with people who either don’t have the knowledge or don’t interest, or for very good reasons are involved with other things in their lives and you can passionate about something like zero waste and you can find that yeah, there are some people in the community who can really get passionate about that but there’s an awful lot of people saying, wait a minute, why should I even have to think about that? An example of that was the way in which we dealt with issue of grocery bags in Seattle. We went into this really interesting study mode, where we were thinking, what would be the most environmentally responsible thing to do? Our conclusion was the most environmentally responsible thing to do, and the thing that would work best was to put a fee on grocery bags at the check out stand. We proposed a 20 cent fee on both plastic and paper bags, because our studies showed us that paper bags had just the same, or in fact even more environmental impact than plastic bags, although plastic bags are much more visible. We put this ordinance in place, it was fairly complicated, and it was complicated enough and threatened the interest of the bag industry enough that the bag industry paid signature gatherers to put it to referendum, and we lost that referendum, we only got 46% of the vote. And the reason was we had simply made it too complicated. People in the community were really concerned about plastic bags, they saw that was a problem, they probably would have supported a ban on plastic bags, but this complicated, very intellectual measure and bringing in paper bags as well, it was just too much for people. And so they wound up voting to repeal it. That was an important lesson for us, so a couple years later we brought it back, adopted a ban on plastic bags, found that there was really no opposition. I suspect the bag manufacturers did some polling and found they couldn’t win an election, and so that went into place with out any controversy. So overthinking can be a problem. You really need to come from where people are at, and help them find ways in which to be helpful.

 

EG: I’m not from Seattle, but did Seattle ban Styrofoam?

 

RC: We did – that was one of the early things from the Zero Waste Strategy. It was very well received and went over very well.

 

EG: I was wondering if you could tell me more about that process, because most of the people I know from Seattle are always very proud that they’ve banned Styrofoam and they’re in shock when they see it in California.

 

RC: Right, so when we decided to develop the Zero Waste Strategy, what we did was commission some consultants and they put together a package of things that we could do – some were incentives, some were prohibitions, some were measures that would educate the public. There were a whole series of things that we adopted – probably about 40 different things that we were aiming for, to move towards zero waste. The Styrofoam ban was one of the first things that was suggested as one of the things that would actually be a ban of a particular substance. We moved pretty cautiously on that because you don’t want to get ahead of the public on that, and it turned out to be remarkably easy. We met with the restaurant industry and we talked to them about it, we listened to some of their concerns and what we did was in addition to banning Styrofoam, we actually required that all the containers and disposable utensils be compostable or recyclable and what we did after our conversation with the restaurant industry was, we phased that in. They told us that at the time there were not spoons being made that were compostable or recyclable that would work because they would melt in hot things like soup. We said ok, we’ll wait on spoons until the technology is developed, so we gave them two or three years before we actually banned the disposable spoon, so the technology was actually there for the compostable spoon, but we’ll ban the Styrofoam now because there’s an alternative, and similarly then the butchers came in and said we don’t have an alternative for the Styrofoam trays yet for meat production so we held off on that as part of the ban until there was technology that allowed that to be part of it. So figuring out that there was both a way and an important thing to do but also, that we had to work with those being affected we were able to do it in a way where maybe they would have preferred it not to happen, but as long as it could happen in a way that was economically rational for them they were willing to go along with it.

 

ST: Do you see that as a strong tie – the economics behind sustainability and then the ideology behind it?

 

RC: Well sustainability requires that you take into account the economics and the social justice as well as the environment, and that was something that we wanted to make sure we did from the start. So we insured that most of the policies that we put into place, we went through a checklist to make sure that we were meeting those sustainability goals. The fact is that if you don’t have something that’s economically viable it’s going to be very difficult for you to actually make it work. So it’s ok to have things that cost something, but it’s not ok to have something that’s simply not going to work economically.

 

EG: What do you think is one project or issue you were most passionate about in the environmental field?

 

RC: Let me just talk about the one that I am working on right now which is local food. When we started looking at local food 6-7 years ago there was very little work on that in the public sector. A lot of people in the communities were very interested in local organic food but there wasn’t a lot of involvement with the state or national government. But what we did when we started looking into it, was how much local food fits so well into the local paradigm because were talking not only about improving peoples health and doing it in a way that’s great for the whole community, we’re also talking about reducing carbon emissions, we’re talking about things that are going to reduce the use of pesticides, reduce the over use of water – there are lots of things that local food kind of epitomizes as something that will really work well for people. Its also something that builds community and community is also a key part of making sustainability work. Something that we did very early on was to encourage people to plant vegetables in the front of their houses rather that in gardens in the back of their houses. So in what we call the planting strip, it used to be called the parking strip between the sidewalk and the street, we now call it the planting strip and encourage people to do that. And people would come up to me after they started planting the food in their planting strips and they would say, you know this is really neat because people will stop by as they’re walking and they start talking to me. I’ve met neighbors I’ve never met before because they wouldn’t stop by if I had a garden in my back yard. But this is a way in which you can really build community. When we started working extensively on climate change issues I realized that much of the approach to climate change was very technical and we talk about increasing the mileage of cars, or its very oriented towards a mode of transportation, like reducing people’s use of cars, but if you look at it from a whole economic sector, like food, its a whole different way to work on carbon reduction and climate change. The work that we did on food, there has been a little bit of study at the national level now and it appears that the food system is associated with about 25 – 35% of carbon emissions, so if you’re working on it from all different perspectives, you have a chance of chipping away at that in way that could really make a difference in the long run.

 

ST: So how exactly did you go about encouraging people to go about using the planting strips for example?

 

RC: Well that was something people came to us with actually, we had people who wanted to grow food in their planting strips and what they were finding was that the department of transportation was telling them they couldn’t do it. So this was a great example of how digging into regulations and figuring out what is the real goal here can really make a difference. We asked the department of transportation why they we were discouraging people from growing food and it turned out they didn’t even have a law or regulation so they were doing it kind of on their own and we asked them why and they said there are really two reasons – one is that if people plant food in their planting strips at corners it will cause difficulty for sightlines, so its going to lead to more accidents because cars won’t be able to see around corners if there is food growing in the planting strips there. The second thing they said was, if people build permanent structures like raised beds handicapped people for example getting out of cars won’t be able to get to the side walk. And our thought on that was yeah, those are both legitimate concerns but they don’t really have to do with the question of growing food in the planting strip, they have to do with sightlines and access for handicapped people. So lets work out a program that would actually enable the Department of Transportation to meet its goals and still allow people to grow food. So we wound up writing a regulation and what the regulation said was you can grow food in the planting strip but, if you’re within 30 ft. of a corner, you cant grow anything that’s over 3 ft. high so the visibility will be maintained, and if you want to put a permanent structure in like a planting bed you have to get a permit from Department of Transportation, that’s a free permit and the Department of Transportation will advise you so that it doesn’t limit access. The transportation people were perfectly happy with it because it met their goals, and the food people were really happy with it because it gave them what they wanted, and then once people started doing it we just spread the word around the community that this was something that was available and more and more people did it.

 

ST: What are some other things that you guys did to promote local food initiatives?

 

RC: Well community gardens are really big in Seattle, we had about 45 community gardens in 2008 and we decided to do a massive expansion of the community garden program because we had more than 1,000 people on our waiting list so in 2008 we went to the voters with a parks levy, to expand the parks system and I got the council to put $3 million in that for community gardens. Our initial thought was that we would have to buy land and develop it for community gardens so we would get a few gardens from that but not a whole lot, but then we started looking at how much land the city owns and we realized that the city owns a lot of land that is suitable for gardening. Some were parts of our parks, some rights of way, there were just little odd pieces of land that the city owns in different places. So we did an inventory of city property and the result of that was that we were able to put into place 30 more community gardens with that money that we had set aside, about 7-8 times as much as we thought we would. We got about 1,000 new plots and we now have over 75 community gardens. So that was one of that things that we did. With community gardens we also discovered that in low income communities, particularly immigrant and refugee communities, there was a tradition of growing culturally appropriate food and selling it or providing it for your neighbors and friends. But, under our community garden program you weren’t allowed to sell food from a community garden if you have a plot, you could only give it away or use it yourself so we came up with a special community garden program in conjunction with our housing authority in which we developed community gardens on housing authority land and those people were actually allowed to produce and sell produce. Particularly, again we had refugee and immigrant communities involved in that. We also looked at a couple of several very large parcels that the city had, and we started developing community farms. We now have 3 community farms in Seattle where people actually grow food for sale and its agricultural produce. They can produce right on that land. We also set up a permitting process for people to grow food in their backyards and sell it out of their homes, so before that was prohibited, now you can not only sell food that you grow yourself up to a certain amount, but I think the limit is you can only have 3,000 sq. ft. in cultivation before you have to get a special use permit, but now you can sell value added products, that do not have health related problems, so for example you can dry your fruit and sell it out of your front door, or at a stand on the street, and before that was not legal. So a whole lot of different things associated with it with many, many different components.

 

EG: So you mentioned that there is a trend of people coming to you guys for help, could you give me another example of that, or another environmental issue where people came to you guys at the city council and wanted to create change?

 

RC: One of the really fun projects I got involved with, well it wasn’t fun at the time but it turned out to be great, was creek restoration of our largest creek in Seattle, which is called Thornton Creek, in an area of was actually one of the original shopping malls in Seattle, so this shopping mall, Northgate Mall, was actually built partly on top of the creek, the creek was put in a pipe underneath the mall, and the area where the creek was, was actually a parking lot. When the mall was built in the 1950’s it was like who cares about creeks and so they just put it into a pipe underneath the parking lot. In the early 2000’s the owner of the mall wanted to redevelop that parking lot. The mall was beginning, slowly, to transition into being auto-oriented into being a little more of a diverse environment, and so they were planning on selling this parking lot and re-developing it for housing and other commercial facilities. The community came to me and said they really wanted to daylight the creek through this parking lot, they wanted to restore the creek. Some community members, of course, did not particularly want the development because some people just resist any type of change that takes place in their community, but other community members embraced the idea of a positive development there that would really be a good urban center rather than the sea of parking and we tried to figure out a way in which to do that so we could get some good development and daylight the creek. It was a big struggle. The mall owner was totally resistant to us. I wound up with a 5-4 majority on the city council who were willing to stand up against the proposal that was to keep the creek buried. Turned out there was a lot of technical and logistical problems with opening up the creek, but we wound up negotiating and coming up with a solution, the ultimate win-win solution does daylight the creek through the center of a new urban development and it’s a beautiful, beautiful little park with the creek running through it, and we also have the kind of housing and commercial development that the mall owner was looking for and its an extremely successful project. So put it all together and we were actually able to meet several of our environmental goals at the same time. It was definitely a struggle for about a year I had to keep my 5-4 majority in tact and keep fighting in order to get something positive done.

 

ST: It sounds like a lot of these are finding compromises between business people and what community members come to you and say that they want in terms of sustainability. Is that something that you find?

 

RC: Well sometimes you do have to compromise but what we try to do is find win-win solutions. In that case, rather than a compromise, although there were some elements of compromise in it, for most of it we were able to come up for a win for everyone. The community was happy with the creek being daylighted, most of the community was happy with the new development. The mall owner was happy with the way he was able to make enough money off of this, so that he was successful. So he probably made less money than he wanted, I’m sure he did, although I’m not privy to his finances, but it was adequate, it was enough for him, so it was a win for him, he was able to get the development, and it was a win for the community. So I try to not think of just a compromise where you split the loaf, but try to come up with ways in which most people can get most of what they want.

 

EG: So your role on the city council – would you say that you act as a delegate between the people and the city?

 

RC: Community engagement was something that was really crucial to me, on the council, and one of the first things I did. I was in charge of managing the planning process for the city council, which was very much a community involvement program for the city. So there were times when I would be kind of an intermediary between the communities and the city, but more often I was able to find ways to bring the community and the city together, so that we didn’t have to have that conflict, but there are always things in the city where people have some ideas where they just want to do things, and folks in neighborhoods just really resist them, and sometimes it is not possible to resolve that conflict. Sometimes you really have to make a decision and make choices, and that was challenging. Those were some of the hardest things that I had to do.

 

EG: Were you ever put in a position where you had to make an unpopular decision?

 

RC: Yes, quite frequently in fact. An example of that was putting in legislation that would allow backyard cottages in the city. Some neighborhood activists were violently opposed to that. There was not a strong constituency in favor of it. There were a lot of people who thought, oh, this is a nice idea, I’d like to do it, but there wasn’t a lot of activism in support of it. From a city perspective we saw it as a great way to provide low-cost housing for people, to help people stay in their homes, if they had difficulty affording it, and to provide additional density and support for a more pedestrian and transit oriented city, but the neighborhood activists really organized heavily against it. There was very intense lobbying against us, and I don’t know what would have happened if it went to a popular vote. The majority of people might have wanted it to happen, but the majority of people who were involved in the issue didn’t want it to happen, so we had to overcome that opposition in order to adopt it.

 

EG: So you mentioned working with the YMCA and environmental education. Could you tell us more about how environmental education has played a role in shaping community change?

 

RC: Well, one of the things that’s really important is for people to understand as much as they are willing to, the complexity of some of the environmental choices that we have to make, and you have to get people started doing that. It’s also really important to help give people hope by getting people started with relatively simple tasks. For example with recycling – one of the first things we did when we started doing recycling work in the city was to find ways in which to get education about recycling into the schools and we found that the students were actually carrying the information home to their parents and were really happy to be able to tell their parents what they were doing wrong, so they were getting their parents involved in recycling in a way that would have been much more difficult for us to communicate to them directly. So environmental education is a very important part of that. So the “gateway drug” theory of environmentalism which we practice a lot is, you get people started and give people the feeling that they can actually accomplish something and do something positive, and then they’ll move on and tackle some of the harder issues, and that was one of the philosophies that we used in the YMCA Earth Service Corps and with a lot of the environmental work that I’ve done. Get people started – if people just sit back and complain that everything is going bad and that the environment is going to hell, that doesn’t do any good. Give them something positive to do. Help them plant a tree, clean up the neighborhood, do some recycling, and then once they get the feeling, that yeah, I can actually do something, then they’ll start being willing to go beyond that and tackle the tougher issues. Our experience in that with a lot of issues that does work. The more complex the issue is, the harder it is for people really to make those links.

 

ST: When the solution needs to be more complex, how do you help people understand what’s going on?

 

RC: Well part of it is trying to figure out ways to communicate in words and terms that people are really used to, so that they understand it – trying to stay away from technical jargon and those sorts of things, using different communication channels like social media, and just being really willing to go out and talk to people as much as possible. I would say that this was the most difficult aspect of being able to be involved with politics on a large scale is because there were so many people that I had responsibility to, that it was very difficult to figure out a way to get across that relatively complex communication. We used a lot of different means, but I’m not convinced we actually found the way that was ultimately going to be totally successful, even though we made a lot of progress. Mobilizing community groups and speaking to people where they are, was also an extremely effective way in which to do that, so that instead of scheduling a meeting and asking people to come, go to their meeting, and talk to them where they are already there.

 

ST: What types of groups would you form alliances with in Seattle?

 

RC: All kinds of community based group’s churches, ethnic community associations – any kind of group that was willing to have someone come and talk with them.

 

ST: Earlier you mentioned that you worked with transit in Seattle, what are some of the projects that you’ve been working on with that?

 

RC: When I first ran for office we had just approved a measure on transit program in Seattle, to build our first light rail line, and my early years in office was a time of great turmoil because it turned out that the costs and difficulties had been underestimated and there were all kinds of challenges involved with making it happen, and so I was involved primarily in a support way in working with communities that were having challenges, working to try and keep things moving. Then in 2008 I was appointed to the board that oversees our light rail development – the Sound Transit board – and at that time we had the first line just about complete and it was just about ready to open. We knew that we had to do a lot more for transit, so we worked on the board and we actually put on the ballot for 2008, a major expansion of our light rail program, and that was approved by the voters, and in 2009 and from there on out until I left the council I worked on actually helping to make those lines possible. Some of that involved community mediation, dealing with communities where the rail was coming through to make sure that they got what they needed to protect them from issues, like noise and traffic and problems like that. Some of it was negotiating with cities – we had one city in particular that we needed to put a light rail line through and they were being very recalcitrant and difficult about it. They wouldn’t come right out and say they were opposed to it, but they acted like it, and so I actually was involved in the negotiation process with them where we had to let them know that, we have the power to put this through your city if we have to, but we really don’t want to have to exercise that power so lets see if we can find a way to make this work for you, and eventually we were able to do that. And another thing on the city level that I was involved with was working to get development to make the transit function well so that we had housing and jobs around the rail stations. So we actually have right now, four light rail lines under construction, one that’s almost complete and will be open next year that extends the initial line to the university and three more that will be extending the line farther out. Two of them are under construction now the third one will be entering it shortly.

 

EG: I’m from Washington DC, and I don’t know that much about Seattle, but I was wondering if you explain more abut if there are wards or districts, or how the city council works?

 

RC: I’m from Washington DC too, I grew up in Arlington. So during the time I was serving on the council, Seattle actually had an unusual system of government, that’s what we called the strong mayor, strong council system. In a lot of cities you have a strong mayor where the mayor is the executor of the city, and the council is basically part time people who approve the budget and deal with neighborhood issues, but don’t have a lot of policy work. In other cities the Mayor is a figurehead who is primarily ceremonial and you have a city manager who runs the city and the council is really the policymaking body, and the mayor in that case is often picked from the council. Seattle is an odd system – we have a strong mayor who is the executor of the city, and we also have a full time council that serves. Sometimes we talk about it as having 10 mayors for the city because the councilmembers really take on responsibilities for departments, they take on strong interests in particular issues, and the mayor and the council have to negotiate really, to get most things accomplished. That actually changed in 2013 – an initiative was proposed that changed the council to have seven district members and two at large members, so we’ll see how that affects the way in which that council operates in the future. But, during the time I was on the council, as a councilmember, you had to represent the entire city. The good thing about that was that you could get involved with any type of issue that you wanted to. If I didn’t live near the Northgate mall, for example, but the people came to me because of my environmental record to help them work on that. If I had been in a district I might never have been able to get seriously involved in it. The hard part is that you have to get involved in every issue in every area of the city, and that means that there are places that you’d probably prefer that you not have to make decisions and get involved in that you really have to. So it was a different kind of political perspective, and I’m not sure exactly how much changes are going to happen as a result of the new district system – my guess is it wont take as much as people think, because the power of the council stays the same, but it could have some changes.

 

ST: So in our class we’ve been talking a little bit about politics on a more local level versus politics on a more national level. Have you always had political experience on a more local level, or have you ever worked on national issues?

 

RC: I’ve worked a little bit on national issues, and been involved in national politics – I was actually an alternate to the democratic national convention one year, but most of my work has been on the local level, because I really like the tangible things that you can do. I really appreciate and admire the people in congress who can be there for 10 of 15 years before they get something approved, but in the local level you can be running things through every month or so that are major and significant things that make a difference in people’s lives, so I really liked being at the local level.

 

ST: So you mentioned that you are in Riverside, CA right now, why are you in Riverside?

 

RC: This is actually part of my new work, I’m working as a consultant, and one of the things I’m consulting on is food policy. Riverside had hired me to help them with local food policy for the city.

 

ST: What kind of things does that entail?

 

RC: Riverside is kind of interesting – they are really just beginning their work on local food. They held a big conference last year, and that was what got the energy really going. They have this particular situation where they have 4,500 acres within the city limits. They were set aside as a reserve for citrus production many, many years ago. Riverside, at that time called itself the citrus capital of the world and they marketed themselves as the place where oranges and grapefruits were grown. Well, the trees are aging, the economics are changing, and of the 4,500 acres only about 1,000 of them are still in citrus production right now – so they have this enormous opportunity to potentially grow a lot of local food within the city limits, on this land, but the land is in private hands, so they’re trying to find out what kind of pattern of incentives, and city activity, and building community support, and working with the property owners, will actually work to create a lot more local food in Riverside. Lots of opportunities to do this – they have this ambitious idea of an “Eat Riverside” program where they’ll make it a center for culinary tourism, they’ve got some of the restaurant people involved who would really like to do some strong local food work there. It’s pretty exciting! It’s been a lot of fun to work with.

 

EG: So you’ve been doing a lot of local food work as you mentioned, I was just wondering what the role of compost is. You’ve also mentioned recycling earlier, I was wondering if that was part of what you do?

 

RC: The disposal of food waste is a critical issue, and one of the things we did as part of the zero-waste strategy, when we analyzed Seattle’s waste stream we realized that in fact the two biggest components of the waste stream that the two biggest components that were still going to the land fill were food waste and construction debris, so we put in place programs to address both of those. In Seattle, we moved to universal food waste collection. Now every multi-family home is required to have compost bins for people to put their food waste in, and that’s collected on a weekly basis. We also encourage commercial developments to do that as well, and now most of our local businesses are now composting. So there is reducing waste, that is providing better storage of production capabilities so that people actually use the food, and then there is taking care of what is inevitable waste, bones and vegetable skins, and those sorts of things, and making sure that gets composted properly.

 

ST: As someone who’s from Seattle I kind of grew up with compost and its something that I’ve always been super passionate about, like that’s one of the things I did in my high school was like trying to get composting bins in, and then I came to Southern California and realized no one has composting, so how did Seattle become involved in composting and why isn’t it more widely accepted or done?

 

RC: Great question! I’m not really sure I know the answer to either of them, but it was really a community-based movement. It started in the late 70’s early 80’s and there was a really strong community movement to do a lot of work on the neighborhood level on these environmental issues, and the composting movement was one of the things that kind of came out of that. So there was a strong community base for moving towards it as a city.

 

ST: So again, its mostly people bringing it to the policymakers.

 

RC: Exactly, yeah.

 

EG: So you mentioned before that you were part of Sustainable Seattle, was that before or after you were involved in the city council?

 

RC: Well I was one of the founders of Sustainable Seattle during the time that I was working at Metrocenter at the YMCA, we founded Sustainable Seattle in 1991, and the organization is still going, it continues to work on climate change and resilience issues. It is now housed at the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, but it’s an independent non-profit organization, that basically focuses on education and action around sustainability.

 

EG: Was creating that totally different work than local government?

 

RC: Well, kind of. One of our goals was really to influence local government, so we wanted to create the community base for some of the tough policies that had to be adopted in order to move towards sustainability and also to influence local government in order to understand some of those policy choices that needed to be made.

 

EG: Could you tell me a little bit more about how you got started in that? What does it take to create your own organization?

 

RC: You know, all it takes really, is a small group of people who are passionate and willing to do something, and who have an idea that actually has some resonance with other people in the community, so I founded several different organizations, and in most cases its people who come together because they see a need and I would say in the case of sustainable Seattle there were 6 of us who met for about a year, trying to figure out what we wanted to do and how we could organize it. We came up with some projects, we held a conference and had about 80 people there and we got them engaged and involved and we were able to identify some modest funding – we were never a very heavily funded organization, it was mostly volunteer – and we were able to establish it, and continue to have lots of people involved. So, getting to that critical mass of people who are willing to volunteer energy, and then the second thing is having an issue that really is going to have enough resonance with more people that you’ll actually be able to build the organization.

EG: Did you guys have memberships, or was it more locally based, or what did you guys do?

 

RC: Sustainable Seattle never really was a membership based organization, it was just volunteers, so there was not an attempt to go out and get people to sign up as annual members, or that sort of thing, which is another operational mode, you can do that as an organization, but our orientation was primarily funded through grants and contracts and primarily people participated as volunteers. We never really developed that individual membership base.

 

ST: You mentioned earlier that you were going towards this Carbon-Neutral Seattle, and that diversifying energy was part of that. How do you go about trying to diversify energy?

 

RC: Well the core thing with energy issues is understanding that conservation is a resource. So the first step is making sure that you implement conservation strategies. The second step is to actually identify what are the possible ways in which you could get renewable resources into the portfolio of energy resources. We launched a major wind acquisition program and the city of Seattle now own about 200 MW of wind generation and most of that is participating in wind projects that other utilities are also involved with so some of the risk is spread around, but it was really just getting the understanding that this was a cost effective measure for us. The mix of technical issues that you have to work on when you do those kinds of things, we had to understand the concept of marginal cost pricing, which you may or not be familiar with, but the idea that if you are going to expand your resources in the future, its going to cost you more than what you currently are paying for the resources you are using, so that’s your marginal cost, and that allows you to justify buying things that are more expensive than the current resources that you’re using. So some of it is that technical approach, and some of it is just mobilizing the community. Actually go out and say that we really want to have this done. Seattle City Light has a long and proud record of being a renewable resource utility, but we needed to take it to the next level.

 

ST: So it involves more talking to people and drumming up interest?

 

RC: We had a Coalition, the Northwest Energy Coalition, which I was also involved in the founding of. Northwest Energy Coalition is actually a pretty large organization at this point, and works all over the northwest, and it did have a very strong orientation towards helping the city of Seattle become more renewable resource oriented. The whole thing began back in the late 70s, when there will proposals for nuclear energy in the Northwest and the Northwest Energy Coalition and a number of folks came together to oppose that and realized that they needed an alternative, and the alternative was to put together a strong conservation and renewable resources program.

 

ST: I think that’s pretty much it!