Focus on environment garners planning award for Green Cincinnati plan

The City of Cincinnati, Mayor Mark Mallory, and the visionaries behind the Green Cincinnati Action Plan have been awarded the Frank F. Ferris II Award for Planning Excellence from the Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission.

The award is presented annually to a planning commission or committee for projects demonstrating planning excellence and civic, economic, aesthetic or environmental significance.

Vice Mayor David Crowley and climate protection coordinator Ginnell Schiller accepted the award on behalf of the city.

"It's great for the City of Cincinnati to be recognized for planning achievement," Crowley says.  "I think that it's the combination of planning around environmental issues that makes this very exciting to us."

Crowley says that the plan ultimately resulted from his meetings with Mallory about restoring the environmental focal point that was lost when the Office of Environmental Management was disbanded in 2003 due to budget cuts.

Mallory appointed Crowley as chair of the plan's steering committee, with much of the staff work being done by Larry Falkin, the current director of the Office of Environmental Quality.

"At that point it was constituted of about 20 organizations and people," Crowley says.  "Not just environmentalists…there were business people, there were government, citizens, institutions, labor.  We had some really key players involved in this overall effort."

The steering committee assembled more than 150 experts and concerned citizens into five task teams – energy, transportation, land use, waste management, and advocacy – to compile a list of ways by which the city could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 2 percent annually.

In April 2008, the 212-page plan was finalized with 82 specific recommendations, and, in July 2008, it was approved by city council.

To Crowley, the value of all of that hard work lies in the "action".

"This plan says that we don’t just want this to sit on the shelf," he says.  "We want to make this thing work.  So we started with some of the activities that the city itself can do, and of the 82 recommendations there's work being done by somebody, somewhere, on 60 of them."

Writer: Kevin LeMaster
Photography by Scott Beseler
Mayor Mark Mallory