Auckland Super City

A topic of discussion in the hallways at the conference is the creation by the national government of a new Auckland "Super City." This creates a new Auckland City Council combining eight existing cities into a new Auckland City Council on November 1, 2010. More info on the national government action here and the transition work being done in Auckland here. One reason this has been such a topic of conversation has been that the Chair of the conference, Rodger Kerr-Newell, is Chief Executive of a Council that is to eliminated by this consolidation and they are fighting it. See press account of all this here.

Conference Chairperson Summation

Since the conference was hosted by three associations, there was no one person who was naturally the chair of the meeting. So SOLGM selected Rodger Kerr-Newell, the Chief Executive of Rodney District Council.

Kerr-Newell is a senior New Zealand manager, apparently very well known in these parts. He chaired the meeting with a cross between Johnny Carson and Peter O'Toole. He did a great job keeping things on track, but not too formal.

Kerr-Newell was given thirty minutes at the end of Friday (he took ten minutes) to sum up the proceedings. He said he came away with two big issues from the conference:

1. Sustainability is an idea communities need to seek. Sustainability programs do not just happen in a community, but residents and local government managers must actively work to make the programs happen in their communities.

2. Sustainability to be successful in communities can not remain the work of environmentalists, as he put it "the dark corner of society." To be successful, sustainability must be part of a communities larger social, economic and cultural agenda. There must be recognition in the community of this broader based approach. Sustainability must also have a broader based pay off for communities that can be measured on many levels, including how sustainability practices can utimately save communities money.

Well put.

Sarasota County, Florida

The final of the six presentations was from the only US jurisdiction, Sarasota County, Florida. Sarasota has developed a comprehensive countywide plan to address sustainability issues. What sets Sarasota County apart from what other communities are doing in this area is their determination to include sustainable practices into everything they do.

Newcastle City Council

Newcastle City Council in Australia gave a presentation of their white paper on ClimateCam, the world's first greenhouse gas speedometer. The approach here is to widely involvement the community in many efforts of sustainability and to have the community keep track of its efforts to impact change through the use of a speedometer that shows exactly where the community is in meeting its goals. I can not really do justice to the breadth of the ClimateCam program here, but it is one of the most comprehensive community sustainability programs in the world. It has also been going on for over ten years, so its maturity is also one of the reasons for its comprehensiveness. It takes Newcastle four full time employees to support this initiative, plus the work of countless community and business partners.

Hunter Councils

Friday's presentations started off with Hunter Councils, a consortium of twelve local governments in Australia. This consortium brings together these municipalities to provide centralized training, records storage, procurement and environmental planning. This is a model that has certainly done well in the United States, but I never heard of one of these entities doing records storage. Given the large amount of effort I know that Evanston does in this area, it is a great idea to include records storage in such a consortium. More info on records storage from Hunter Councils here.

Newspapers

The newspapers here are huge. I still had a section of last Sunday's New York Times with me to demonstrate the vast difference in size.

Rainbow Springs

After the events of the Maori village, we went on a tour of the Rainbow Springs Kiwi Wildlife Park. The park is literally next door to the Maori Village. We saw real Kiwis and walked around the park which is nice lit at night as the photo above illustrates.