Austin has a reputation for being an environmentally conscious city. Solar panels pepper the roofs of buildings and homes, bikers zip alongside cars in specially drawn lanes and the city plans to be carbon neutral by 2020. It is surprising, then, that in a town so concerned with sustainability, there is no city position that oversees environmental initiatives.
That could change when the City Council votes on its budget Monday, the Austin American-Statesman reports.
Despite the city’s current hiring freeze and budget cuts due to the recession, council members will vote to establish an “environmental stainability officer” who will focus on ways to conserve energy and natural resources and help Austin implement new environmental policies.
The city has environmental leadership, to be sure — there is the Austin Climate Protection Plan and an inter-departmental Climate Action team that sets and helps reach environmental goals for the city government’s separate departments. But there is no single position to help integrate and streamline the efforts of these different entities. A leader to supervise these environmental efforts and create new ones would be a step toward efficiency and accomplishing environmental goals. Furthermore, the stainability officer would report to City Manager Marc Ott, suggesting that the position could wield considerable influence and not just become another bureaucracy-mired post.
Austin is ahead of many other Texas cities in terms of sustainability, according to rankings published by SustainLane.com. But nationally, it lags behind other cities such as Denver, Portland and San Francisco. Austin has even dropped in the rankings from No. 6 in 2005 to No. 14 in 2008. We’ve come a long way in terms of environmental policy, but we can’t stop here. There are still urgent issues to be addressed, such as water conservation, which has become an even more salient problem in light of the severe drought. The position will also have the effect of not only conserving natural resources, but saving taxpayer money through initiatives such as energy efficiency.
Budget cuts are an unfortunate consequence of the economic downturn, and the city’s proposed slashing of $30 million has been painful — even the police and fire department are not immune to the cuts. It may seem counterintuitive to create a new job in this economic climate, but even though money is scarce, council members should look beyond the recession and consider the long run, and make an investment that will help keep our rapidly growing city sustainable.
