ICMA Conference in Phoenix/Maricopa County

I spent several days in October at the InternationalCity/County Management Association’s annual conference in Phoenix, Arizona. I attended as part of the local government management concentration here at SPEA. Looking at the session schedule ahead of time, I was excited to see that there were several sessions addressing sustainability in local government. Perfect!

After I got there and started attending sessions, however, I realized that environmental concerns were almost completely missing from sessions addressing sustainability. In individual conversations, city managers affirmed the necessity of planning for sustainability in its fullest form, and several presenters made brief mentions of initiatives going on in their cities. The ICMA has a Center for Sustainable Communities and devoted its June issue of Public Management wholly to sustainability. However, fiscal sustainability was on the mind much more than environmental or social sustainability, to my disappointment.

There were a few interesting “sustainable communities nuggets” that I brought home from Phoenix, though.

• I toured Civic Space Park near the Arizona State University campus in downtown Phoenix. Billed as "sustainable adaptive reuse," the site includes a historic structure that was renovated and now provides community meeting space and displays community art. Solar panels and public transit connectivity are other major sustainable features of the park, although it is perhaps best known for the public art piece that looks like a giant net in the daytime but is pretty cool when lit at night.

http://ifwtwa.org/2011/06/ifwtwagreater-phoenix-media-tour.html

• In one of the most interesting conference sessions, the city of Mesa, AZ discussed the crowd-sourcing tool iMesa they recently deployed to enhance public input and engagement. This is an excellent example of integrating available technology to enhance the social sustainability of a community. Citizens can submit ideas online, vote for projects they support, and even channel funding to implement certain ideas. A pdf of the presentation is available here, courtesy of ICMA. The most noteworthy thing to me about the tool is the ability to reach a much larger segment of the population and to give people a more powerful voice in the shapes of their communities. 

http://www.mesaaz.gov/imesa/

• Finally, I took advantage of my trip to Phoenix and spent the evening with some distant cousins who live on a small farm in suburban Phoenix. Most of you probably know that Phoenix is in the middle of the desert, presenting irrigation challenges. I was interested to learn that my cousin's property is part of Phoenix's flood irrigation system, by which some residents receive irrigation water from a canal along the back border of their property. As I understand it, a resident can call the utility company and schedule the canal water to be turned on at a certain time and date. They close the sluice gate at one end of the canal that runs along their property, causing the water to back up in the canal and flood the entire lawn. I haven't researched this method in-depth, but it strikes me that if you must irrigate in the desert, this is perhaps one of the more sustainable ways to do it--canal water is non-potable, and evaporation rates are lower than if sprinklers were used. Interesting concept!

All in all, I left Phoenix having learned a lot but saddened that environmental issues, sustainability (broadly defined), and climate change (Climate Action Plans, GHG inventories,...) were not a bigger part of the discussion at the conference. One potentially skewing factor is that the majority of the communities represented at the conference are small to mid-size, and may not yet have the resources or political focus for Offices of Sustainability like we see in larger cities. Regardless, we have a long way to go before these topics are integrated into the mainstream discussions of local governments. Good thing so many of us are so passionate about this sort of thing!