The Oil Drum

This is a guest post by Debbie Cook, Mayor of Huntington Beach, CA, and candidate for California's 46th Congressional District. Debbie has been a peak oil activist for many years; in this post Mayor Cook provides some interesting energy and peak oil-related things to think about from a local government perspective.

Robert Rapier posed an interesting hypothetical yesterday as to how individuals would respond to gasoline at $100/gallon.

However, from my position for the last three years, the question has been “how will local government respond to large increases in energy bills?”

I am the Mayor of Huntington Beach, California, a full service city of 200,000 residents, 27 square miles, 1200 employees and 8.5 miles of beach. We have nearly 200 police vehicles, 3 helicopters, 15 fire engines/trucks, 7 ambulances, 1 HazMat vehicle, and 1 medical decontamination unit. In addition there are hundreds of miscellaneous vehicles and trucks for public works, marine safety, building department, water department, and administration. All said, we consume 495,000 gallons of gasoline/diesel/jet fuel per year. For every $1 fuel goes up, it is a half million dollars out of our general fund budget.

On Monday, I'll be speaking at the local Community Board CB8 Manhattan about bringing safe bike lanes to the neighborhood, which would basically require the removal of a lane of car traffic on First and Second Avenues.

I'm also going to argue for the creation of a bike parking market whereby parking garages would have to accept bikes for parking at a cost ratio of 12:1 (which is the number of bikes you can fit in the place of a car).

I am very interested in how this little exercise in local government will go. My hopes are high, but I'm trying to be realistic and patient about what might actually happen. I have been distributing flyers around the neighborhood so I'm hoping for a good turn out!

Transportation Committee Meeting

Date: February 13, 2006

Time: 7-9 PM

Location: NY Blood Center, 310 East 67th Street, (First-Second), Conference Room #1

Voice your support for bike lanes and bike parking by writing or calling CB8 at: info@cb8m.com or 212-758-4340

Read my draft speech below.

I'm starting to develop a cohesive strategy for making my neighborhood more environmentally sustainable and somewhat more insulated from the effects of peak oil. I think that small initial steps like establishing Green Markets, Installing Bike lanes and Bus Rapid Transit, increasing awareness of energy efficient lighting/cooling/heating practices, etc will help create a growing local eco-ethic that will hopefull build over time into a community level effort to increase its sustainability.

The great thing about my neighborhood is that it is not just any old neighborhood. The Upper East Side is a city within a city with a population of 240,000. But its real power of numbers lies more in its pocketbook than its population. It is one of the most affluent areas of the city, especially concentrated in the area between Fifth Avenue and Lexington. The Upper East Side Campaign Donations contributed a large amount of money to both parties in the 2004 presidential election. And as we know in in the modern era, money talks.