Update on Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Sustainability Alliance

While attending an inspirational event sponsored by the Neighborhood Council Sustainability Alliance (NCSA focusing on how the neighborhood councils could take action to support the City’s Green New Deal, I took a moment to update my data on the growing number of councils that have joined the NCSA.

Before getting into the updates on the state of the NCSA, I thought I’d briefly share my experience at the inspiring, informative and productive Green New Deal event organized by Lisa Hart. It was inspiring because over 90 volunteers from 35 neighborhood councils took a few hours of their Saturday to engage in a variety of discussions covering transportation, waste, clean buildings, water, housing and food topics among others. It was informative because Lauren Faber O’Connor, the Chief Sustainability Officer gave us an update on the City’s efforts across these sectors and it was productive because we broke out into teams and came up with some truly achievable and impactful action plans.

The objective of the event was for attendees to collaborate on identifying action plans for 10 of the 12 focus areas of the Green New Deal. Following an opening update by Ms. O’Connor and a discussion with Julia Forgie, co-chair of the Los Feliz Neighborhood Council Environmental Affairs committee, describing how they are developing a neighborhood-based action plan in support of LA’s Green New Deal, we broke into 10 teams to brainstorm ideas how each neighborhood could contribute to the City’s efforts. At the end of the very productive and informative event, each team presented highlights from their brainstorming. More on this to come in a future post.

As a side note, I took public transportation to the event. In anticipation of an admonishment by a member of the Los Angeles Eco Village that zero-emission vehicles are “not the solution”, I mapped my route to include the #102 Metro bus and then the Expo (E) and Red (B) Metro trains to the Los Angeles City College campus. I write this because a lot of people have tried public transportation once or maybe twice and dismiss it as a non-viable option; my experience getting there was admittedly frustrating. I missed the #102 by 2 minutes and had to wait 25 minutes for the next bus and then as I was trying to confirm my route, the Expo train left the station. My entire commute to the event took nearly 2 hours whereas on mid-day Saturday, Google estimated my drive would have taken 40 minutes. My return home took 75 minutes due to a greater familiarity with the route and a bit of timing luck in the connections. This is all to say that while public transportation in Los Angeles still has a long way to recover from the street car days, the Metro is well underway to becoming a viable alternative to driving.

Okay, so, now onto a quick update on the NCSA’s membership. A few months ago I wrote that roughly 25 of the 99 neighborhood councils had committees with a focus on sustainability and that there were a little over 50 councils with membership on the NCSA. Since then, the membership has grown another 10% with 57 neighborhood councils having signed on as members. As I did in the previous post, I wanted to understand the relationship of those councils with a sustainability committee to those who are members of the NCSA.

Following is a map showing those councils showing those neighborhoods with a sustainability committee, membership in NCSA, both and neither. There appear to be 4 neighborhoods with a sustainability committee that are not NCSA members: Arleta, Hollywood Hills West, Olympic Park, and Sherman Oaks. Conversely there are 24 neighborhood councils that are members of NCSA that do not have a sustainability committee which suggests a strong commitment to the NCSA.