Green New Rochelle, ICLEI, Agenda 21 etc. are nothing more than local organizing angles torn from the pages of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." This is the textbook of New Age societal re-organization for the hordes and multitudes of the disaffected and self-classified 99 percenters poised and ready to inflict a second Great Recession on our nation with a second Obama term of office.

They are ideological crowbars; extraordinary tools for forcing open the ordinary mechanisms of local governance and political reform in our municipality and injecting into them some very serious, long-term revisions and reversals of accustomed democratic practices in our system of representative government.

As a general matter, no one is his or her right mind can be against serious recycling; reductions in packaging and energy utilization, re-use of carbon-based materials like PVC and PET, composting of appropriate materials etc. The point is only that we do not need a "multi-inch" bundle of mundane platitudes and intrusive prescriptions and proscriptions to achieve it.

I have been subjected to granola overload on Sustainability recently over the airways. The more I hear, the more I am convinced that few people have any perspective, or much knowledge on the subject. This is fine as an excuse to smack the kitchen table and scream out dumkopf or muttonhead, but it is serious business when it could well represent reduction in property owner equity or even political persperation. We are going through very, very difficult times and all we need are other reasons to shock the system and step all over any sense or sensibility that exists in governance.

Let's get a grip on Sustainability/GreeNR. Other communities are beginning to see the light and it is our turn.

There have been many other times during the evolution of civilization when we had to change based on natural causes (climate) or technological change (bronze age, iron age). It takes place as a natural process of evolution, of survival of the species. Recently, we have experienced these types of changes we can more readily identify with and these can be correctly define Sustainability and for our community GreeN.

The United Nations has released its preliminary report in preparation for Rio + 20. New Rochelle will be represented at the conference by Mayor Noam Bramson.

Bramson has denied a relationship (video from April 10, 2012 City Council meeting above) between New Rochelle and the United Nations even as he prepares to go to Rio de Janeiro for the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development known as "Rio + 20". The major UN Conference, scheduled to be convened in Brazil from June 20 to 23, is organized by members of the UN system.

Just in time for Earth Day, Talk of the Sound has reviewed the Local Agenda 21 plan for New Rochelle, NY created under an ICLEI program first announced in 2009 and analyzed changes to the document made after the New Rochelle City Council voted to adopt the plan in 2011. Earth Day falls each year on April 22nd. It is the two-year anniversary of the release of the original GreeNR plan.

GreeNR Side by Side Analysis (39 MB PDF)

Talk of the Sound conducted a similar analysis when GreeNR was released in 2010 and many of the concerns we raised were raised at Council. In some cases, items we identified -- requiring homeowners to pay to upgrade the lateral lines from their house to the City sewer system when selling their home, displaying private information from Con Edison on electricity usage -- were removed from the revised GreeNR plan. Others however, such as the GreeNR Seal and the "Green Lien" programs, remain.

The linked document provides a side by side analysis of the document as presented to the City Council in April 2010 and the document created on March 17, 2012. The two documents contain insertions and deletions of images, section dividers and other cosmetic changes that make a side by side comparison difficult. Talk of the Sound inserted blank pages or removed cosmetic pages so that the content pages matched up and could be run through the software to identify changes. The mark up key uses yellow highlights, red rectangles and red ovals: sections, sentences or words "of interest" are highlighted in yellow; changes between the two documents are marked with a red rectangle; sections, sentences or words that suggest mandates are marked with a red oval.

Although certain sections have been updated to reflect data from 2010 to 2009 or 2011 to 2010, the title is not updated. The title is "New Rochelle Sustainability Plan 2010 - 2030" but the plan was not adopted until 2011. Title should read "New Rochelle Sustainability Plan 2011 - 2031". Which data was updated in the document is inconsistent and appears to be random.

During the Public Hearing on GreeNR in 2010, New Rochelle Sustainability Coordinator Deborah Newborn stated that GreeNR contained recommendations for mandates. When she was asked about mandates during City Council meetings she said there were no recommendations for mandates. In fact, there are recommendations for mandates and, in one case, according to the updated GreeNR document, Residential Recycling the City has already moved on from voluntarily recycling to mandatory recycling; the plan states that the City may now issue summonses. In another example, there is now a mandate on idling and summonses can be issued. There are other mandates regarding building codes. According to Newborn, the overall intent of GreeNR is to try the voluntary compliance route first and then move to mandatory mandatory if the voluntary route fails which is another way of saying the plan contains "mandates" even though she and the Mayor later claimed there were no mandates in the plan.