This is Part I in a 7-part series “All About ICLEI”
In March 2009, Mayor Bramson announced that New Rochelle would participate in a pilot program with ICLEI.
Earlier this year, the premier international umbrella organization for sustainable communities, called ICLEI, announced an exciting initiative: a handful of cities throughout the nation would be selected through a competitive process to work with ICLEI staff to craft local versions of New York City’s PlaNYC.
PlaNYC is widely regarded as the best long-term municipal planning document in America. I encourage you to look it up on the Internet. You’ll see an integrated approach to transportation, infrastructure, land use, and much more, with clear objectives and metrics to measure progress.
More than twenty cities applied for this tremendous opportunity to tap into ICLEI’s expertise. Tonight, I am thrilled to report that, along with Newark and Miami-Dade, New Rochelle is one of just three cities to be chosen.
So I hope that when I appear before you a year from today, I will be able to tout not only a list of achievements related to environmental management, but also to share an comprehensive blueprint, based on national-caliber knowledge and local community input, for meeting the critical planning challenges of this century, with tremendous potential benefits for all residents of New Rochelle.
From talking to various elected officials and active residents in New Rochelle, I have found very few who know anything about ICLEI, the pilot program the Mayor is talking about it and what impact this might have on New Rochelle. To be quite candid, I had never heard of ICLEI until the Mayor mentioned it in his speech. While it may well be that the community will wish to heartily endorse a partnership with ICLEI it seems that the Mayor ought to do a better job of explaining who they are, what he hopes to accomplish specifically and what alternatives to an ICLEI partnership exist.
In attempting to an answer to these simple questions I found ICLEI to be an onion requiring a long time peeling.
More tomorrow….
Mayor Bramson
I am so sick and tired of hearing this man use the terms “staff” and “challenge’s” in every speech he makes.
I would like to give him a “staff” and “challenge” him to remove it from where it should be inserted.
There have been some bad Mayor’s in this city, but this man is the worse.
What really galls me is how many people are actually swallowing his rhetoric.
Are there no leaders out there that can run for Mayor and turn this city around.