The New Rochelle City Council only allows speakers 3 minutes and I had a 7 minute speech so I gave a few highlights and offered to post it on Talk of the Sound. Here it is…
Mr. Mayor, two years ago, in your 2009 State of the City address you announced that New Rochelle would be partnering with an organization unfamiliar to all but a handful of New Rochelle residents. At that time, you called ICLEI the “premier international umbrella organization for sustainable communities”. You portrayed the partnership as an opportunity to pick the brains of this organization to assist New Rochelle in crafting a locally developed plan.
You talked then and since a great deal about a concept called “sustainability”. When asked to explain “sustainability” you have responded by providing examples of what you want to do here in New Rochelle but never actually defined the term or explained its origin.
You created a sustainability task force stacked almost entirely with advocates for so-called sustainability, many of whom were either not New Rochelle residents or would benefit directly from the adoption of so-called sustainability initiatives in New Rochelle, such as an executive with Garb-O-Liner, a company that manufacturers recycling-related products or an executive from Turner Construction responsible for sustainability initiatives at that company. Other participants included lawyers and consultants who are hired as paid advisors on sustainability-related projects.
Along the way you have mislead the public on numerous occasions.
Perhaps the most significant was the hiring of Deborah Newborn as a so-called Sustainability Coordinator. I have not found anyone who has heard you publicly state the employment of a Sustainability Coordinator was a requirement for the ICLEI program for which you later successfully applied.
ICLEI requires its partners to have a Sustainability Coordinator not to coordinate among different departments in local governments but to coordinate between the government and ICLEI. You did not disclose that ICLEI provides job descriptions for the hiring of people like Deborah Newborn, offers a jobs board for people looking to be hired as Sustainability Coordinators, or that ICLEI insists that a Sustainability Coordinator not be hired as a municipal employee but rather as a consultant to avoid having to abide by ethics guidelines, financial disclosure and conflict of interest laws all while being free to earn outside income including income derived directly or indirectly from ICLEI and its partners.
You have never once offered any detailed explanation of ICLEI, an organization which you say is helping shape New Rochelle for the coming decades.
You have never once even mentioned Agenda 21, which spawned ICLEI in the first place, or the 1992 Earth Summit Conference in Rio de Janiero where Agenda 21 was launched.
Perhaps this is because you do not want New Rochelle residents to know that in his address to the summit, Secretary General Maurice Strong announced as a formulating principal of Agenda 21 the QUOTE …current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class ‐ involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work air conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable UNQUOTE.
No wonder ICLEI, as the primary means by which Agenda 21 is advanced in the United States, selected New Rochelle as a target — their goals of eliminating suburban single-family housing and private automobile transportation –run directly counter to the lifestyle which has attracted most New Rochelle residents to the City in the first place.
The irony is that you and your friends at the United Nations have managed to convince a large number of homeowners in New Rochelle to slit their own throat by adopting GreeNR, a set of programs and policies designed over the long term to make single-family housing unaffordable or impractical ultimately rendering their single biggest assets worthless. The Agenda 21 playbook of shifting suburban populations into large apartment complex surrounding rail transportation and turning suburban areas into wildland has been driving the actions of your government for years.
Earlier today you dismissed as “fringe” questions being raised about ICLEI and Agenda 21. You used the word conspiracy theorists. You cited a political candidate in Colorado raising issues about bike lanes. You said residents asking to know more about ICLEI and Agenda 21 were people who are misinformed by fringe sources of information who are not in the mainstream.
Demagoguery which does nothing to address the rather simple question “Who is ICLEI?” and “What is Agenda 21?”
Despite your claims that asking these two questions are “odd” and “fringe”, you then proceeded to distance GreeNR from ICLEI and Agenda 21. Why? If the answers to these questions are so innocuous why not publicly embrace ICLEI and Agenda 21?
Two years ago when you announced your deal with ICLEI you acted like you had just won the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.
Today you said there was no involvement by ICLEI in specific content and substance. You said you wished they WERE more involved. You even went so far as to diminish them, calling them an innocuous planning group quite a change from calling them the premier international umbrella organization for sustainable communities in 2009.
As you know Mr. Mayor, ICLEI is not set up to work directly on local initiatives they have instruments do that, partners like the Regional Planning Association. In the case of New Rochelle, Mr. David Kooris from the Regional Planning Association was intimately involved in developing the GreeNR plan. He played a leadership role throughout the process. In fact, he gave what I would call the keynote address at the only public input session for GreeNR held at Iona College in September 2009, he is the person who presented the GreeNR plan to Council in April 2010. You publicly credited him for his role in developing GreeNR. Now you don’t know him anymore? You want to pretend ICLEI, through the RPA, had no role in developing GreeNR.
This is the same David Kooris whose speech dwelled primarily on propaganda from the New Economic Foundation, the group behind presenting shadow conferences at G-8 Summit meetings around the world.
You then said there 600 members in USA, 8 of 10 largest cities and 20 members in Westchester County. My sense was the figure of 600 members was meant to convey the sense that ICLEI is widely accepted and mainstream yet you failed to mention that according the U.S. Census Bureau there was about 30,000 incorporated cities in the United States, 3,143 counties and 16,504 organized township governments. There are thousands of other forms of political units and divisions of the United States. A quick count from this list is that there are well over 50,000 political units and divisions of the United States of which 600 are member of ICLEI or 1.2%. In other words 98.8% of the political units and divisions of the United States are NOT members of ICLEI.
It is, in fact, you, Mr. Mayor that placed New Rochelle among a fringe group of political units and divisions of the United States that have joined ICLEI.
Today, Commissioner Freimuth said what else ICLEI does beyond involvement in the GreeNR plan is immaterial.
Really?
Suppose for just a moment that a Council Member proposed adopting a healthy lifestyle program that all agreed was a beneficial program that could improve public health, would it matter if the organization that had developed the program was affiliated with a large Pro-Life group? Suppose another program, otherwise deemed worthwhile, came from a group funded by Council on American-Islamic Relations would any of you argue that what those organizations do beyond their involvement in a specific New Rochelle program is immaterial? I doubt it.
You have the votes to ram through your GreeNR plan so by all means feel free to ignore the “fringe” notion that residents ought to be informed as to the nature of the organization behind a plan to radically alter the lives of New Rochelle residents, voters, property owners and taxpayers or the agenda of the organization which created that organization to further the goals of eliminating single-family housing, personal automobiles and the very nature of highly-affluent suburban living.
I would suggest it has less to do with your professed concerns about conspiracy theories and a lot more to do with want to prevent highly-affluent suburbanites, the largest voting block in New Rochelle, from peeking behind the curtain and getting a clear understanding of why ICLEI was created by the United Nations and how they intend to implement Agenda 21.
There can be widespread support for common sense approaches to reducing waste, keeping air and water clean, saving energy and otherwise being more efficient. The City can have a plan on how to accomplish “green” goals. Signing agreements with ICLEI or swearing fealty to the United Nations is not required to do this.