I listened to Bob Cox and Louis Trangucci this past Friday as they tried to make sense out what ICLEI is and what it would do for NR. Both of these individuals are fairly well informed and intelligent yet neither sees the benefit in ICLEI or understands it’s full scope. I tried to make sense out of it by going to the ICLEI website but I don’t have a doctrine from Yale so it wasn’t something I could readily understand. Therefore, I have to wonder: Is Mayor Bramson really trying to push the city into a partnership with an organization that few New Rochellians can comprehend? It appears so.
This whole ICLEI thing seems like a disguise–a way for the Mayor to push his development agenda on New Rochelle without the residents fully understanding what it is he trying to sell us. All along, the Mayor has been for “density” in the downtown and in the so-called “floating zones” when council believes it is appropiate. He has pushed for “affordable” housing components in many of the the densely packed communities he wishes to develop. Essentially, and I welcome him to correct me if I am wrong, he would like to push the lower and middle class into densely packed “sustainable” areas of the city because in his words, “there are just so many of them.” I guess then what he is saying is that the American Dream, the thought of private home ownership, is dead. That we now all have to live in cubicals contained in housing developments in order to survive.
I am glad Noam has the Havard education to understand ICLEI and Agenda 21 because it didn’t make for easy or interesting reading. The little I understood about it is that it falls right into the Mayor’s vision of downtown NR and paves the way for the destruction of middle class nieghborhoods and ultimately middle class home ownership. The Mayor is asking the majority of NR residents to support, through their council people, this lenghty ICLEI plan which, without taking a survey, I guaruntee hardly anyone in NR understands.
If the Mayor has “green” intiatives for NR, he can certainly put them on the table on a case-by-case basis and let the public decide what is best for NR–not ICLEI. Moreover, his vision of “density” in the downtown and the concept of throwing the middle and lower class into these crowded little cubicals is not my idea of living. It seems it sits well with him and the well-to-do members of NR because it allows the wealthy taxpayers in NR to hold on to their homes and high priced government services while pushing all the “problem children”–the middle and lower class–into a segment of the city where they won’t be a burden to the rich. Is this what ICLEI really is?