O2 - Issue 2 - (Page 35)

MAN WITH A PLAN Rohit Aggarwala is overseeing New York’s greener future By Kevin Lerner O N EARTH DAY, NEW YORK CITY MAYOR MICHAEL Bloomberg announced PlaNYC 2030, an ambitious blueprint for sustainably managing the city’s growth for the next 23 years. In his announcement, the mayor said the original goal was just to create a long-term land use plan. “But,” he explained, “we soon realized that you can’t formulate a land use plan without thinking about transportation and you can’t think about transportation without thinking about air quality. You can’t think about air quality without thinking about energy and you certainly can’t think about energy—or any of this—without thinking about global warming.” In 2006, Bloomberg had tapped former McKinsey and Company transportation consultant Rohit Aggarwala to head the Long-Term Planning and Sustainability Office, which was charged with creating and implementing PlaNYC. Aggarwala and his team wrote 127 ideas for making the city’s building stock more sustainable, increasing access to public parks, and cleaning waterways. (You can find them at www. nyc.gov/2030.) On the day the U.S. Congress announced conditional aid for the plan’s most controversial proposal—to charge a fee to drivers in Manhattan below 86th Street—Aggarwala sat down to discuss PlaNYC in a rare break between meetings. Kevin Lerner: Why is this the time to enact PlaNYC 2030? Rohit Aggarwala: The timing was based not so much on the KL: How is the plan being implemented: What’s already been done, and what are the next steps? RA: There’s a lot that’s already been done. Some of the quickest things that we can do we’ve already done. For example, the mayor has already opened 69 schoolyards for use outside of school time. We’ve already announced plans for one of the regional parks, which will be a $40 million landscaping of an existing park [that is currently] a big dirt field. We’ve already begun working on changes to the building code that will make our building stock more efficient. So we really are going full steam ahead in implementing the entire plan—it’s not just the congestion pricing, which has gotten all of the attention. KL: How can individual New Yorkers help to implement this plan? RA: The first thing is to stay in New York. The average New Yorker is environment as on population. The city’s population declined by a million people in the 1970s, and we’ve been slowly rebuilding for the last 25 years, which is to say that we’ve been reusing existing capacity. In 2000, for the first time in 30 years, we set a population record in New York City, so how do we shift the mindset from recapturing existing capacity in a city that had already accommodated 8.1 or 8.2 million people to expand the city to accommodate 9.1 million? KL: Is the city in a place where it could pay for a plan like this? RA: We have the luxury of a pretty healthy city government, responsible for only about a third of the carbon emissions of the average American. We live in smaller homes or apartments; we rely on mass transit. There also are some easy things you can do in your apartment, things that we’ve put in the GreeNYC program and that you can see in ads around the city. Changing your light bulbs to compact fluorescents, ensuring that you have the timer on your air conditioner— some basic things reduce your electricity use. New Yorkers also can be public participants. We learned through our outreach process that many elected officials haven’t appreciated just how far New Yorkers have moved in terms of how important they thought the environment is. Making that clear to our officials is an important way to participate. Individuals can also request street tree plantings or bike racks through 311 or www.nyc.gov. That’s a great thing to do if you’re on a block that doesn’t have sidewalk trees: You can ask for them, because they’ll last longer on a block that wants them. KL: Since you’re also a historian, could you put PlaNYC in context? RA: It seems like once a generation, there’s a long-term plan and financially, so that gives you a certain amount of leeway. You’ve got to take those opportunities to do long-term planning, because there are going to be times in the future where we can’t afford it. But it’s also important to note that the mayor sees environmental sustainability as an economic development strategy, because all the things that you do to make the city environment sustainable also enhance its efficiency and its competitiveness in a national and a global marketplace. KL: How does the plan fit in with other cities’ plans, both in the U.S. and internationally? London comes to mind. RA: I’m a New Yorker and I was involved in writing this plan, so obviously I think it’s the best one out there. London’s got a very ambitious plan and a few years’ head start, but they’re only now in the process of building the idea of climate change into their plan. We had a second-mover advantage in that we built that into our plan from the beginning. I don’t think there are any U.S. cities that have come close to the thoroughness and the hard-headedness of our plan. The simple fact is that all the commitments made in our plan are backed by city budget allocations or proposals to Albany or Washington. most of them haven’t gone anywhere. One of the things we were very conscious of was why most of them don’t go anywhere. One problem was that they were created without any community input. So while we obviously didn’t have the opportunity to talk to every New Yorker, we did a series of outreach meetings. We had 11 town halls. We had an advisory board that brought a lot of different perspectives. We met with over 150 advocacy organizations and received over 3,000 suggestions from our website. With all of that, we were able to think about what New Yorkers wanted, what New Yorkers were ready for. The fact that so many of them advocated congestion pricing certainly informed our thinking on whether they had an appetite for anything like that. But it wasn’t just that. We also learned that New Yorkers are very well-informed about seemingly obscure things like green roofs and the urban heat island effect, and those issues resonate with them. So that helped us be bold. [Conversely,] many energy-saving ideas came up in the 1970s, before attention shifted. Some of the analysis then was a little less sophisticated and some of the ideas seem a little dated—we didn’t have compact fluorescents then—but so much of this is déjà vu. As with so many things, it’s more about how you get this stuff done. [ O 2 G R E E N M A G A Z I N E . C O M ] 35 http://www.nyc.gov/2030 http://www.nyc.gov/2030 http://www.nyc.gov http://O2GREENMAGAZINE.COM

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O2 - Issue 2

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