Residents' green board to advise Cape officials

After a lengthy negotiation over the scope of its duties, Cape Girardeau will have a new advisory board soon to discuss how the city can use its resources in more environmentally conscious ways.

The Girardeau Goes Green Advisory Board, which needs a final vote April 20 to become official, will be a seven-member committee of city residents dedicated to studying city operations from an environmental point of view. The idea for the advisory board grew out of discussions by the Southeast Missouri Climate Protection Initiative, an organization founded to promote regional actions to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Bringing the advisory board into existence required compromise on the side of proponents, who wanted broad language that would allow the board to look beyond city activities to private actions and make suggestions. And some council members, carefully reading the initial proposal, wanted to make sure the board wasn't authorized to make suggestions that would impose large costs but provide little in the way of savings.

Acceptable language was finally written, and Monday the council approved the board with a 5-2 vote.

"I think it is a good step for Cape," said Kathy Conway, an associate professor of education at Southeast Missouri State University. Conway, along with biology professor Alan Journet and Ellen Dillon, a communications instructor, pressed the council to create the board.

"Life is full of compromises," Conway said. "A compromise is something that wouldn't be your first choice but it is something you can live with. Our idea is to use the resources of the community to help the city. If the board can do that, then our goal has been accomplished."

Journet, too, said that getting the board established with a purpose that focuses on the city government rather than a more general directive was part of the give-and-take. "It wasn't exactly the way we proposed it. We think it is a reasonable compromise."

One of the dissenting votes was cast by Marcia Riter, councilwoman for Ward 6. She said she would have preferred to create a temporary task force for a comprehensive look at city operations. If the results justified an advisory board, she said, one could be created later.

"I felt that was a more conservative way of going about it," she said.

And Mark Lanzotti, councilman for Ward 5, voted for the board but was deeply involved in the negotiations that narrowed its scope to city operations. At one point, Lanzotti wanted the language to include a provision that the board not suggest actions that impose a cost on the city.

Lanzotti said Thursday that he meant every suggestion needs to be cost-effective, capable of reducing city costs by more than the initial expense.

"If there are cost-effective ways to have Cape Girardeau city government reduce its environmental impact, we would love to have those suggestions and channel these folks' passion into those areas," Lanzotti said.

The original proposal also allowed for nonresidents to hold seats on the board. Journet and Conway, for example, live just outside city limits. The council kept the residency requirement, which is the same for other advisory boards, but will allow county residents with special expertise to be named as nonvoting members.

The resolution of the residency issue, while disappointing, wasn't a fight worth killing the idea over, Conway said. "It wasn't Alan and Kathy and Ellen's board," she said. "This is an idea we think should happen."

rkeller@semissourian.com

388-3642

Pertinent address

401 Independence St., Cape Girardeau, MO