BY BEN L. KAUFMAN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The Hamilton County Environmental Priorities Project ended thousands of hours of study Saturday by ranking the area's most pressing needs. Its top three choices looked forward and called for:
Sustainable development that gives due weight to environmental and economic concerns and how choices affect communities.
Institutions that further environmental education and community outreach.
A countywide environmental forum.
The next three choices addressed existing problems and urged: Reducing contaminated urban runoff.
Greater use of low-pollution fuels in Metro buses and fleet cars and trucks to improve air quality.
Stricter, more aggressive enforcement of environmental regulations.
A 21-member "consensus forum," which has been the core group of the project since it began two years ago, made the choices in a three-hour public meeting downtown.
"We need strategies that could be implemented relatively soon," volunteer Larry Fine said before the group voted.
Dennis Murphey, forum member and head of Cincinnati's Office of Environmental Management, urged "concrete" choices over the "soft and fuzzy."
After the vote, forum members had done both and fulfilled project manager Patricia Timm's hope that they would "champion a few strategies" that could "take on a life of their own."
The project's goal is to set priorities for decision-makers. From the start, participants knew that their influence, if any, would come from the project's broad participation and the quality of their research and recommendations.
About 200 volunteers spent months studying local land, air and water pollution and problems with local decision-making. Late last year, they brought in their recommendations, which the consensus forum winnowed to Saturday's options after a series of public meetings.
In the next three weeks, the project's 10-member board will refine Saturday's choices and ask governments, agencies and others involved in the individual issues to commit themselves to seriously address the project's efforts.
Originally, the board was to fashion action plans from the recommendations and urge those on decision-makers.
Saturday, forum members and others agreed that might be impossible before the project goes out of business at the end of June.
Never mind, forum member and Sierra Club activist Lynn Frock said, because the final recommendations were not the project's most important product.
Instead, he pointed to the more than 70 recommendations and supporting documentation and said no one ever need start again from scratch on any of those issues.
All of the information is available at the project's www.queencity.com - hcepp Web site.
In the same way, any reasonably informed group could have come up with some similar recommendations, Mr. Frock said. But the project drew on such a wide range of interests that the recommendations assumed cooperation rather than adversarial relations among county, local governments, industry, regulators, activists and others.
Of the six top recommendations, five were last-minute consolidations of related choices.
The two hours of give-and-take it took to assemble those packages Saturday also reflected project members' willingness to accommodate each other's interests.
Only air quality was a single recommendation.
Some of the 70-plus recommendations -- drafted as endorsements of existing environmental programs -- also were ranked by forum members. They strongly urged further support and additional resources for:
- The Cincinnati - Hamilton County Port Authority's overseeing "brownfields" programs to clean up and reuse contaminated industrial sites.
- The Regional Ozone Coalition.
- Metropolitan Sewer District's program to minimize raw sewage from combined sewer overflows during heavy rains.
- Restoration - preservation efforts on the Little Miami River and Mill Creek.
- Development of a transportation-focused environmental strategy.
- Further research into sources of microscopic airborne particles the federal government is going to regulate.
How to communicate those endorsements drew a warning from forum member Elizabeth Brown, from the Institute for Advanced Manufacturing Science and the League of Women Voters.
"We're not saying enough is happening," she said. Rather, endorsement meant that the forum liked the "kernel" of what it saw but urged "additional punch and support."
Stan Hedeen, Xavier University biology professor and forum member, praised the environmental priorities project as the broadest effort of its kind since a Cincinnati task force in the 1970s created the "foundation" for much of the city's environmental action of the past quarter-century.
