Monday, September 27, 1999
Environmental center opens Tuesday
Holds collection of Tristate data
BY BEN L. KAUFMAN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Redeeming their year-old pledge, activists are opening a Tri-State Environmental Resource Center with money left from the Hamilton County Environmental Priorities Project.
The open house will be 5 p.m. Tuesday at the center's temporary Mount Auburn quarters at 2828 Vernon Place. The public is invited.
“It's a resource that is absolutely vital to the Tristate and to all of the other environmental groups,” board chairman Vincent B. Stamp said. “There is no one place where there is a collection of environment-related data.”
Initial efforts will reflect the founding project's priorities:
• Community environmental calendar.
• Online database.
• Directory of environmental Web sites.
• Computerized mapping with a GIS (geographic information system).
• Research assistance and speakers bureau.
“Our goal is to provide environmental data, news and information that is relevant to the Tristate region,” Mr. Stamp said. “We believe that environmental information should be gathered without bias, widely disseminated, easy and convenient to use, and presented clearly and objectively.”
Information and guidance will be available online or walk-in, he added, and a permanent home is being sought.
Creating the center was one of the seven priorities when scores of volunteers finished their work and the environmental priorities project went out of business in November.
In a sense, the priorities project became the center, shaping it as a nonprofit corporation and passing on $15,000 in unspent grants.
Terence Cody, a retired University of Cincinnati research assistant professor in environmental health, is volunteer interim director of the center.
“We'd all be dead without him,” Mr. Stamp said of Mr. Cody and his work.
Now, Mr. Cody and the board have raised enough to seek a paid executive director.
Cinergy matched $10,000 raised privately and the Greater Cincinnati Foundation pledged $15,000. Other fund-raising continues, Mr. Stamp added.
Mr. Cody, a toxicologist associated with UC's Health and Environmental Risk Institute, said the new resource center was proposed by his working group in the environmental priorities project.
They wanted the information they had gathered — including identification of Tristate decision makers — to be retained and accessible to anyone who asked.
Birth pains for the center initially were eased by project staff as they shut down their operation late last year. Since early 1999, however, Mr. Cody has done “sort of everything that needed to be done.” That meant returning calls, raising funds, writing grant requests and staying in touch with “one of the most effective boards I've ever been part of.”
Mr. Stamp said various loca tions are being considered for the center's permanent home. They include the downtown branch of Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County, and other libraries.
Being housed in a library would permit an operating budget of about $100,000 a year, Mr. Cody said. Otherwise, the center faces “astronomical” start-up costs. Moreover, Cincinnati's public library is a model of usefulness to the general public and it has a rich body of environmental information, he said.
The center began taking shape late September and “we didn't know if it had been done in any other places,” Mr. Stamp said. Soon, however, he and co-workers found similar modest efforts in Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco.
“We studied them for what worked, what didn't work, and what they would have done differently,” Mr. Stamp said.
Michael Siolo, who was active in the creation of the Chicago-area Calumet Environmental Resource Center at Calumet State University in 1992, will be keynote speaker Tuesday evening.
He runs the Calumet center now, which is one of the few in the nation.,
Mr. Siolo also will speak at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday in Room 402 of the Tangeman University Center at the University of Cincinnati.
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