Sustainability board wants the environment to be ‘an underpinning’ of Lawrence’s next strategic plan | News, Sports, Jobs
picture by: Sylas May/Journal-World
Members of the public watch the Environmental Sustainability Advisory Board’s assembly at City Hall on Thursday, July 23, 2026.
When Lawrence’s new strategic plan is crafted in the coming months, the Environmental Sustainability Advisory Board wants to be sure that its imaginative and prescient is a inexperienced one.
The board met on Thursday evening to additional talk about what environmental insurance policies and tasks it ought to suggest to the City Commission, and its members mentioned that whereas they need to be arising with coverage suggestions in the close to time period, they need to additionally be considering forward to the strategic planning course of that can quickly begin in earnest.
“I think it’s really important that we do it in two phases,” board Chair Nancy Muma mentioned. “We have some priorities that we put forth now, and that we really engage in the strategic plan… we make sure that we can get environmental sustainability as an underpinning of many of the goals and plans and (performance metrics).”
The strategic plan is a doc that, amongst different issues, units targets for the metropolis and establishes the way it will measure progress towards them. The earlier five-year strategic plan did embody environmental sustainability as one of the metropolis’s commitments, Sustainability Director Kathy Richardson informed the board.
But board member Patrick Ross mentioned he’d seen “a lack of environmental stewardship and care” in different components of metropolis authorities, and that he wished a stronger sustainability framework for the metropolis. Ahead of the assembly, I put collectively a 460-page “Environmental Policy and Initiative Compendium” as half of that work.
“The city’s going to go through a strategic plan restructuring with a new commission here in September, so this would certainly fall into that as far as how we rework our strategic plan collectively as a city,” Ross mentioned.
This doc, which the board hasn’t taken any formal motion on, contains solutions for metropolis insurance policies, from an environmental knowledge dashboard to a brand new noxious weeds and native vegetation ordinance to including extra photo voltaic panels to metropolis buildings. But it additionally contains concepts Lawrence might advocate for at the state and federal ranges, akin to a brand new regional passenger rail hyperlink between Topeka, Lawrence and Kansas City, and longer-term targets that would span many years, akin to making Lawrence “energy-positive”: a neighborhood that produces extra clear power than it consumes.
Ross mentioned he was impressed by a dialog with Mayor Brad Finkeldei at a meeting in March. Back then, Finkeldei informed the board that metropolis decision-makers would respect an inventory of concepts for environmental insurance policies, as an alternative of having simply “one good idea” offered to them at a time.
“When he asked, ‘What is everything we can possibly do?’ I tried my best to come up with a list in that totality of ideas,” Ross mentioned.
Many of these concepts would join to the strategic plan. One of them is a “state of the environment” report, which the compendium says would be “an annual benchmark for evaluating progress” on the strategic plan’s environmental targets. It would be a report on environmental circumstances that may go earlier than the board and the metropolis and county commissions every year, and it’d embody knowledge on issues akin to air pollution and per-capita electrical energy use.
“Patrick, you have a really great overall plan that you’ve started to put together, and that’s going to be a great starting point for our discussion when we’re going through the strategic plan,” Muma mentioned.
She additionally, nevertheless, wished to deal with some extra short-term aims. The board has talked about a number of of these in the previous couple of months, together with a styrofoam ban, an anti-idling ordinance and changes to the city’s weed control rules, however it nonetheless hasn’t forwarded any of them to the City Commission stage.
Board member Joe Fearn wished concepts that do not “require significant buy-in from other people,” like public schooling campaigns on correct recycling. “I’m a big person that wants action and results immediately,” he mentioned.
Last month, the board requested members of the public to come to this month’s assembly and share what they thought the instant priorities ought to be. About a dozen individuals spoke to the board on Thursday about such points as the weed ordinance; utilizing native vegetation in metropolis landscaping as an alternative of monoculture lawns; extra bicycle security measures, together with probably reducing the pace restrict on residential streets; and renewable power infrastructure.
One commenter spoke a few good friend who had been cited for violating the weed management guidelines as a result of of vegetation she grew in her yard for meals or medication. Another mentioned there ought to be “a structured citywide prairie restoration program.”
“I think the weed ordinance and stopping the monoculture has really come through” in the feedback, Muma mentioned. And board member Josh Roundy mentioned solar energy and transportation had been two different matters that he noticed quite a bit of assist for.
The fee will proceed its work on instant suggestions at its next assembly. And the strategic planning course of, which can contain new City Manager Majed Al-Ghafry, will be happening all through the second half of the yr. Richardson mentioned there’ll be a neighborhood survey popping out in August to assist form the plan, and that the purpose is for the metropolis to undertake the strategic plan by the finish of the yr.
