David Dodge, EFCL District B

David Dodge EFCL Past President and past district rep for Lago Lindo, Kilkenny, McLeod, Evansdale, Northmount, Londonderry, Steele Heights, Balwin, Killarney, Delwood, Glengarry, Rosslyn, Belvedere community leagues in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Photo by Rob Agostinis

Thursday, October 21, 2010

City of Edmonton Renewable Energy Task Force - What's that?

Hi Community Leagues


First, congratulations to Dave Loken, Ed Gibbons, Tony Caterina and Kim Krushell on their successful election campaigns! These are our four councillors from the region. Welcome "back" to three of you and a special welcome to Dave Loken, the new councillor on the block.


Don't forget the Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues RGM is Monday October 25! Get the meeting package here. Come on down and join in the conversation about hockey memberships, get updates on current topics and have your say!
Duggan Community League, Address:  3728 – 106 Street
Dinner for RSVP’ed guests at 5:30, Registration until 6:30
Meeting begins at 6:30 Monday, Oct. 25, 2010.

Renewable Energy Task Force
A very interesting thing happened to me in my community league work over the last few months. Not long after members of Area Council 17 were peppering Edmonton City Councillor Ed Gibbons with questions about why the City does not have more solar panels installed, one of my colleagues, Renewable Energy expert Tim Weis invited me to a special meeting of the City of Edmonton Renewable Energy Task force.

The special meeting was to hear California renewable energy guru Paul Gipe make a presentation about using feed-in-tariffs to encourage growth in clean energy sources. I did a short video interview with him after his presentation. Gipe was promoting feed-in-tariffs as the key policy that has successfully secured half of the new renewable energy projects in the world.


The City of Edmonton ran a very small solar-electric pilot program to test interest in solar energy and their small $200,000 program was oversubscribed within days! The program resulted in 29 new solar systems being installed in Edmonton increasing our solar energy supply by 100%. This last statistic is pretty sad really, since it confirms we have only taken very tiny, baby steps towards developing clean sources of energy. But it does give a strong indication of interest by the public in getting in volved with renewable energy. Enmax is working on a program to put 8,000 small solar systems on the roofs of their customers. Watch for this next year.

There is no question the public is interested in renewable energy. I know this because of surveys that confirm that the public sees renewable energy and energy efficiency as the two key things we need to do to create a new green energy economy, to tackle climate change and to transform our relatively dirty energy supply into a clean energy supply over time.

The moral of the story is after attending the meeting I was invited to the next meeting of the City of Edmonton Renewable Energy Task force and I am now representing the EFCL and community leagues on the City of Edmonton's Renewable Energy Task force.
I attended the fourth meeting of the task force today and the topic was transportation.

This seemed like a good way to combine my interest in energy issues and my volunteer work in communities. The committee is a very interesting mix of folks and includes a lot of expertise.

I will be looking for ways to share information with community folks and eventually we will propose a meeting for community folks on these topics.

Today the topic was transportation and I learned all sorts of interesting things. I learned that Edmonton is one of the most car-oriented cities in Canada. I still think Calgary must be worse, but so it goes.

The City of Edmonton is currently working on significant expansion of the LRT to reduce emissions and roadway congestion. Apparently LRT ridership is now 94,000 per day, up 26% since adding just two stations to the line!

Environmentally this is interesting for other reasons. LRT runs on electricity and quite efficiently. Just this week I also noticed a sign at the new local school. The sign indicated an electric car charging station at the new school in my neighbourhood.


There is a sign and a plug-in for electric vehicles. I was thinking that electric vehicles are one of those technologies that is still not mature enough. But it seems electric vehicles are coming on stream in a variety of forms: electric vehicles (EV) and as plug-in-hybrids. Apparently even in Alberta where 60-70% of our electricity still comes from dirty sources like coal, the EV car produces 30% fewer emissions than a conventional gas car, according to experts on the task force.

The topic of the task force is of course renewable energy. The connection to cars and LRT is obvious. Electric is more efficient, and if you supply the power for the cars from renewable sources of energy then you have one very clean system.

One other fascinating fact came from a presentation by Godo Stoyke of Carbon Busters. He told us Amsterdam decided to invest heavily in cycling to encourage people to use bikes instead of cars. The program was so successful more than three times as many people use bicycles now in Amsterdam. And here's the crux: apparently there has been no increase in bike accidents with three times as many riders. Apparently the more bicycle riders you have the safer it is!


The last little factoid comes from Belgium. When the City of Hasslet was desperate for new transportation solutions and broke financially, they decided to try something radical. Instead of building multi-million dollar roads, they invested something like $5 million to provide all citizens with free transit service. Ridership went up 700% immediately and ten years after ridership is still up 1,100% thus saving the City millions of dollars on roads and other costs.


The City of Edmonton Renewable Energy Task Force is collecting information at this stage and will be making recommendations to City Council about a year from now.


If you have any questions let me know.







Sunday, October 17, 2010

EFCL Board Package Oct. 2011 - District B Report

EFCL District B Report
October 14, 2010

The big news is that the Edmonton Minor Hockey Association (EMHA) has decided that they will no longer sell or require membership in a community league to play hockey. There will be discussion about this at the upcoming EFCL RGM. The EMHA has indicated they may be interested in collecting a fee to support hockey programs or facilities in communities, but the days of requiring memberships are over. There are approximately 4,000 community league members who play hockey. (see item 10.4 in the board package).

UPCOMING

EFCL RGM is October 25, 2010 at Duggan Hall – Don't miss it. Hockey memberships will be discussed and much more.

President’s Dinner – November 12, in honour of the terrific contributions of Community League Presidents in Edmonton the EFCL is hosting an appreciation event on November 12, 2010.

FROM THE OCTOBER 14, BOARD PACKAGE – Download it here

6.1 EFCL Policy Manual – the EFCL hired a summer student lawyer to gather up and organize its policies into a one-stop collection of all EFCL policies. It will be available for download soon.

6.2 Direct Deposits for Community Leagues – set up direct deposit FROM the EFCL to make it really easy and efficient to receive deposits from the EFCL for membership revenue.

6.4 LRT Alignment Notice – the EFCL is asking the City to provide one month notice from the time the plans for the new LRT alignment are released before the matter is considered at council on Dec. 8, 2010 to give community folks time to provide input.

6.6 Casino Report – the provinces report on casinos is out and it recommends changes that would see Edmonton casino funds go down. However, the minister has not accepted the report and has sent it back for review. The risk is still there, but the report is under review now and the status quo will apply for a while yet.

8.1 Complete the Quilt – Community League Day was a tremendous success, with 91 leagues participating this year! Your league will now have a chance to contribute to the Community League quilt that was created for the 2010 Community League. This is your chance to join the 43 leagues who have already created sections for the quilt celebrating their communities. Watch for news in the EFCL newsletter.

8.3 Executive Director’s Report – (Allan Bolstad)

CL Capital and Operating grants proposal – as a direct result of the Tripartite licence negotiations and a report by the EFCL about the Community League infrastructure deficit out there (leagues that need halls and other families fixed or built) we made a joint proposed with Community Services to the Community Services Committee for the following:
  • $3 million in a new Community League (CL) capital projects fund
  • $1.35 million in additional funds for (CL) operating grants
This proposal was reduced by the City to the following:
  • $1.5 million for CL Capital Projects
  • $700,000 for increases in CL operating grants
In addition the proposed has moved from the “funded” column to the “unfunded” column which means this allocation is in serious competition with many, many other projects for a limited pot of $6.9 million.
Please urge your councillors to support these desperately needed increases for community leagues across the city. One community league hall was recently found to be in nearly condemned condition – this fund is really needed to prevent facilities from becoming a big mess.

Tripartite License Agreement Negotiations – work continues on this front. Dwayne Robertson (President of ACES) and I got together to review the proposal on our own before the last meeting of the committee and then continued our line-by-line review of the licence with the Tripartite Committee.
  • it will take at least three meetings (we’ve had two) to go through the agreement clause by clause
  • there is some legal jargon still in the agreement – we have been trying to reduce jargon and we are pushing hard for an agreement community leagues can understand – this is an uphill battle
  • we are making good headway on many points
  • we are still trying to get the City to reduce its involvement in small projects to cut down on red tape and reduce the hassle for the City too
  • the role of the EFCL is being reduced dramatically from the original agreement to an appropriate role as a backstop for leagues
Living Local Symposium – the EFCL is proposing to hold a symposium with the City to discuss what living local means and how we can support community concerns that activities and reasonable facilities are located close in their communities
  • the symposium to could take place as early as spring or next Fall
8.4 Community Development Officer’s Report  – there is some very interesting work going on here on cultural integration, REACH, joint use and many other topics. Please read this section of the board package if you are interested in these topics.

Pool Allocation Meetings

Pool Allocation Meeting with Area Councils - EFCL attended a meeting with Area council 1,2, 17 and Clareview representatives to deal with a number of issues surrounding the Pool allocation process. Contrary to the notes in the board package the outcome was this (I sought a correction at the meeting):
  • Leagues in the NE will receive agreement letters and not long contracts for rental periods
  • Recognition for the contributions of Area Councils to the development of pools is being considered
  • prices for pool rentals for our region have gone down
  • the model we use in the NE is being replicated in other parts of the city
EFCL Pool Allocation Meeting – many people attended this meeting from all over the city
  • the model we use in the NE is being used in other parts of the city
  • the city is going to come back at some point with some sort of City-wide offering for Community Leagues – leagues asked for this and the City seemed quite interested – we will see.
8.5 Planning Report – the planning committee is very busy, here are a few highlights:
  • Family Friendly Housing Workshop – well attended
  • Vision for what row housing should look like
  • Feedback sought on
  • Medium scale residential overlay
  • RA8 – 6 storey high-rise higher floor/area ratios
  • Large site zoning process
  • Transit-oriented development guidelines
  • EFCL organizes Nov. 3 meeting between community leagues, city and developers about pre-application process
10.4 Edmonton Minor Hockey Association has decided that the days of requiring community league memberships for hockey players are over.

Hope to see you at the RGM at Duggan Hall on Monday, October 25 at 5:30 pm. Dinner is included!