Seize the Future

[Paul n Shelley]

Eric;

I am currently serving on the City of Long Beach's Strategic Plan
Environmental Taskforce. We are creating the enviro plank, including a
sustainable development board, a tropical/temperate wood purchasing
policy, and improving the Open Space Element of the General Plan. Once
we're done with the meetings and deliberations in April, I will forward
our recommendations to you for use as a blueprint. I also suggest you go
to the City of Santa Monica's website to find out more about their
sustainable development policy. Dean Kubani is the administrator there
that you may want to have come up to Ventura to make a presentation at
one of your workshops.

Best regards,
Paul Racko
Long Beach Organic
(562)438-9000



EWerb at aol.com wrote:
> 
> There is a major, six-month long community-wide effort to develop a long range
> vision for how Ventura will be some 10, 20 and forty years down the road,
> called Seize the Future. See and respond to the site at www.seizethefuture.com
> 
> A group of citizens representing various sectors of the community have been
> trained to go around and conduct small workshops to gather input to guide our
> visioning for the future. There will also be four large community meetings on
> major sub-topics to provide more specificity for the vision.
> 
> The 4 communitywide workshops will be at public schools - but the specific
> sites are yet to be decided. The workshops are:
>  Environmental Resources: Thursday, March 18, 6:30 pm
>  Economic Activities: Tuesday, March 30, 6:30 pm
>  Community services, programs, and facilities: Saturday, April 10, 1 pm
>  Community design principles and prototypes: Saturday, April 17, 9 am.
> 
> The end result of this input process will be a set of policies and major goals
> to guide community development for years to come, as well set some ground work
> for the general plan update process which is due every ten years and kicks off
> this summer.
> 
> Since environmental quality looms large in Ventura's future, it would be good
> to hold a meeting of environmental groups to receive your ideas and brainstorm
> for the future.  We will discuss what we like and don't like about Ventura,
> ways we'd like to see it grow and change, and what should not change. Then
> we'd focus in on what specific environmental resource issues we would like to
> see addressed in the future, for example in the area of transportation, water,
> air quality, sustainablity questions, business development scenarios and so
> on.
> 
> We could hold a meeting sometime after work on a week day or on the weekend,
> whichever folks found more convenient. By a show of hands how many folks think
> they'd be interested in participating a session like this?
> 
> We will submit our eco-proceedings to be added to the mix of other input
> documents in the process, and just as importantly if not more so, we will be
> better prepared to participate in the larger forums with better articulation
> of   future sustainablity scenarios to be set as policy. Let's get ahead of
> the game on this.
> 
> eric werbalowsky