APWA SUSTAINABILITY COMMITTEEMEETING NOTES

– 07/28/2017 CONFERENCE CALL

Notes Prepared by: Bruce Erickson, 08/21/2017

Attendees: Bruce Erickson, Amanda Schweickert, Jim Rioux, Dwight Miller, Nathan Dasler

Meeting Discussion

  • New participant Nathan Dasler of AKS introduced himself to the rest of the group.
  • Bruce summarized the committee activities of the recent past (sponsoring conference presentations and organizing an Envision training), then added that we shouldn’t feel constrained by those categories for future events. Other possible types of activities include sustainability-themed community activities, and coordinating with other APWA committees or organizations outside of APWA.
  • We discussed the ideas for better leveraging the resources provided by the national APWA Center for Sustainability (C4S). We also discussed the C4S Resource Guide that Dwight distributed.
  • We discussed the idea of creating a survey of Washington APWA member interests around sustainability to better understand what specific aspects of sustainability most interest members. Perhaps we could relate the survey questions to the categories of sustainability information described on the C4S website (in the sustainability toolkit section).
  • There was discussion of the idea of writing sustainability-themed articles in the APWA chapter magazine, which is published quarterly.
  • We discussed the idea of organizing a conference presentation on current sustainability resources and best practices. This might be particularly helpful for smaller agencies that might not yet have much sustainability experience or in-house expertise. We could describe resources that are available, such as:
  • C4S
  • ISI (Envision)
  • Greenroads
  • LEED
  • Local agencies with sustainability experience (King County, Sound Transit, WSDOT, City of Seattle).
  • Members of the sustainability committee
  • Our committee website (assuming we get it updated)

Action Items. Action items listed below include ones discussed at this meeting as well as outstanding ones from previous meetings.

  • Bruce:
  • Set up a presentation on a comparison of project sustainability rating systems. This could be presented at either a conference or an Emerging Professionals monthly meeting.
  • Set up meeting time for any of our members who go to the Fall Conference. Note that this has been done: our meeting time is Wednesday 8:45 to 9:45 a.m.
  • Contact Julie Raish of Paladino about the idea of potentially participating in a presentation at an APWA conference.
  • Update the committee website.
  • Contact the marketing committee about the idea of conducting a survey of Washington members regarding their specific sustainability interests.
  • Jim:
  • Follow up with Rhys Roth of the Center for Sustainability about potential future APWA conference presentations.
  • Investigate potential sources of grant funding for incorporating sustainability into projects.
  • Amanda:
  • Follow up with the people from King County and SPU who are planning to present on their use of Envision at a future ASCE meeting to see if they would be also willing to present at an APWA conference.
  • Investigate the use of Envision on the recent UW power plant project to see if the project owner and design team would be good candidates to give a presentation at an APWA conference.
  • Dwight:
  • Contact Josh Hatfield of the Greenroads Foundation regarding the presentation Josh is planning to give at the APWA Fall Conference. Dwight will ask Josh if someone from the Sustainability Committee can give a short introduction about the committee at the beginning of his presentation.
  • Patrick:
  • Put together a schedule for when applications need to be submitted for upcoming conferences.
  • Nathan:
  • Investigate the topic of project cost savings that can potentially be provided by designing projects to be more sustainable.
  • All:
  • Think about potential sustainability presentations and/or panel sessions that we could set up for future conferences.