Boca seeks Florida Green Certification
June 13th, 2008 • chatter, environmentalism
According to the Sun Sentinel, Boca wants to be certified green. I think I must be seeing things. First I saw a Tree City USA sign for the Arbor Day Foundation and now this. Why am I shocked?
This is all greenwash.
A Tree City? Sure, why not.
Boca isn’t green at all and the city sure as hell isn’t a tree city. Recently, the city approved and built a new library out on US 441, right above Yamato. Great, I love libraries but there’s a problem: the library is surrounded by a HUGE parking lot and the land is completely devoid of trees. The parking lot is large enough to park probably 300 or 400 cars but the library itself doesn’t have the capacity to hold that many people at all. I used to drive past this part of Boca everyday for work and it was a beautiful forest. Now it’s marred by this gigantic parking lot of a tiny library. So for this tiny library, they cut down a few thousand trees. Great!
On the corner of Military Trail and Butts Road, the Lynn Group recently wasted land and money to erect a new multi-story business building. What was the cost? A small forest. Why was this move stupid? There’s a multi-story business building right behind it that was completed three years ago and still isn’t full. Now they plowed a whole bunch of trees to build another useless building. I also drove past this forest on the way to work two years ago when I worked on that side of town. The now gone forest was actually a park. How sad. Drive north on Military Trail about 2 or 3 miles and you’ll see another giant business complex on your right where another forest used to be. What’s the problem with it? It’s built on what was slated to be protected land for conservation. A few acres of trees plowed for another building the city doesn’t need. Many older buildings in the city are demo’d and built over which is both good and bad. Good because most of them don’t need current building and hurricane codes. Bad because they could be brought up to code and repurposed for a lower cost
Green madness
Now we have the green certification gig. The city claims to be making strides in things like recycling and environmental awareness. Can someone from city council please point these efforts out to me? More than 75% of the city does not recycle and businesses are not required, in any way, to recycle. The city has no facilities to recycle any used electronics or batteries — but we can go to Broward Country to do that…except in Deerfield Beach where you can’t recycle out-of-city goods. The city loves urban sprawl, they strongly adhere to “Build out, not up” and it’s pretty obvious. Instead of building more multi-story apartment complexes for housing, the city nearly mandates everyone to stay under 3 or 4 stories and happily approves new building developments on our ever shrinking available land. They’re even selling off protected and reserved conservation land for development. How is that green?
How about the bikers?
Boca Raton also touts itself as “bike friendly” which it most certainly is not. Just to get to the gas station at the end of Camino Real road (where I live), I actually get to cross Camino Real three times and Powerline Road once. Why? Because only one side of Camino Real has a sidewalk (no bike lanes here) and it’s on the north side of the road. However, the light for crossing the road and the crosswalk are located on the southeast side of Camino and Powerline. Once across Powerline Road, we have to cross Camino again because the gas station is on the north side of the road and this time: there’s no crosswalk or crossing light. How in the hell is that bike friendly? It only gets worse the farther west you go in town.
Or how about how Palmetto Park Road, one of our major lifelines in the city, has bike lanes on one side of the road that account for approximately 3 miles of the entire road? As soon as you cross over Military Trail on Palmetto Park, you get a bike lane until you get closer to downtown Boca and then it disappears. There’s no usable bike lanes on the road before Military Trail and no bike lanes after crossing Dixie Highway. That’s very unfortunate because a lot of people bike along Dixie Highway and US1/Federal Highway since Federal Highway is home to most of the city’s big name eateries and attractions.
What about the city government?
The newly elected mayor says that being green is one of her “top priorities” and that’s great but it’s certainly not enough since she still tools around town in a gas guzzler. Does she plan on offering incentives to businesses who want to use solar power or other alternative means of power? Probably not. Or any help to those who want to try and offset ‘heat island effect’? Again, probably not. While ‘heat island effect’ is not that big of a problem in Boca just yet, it will be in the future. There are not enough businesses clumped together to be a major source of heat islands as it stands now. Is the city government trying to cut down on paper waste by going paperless, even partially? Nope, paper is cheaper than using paperless office methods…for now. There are plans slated to increase mass transit in the city but they’re just not enough as it is now. There are not enough routes nor stops in this city and using mass transit is almost to the point of a joke, going just a 3 short miles can take 2 hours.
I’m sure they’ll be trying to make strides to fix this but given Boca’s image of being a ritzy town, they won’t do a lot or any efforts made will fall short of being helpful. While we have no need or space for a subway, we do need more bus routes and higher visibility (and usability) of cabs. We need more bike lanes and more traffic efficient intersection lighting. We need more city parks that have trees other than palms and more drought-resistant grasses. The city’s use of reclaimed water needs to be focused more on use in generating power than watering the grass in the city — all of the reclaimed water areas I know of are only used for grass irrigation. Waste Management needs to start using garbage to generate power at their plant on the Turnpike although, I’m fairly certain this is in the works.
The Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County needs to introduce “no sort” recycling along with consumer-friendly plastic bag recycling. There are hundreds of cities around the nation already doing this, why aren’t we? I routinely sort out everyone else’s recycling because they’re not educated by the SWA on how to properly sort. The people in my apartment complex see our recycling bins as extra trash cans and always throw their trash in there, the property management is not interested in fixing this despite my complaints.
What can residents do?
At this point in time, not a lot. Other than going to town hall meetings and holding officials accountable, there is not much we can do. Holding anyone accountable will be very difficult since many city officials are deeply ensconced with area developers and make more money off selling off precious nature reserve land than they do in saving it for nature. Since a large portion of the city’s residents are in multi-family residences or housing complexes, I’d say over 65%, we can’t install things like solar panels or micro wind turbines. And those that can are stifled by housing association rules. After Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma leveled most of the city, the city workers were out cleaning up downed trees only to replant them and replant grasses, they were highly focused on re-beautification and still are. I’m happy they were pulling down the ficus trees since they’re illegal to replant in Florida but they replaced them with just-as-insecure palm trees. Why not oaks or cherries or even magnolias? There’s a lot that could’ve been done back then to green the place up and replant for beauty.
I’m going to find out when the upcoming town hall meetings about the certification are and I plan on going to see how the officials can justify something they’re not really doing. I understand greenwash and I understand what the city isn’t doing to make this a cleaner place, I’m interested in their arguments on how they are greening it up around here.