Campus Planning Committee

MINUTES
Campus Planning Committee
Tuesday, Novmber 8, 2011
2:00–3:00 p.m
300 Rice Hall

Attended: Kyu Whang, Barry Perlus, Dan Roth, Susan Riley, Gary Stewart, Jordan Smith, Randy Wayne, Ezra Delaney, Pete Salino, David Cutter, Gilbert Delgado, Mary-Lynn Cummings, John Adams, Tom LiVigne, Stephan Schmidt, Don Rakow, Brian Chabot, Marianne Krasny, Mina Amundsen.

After the introductions, Kyu Whang provided an overview of the PSCC and its mandate — which was primarily to implement the University’s Climate Action Plan (CAP) and to look comprehensively at sustainability planning and action across the Ithaca campus. There are 10 focus groups in this initiative — Buildings, Climate, Energy, Food, Land, Water, Waste, Purchasing, Transportation, and People — which are expected to be ongoing committees that will support the CAP implementation and be thought leaders in their areas of focus. The teams will have a lot of flexibility in determining their scope, goals, process and activities. Dan Roth outlined the purpose of the November 17 annual PSCC summit and what was expected as a deliverable from each team — in sum, a paragraph on their scope and goals. The People team and Communications sub-team will be interacting with all the other teams, although the People Team will be much more focused on education and awareness among employees about sustainability issues. Although the PSCC initiative is focused on the Ithaca campus, sustainable land stewardship practices can be applied to other Cornell campuses in New York.

As this was a joint meeting of the CPC and the PSCC Land Team, there was discussion about how charges of the two committees related to each other. There is overlap with the membership and both are concerned with aspects of campus-wide planning. The specific tasks and roles of each and their coordination with each other will need to be worked out. The original intent of the PSCC was that the Land Team would support the efforts of the CPC, and have the ability to advance specific land-based sustainability efforts in addition to monitoring and reporting on existing efforts.

The group agreed that the Grounds category in STARS did not adequately capture existing land management and planning practices at Cornell and the metrics should reflect the reality at Cornell. Mary-Lynn recommended that the baselines for metrics and reporting should be set early especially if the team was developing new metrics in addition to the STARS ‘Grounds’ category. This issue will need to be taken up in subsequent meetings. There was broad agreement about the goals — short and longer term, which will have to be discussed at subsequent meetings of the committee and sub teams identified.

Next steps are for the CPC and PSCC LFT chairs to meet and discuss coordination between the committees. A schedule for the meetings will be forthcoming as well as access to the Sharepoint site that will be used as a way for the teams to work together. Marianne and I thank you all once again for attending and providing your thoughts and input and we look forward to implementing campus sustainability through both groups.