One of the mission statements of Washington County Peak Oil is to influence policies of local governments for constructive and sustainable solutions. This blog will highlight news and events that occur regarding this issue with our group.

Washington County is a big place, and there are several municipalities here: Hillsboro, Beaverton, Tigard, Tualatin, Aloha, Gaston, Cornelius...well, you get my point. While several municipalities in the United States have begun the process of addressing energy depletion, the task of working individually with all the member cities in Washington County is enormous.

Many cities begin their process by passing a Peak Oil Resolution that essentially officially recognizes the issue as a challenge for the future of their city, and which states some organizational objectives about how the city should begin approaching the issue.

Portland passed such a resolution last year, established a citizens task force, and waited approximately nine months for its recommendations. San Francisco passed a peak oil resolution last year but hasn't yet formed the required citizens committee to research and report on the implications. The City of Oakland's ad hoc energy Task Force, established by resolution last October, began meeting monthly in April of this year "to develop an action plan (by Decmber of this year) for Oakland to become oil independent by 2020." The city of Bloomington, IN, passed a peak oil resolution last year recognizing that the City of Bloomington must prepare for the inevitability of oil peak, and encourages the community to become better informed on energy-related matters. New York has approached the energy situation in a different way, by approaching various issues of energy depletion with suggested sustainability programs. The city of Austin, TX, just passed an Energy Depletion resolution last month after a year-long campaign by the local peak oil group there, Crude Awakening. They want to form a citizens task force to report to the city by the end of the calendar year.

As you can see, this approach takes an enormous amount of valuable time...time that just may not be available any longer. If we were to approach each city in Washington County and campaign for a peak oil resolution, then work with various task forces to reach recommendations, then work with the city's to implement the recommendations it might be sometime in the year 2010 that results would begin to appear. That's just not soon enough. So instead of approaching the cities and working from the bottom up, we decided to start work at the County level and ask the County to become a central coordinator for the city municipalities, and Metro at the regional level.

Here's what we've done so far:

• We went to the offices of the Washington County board of Commissioners to determine how we could best engage the Board in a dialog about energy depletion.  They asked us to send them a letter with some information on the issue, and a description of our intent.  We contacted the Commissioners office with just such a letter of interest, including a four-page description of the peak oil issue and a description of our groups purpose and interest.  In the letter we indicated that we wanted to partner with them on the implications and issues affecting the city in regards to energy depletion.  We received a response from the County, on  June 28th, indicating that the City Administrator, Robert Davis, would be contacting us within a week to discuss our interest. The 4-page memo we sent is attached to this blog.
• We contacted the County Public Information Officer, Philip Brasford, and requested that his office provide us with a summary of the information they have on peak oil, energy depletion, and the implications of the issue. He said he didn't know of any action on this issue and didn't know much about it and would be interested in talking. His first available appointment time would be the week of August 6-10! Well, we'll keep on this one.
• We have invited the Mayors of every city in the County to attend our group's official launch on July 10th and join us in the viewing of the film, A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash.  We also asked them to further extend the invitation to every member of their City Council. We have not, as yet, received any replies and we will wait to see how many actually attend.
• We will be meeting this week with a representative of METRO, to discuss, among other things, how best we can team them up with the municipal authorities in Washington County, and work together on a region-wide approach to peak oil.

As developments materialize, I'll report them in this blog. I hope you will join me in encouraging your local officials to partner with us, and to proactively address this serious issue.