A few updates are in order in terms of WCPO's actions with Washington County elected officials and government offices.

Previous updates:
Initial entry here.
Updates 2-5 here.

In June, we requested a meeting with the Public Information Officer (PIO) of Washington County to determine what information the County had regarding the peak oil issue, and what was currently being done or planned to mitigate the risks. That meeting was scheduled and held in August, and Donna Maebori and I attended.

The PIO also invited the Director of Washington County's VAN (Vision Action Network), Sia Lindstrom to attend. The Vision Action Network is a "private non-profit organization committed to the promotion and support of collaborative community-based problem solving in Washington County" and was established and is largely funded by the County "to promote and support community-based problem solving through relationship building, planning and implementation processes that coordinate and optimize public, private and individual actions and resources."

The PIO spent half the meeting discussing his role with Washington County. We learned that the peak oil information that the County had on file was largely the information we had shared with them to date, and that while the information was informative, specific actions were not being taken that he was aware of. Our query into what actions Washington County was taking toward mitigating risk was met with being given a copy of the "discussion draft" of the 2020 Strategic Plan for the County, along with an invitation to make comments on that Strategic Plan.

Another quarter of the meeting was devoted to Sia Lindstrom telling us what VAN was all about. We were also invited to take a seat on VAN's Sustainability Summit Planning Team, which we accepted. Their next meeting was scheduled for September.

VAN had sponsored the Washington County Sustainability Summit in January of 2007. More than 100 business, community, government, religious, and citizens attended with the goal of developing a shared vision and identify common ground among existing sustainability plans, and to identify and prioritize community-wide strategies to address environmental sustainability. The result was to be the creation of a "shared vision and community agenda" for sustainability in Washington County. The specific areas of focus were,

• Agriculture/Food
• Forestry
• Green Building Development
• Green Spaces
• Land Stewardship
• Transportation, and
• Water Quality/Quantity.

I attended the Summit Planning Team Meeting with high hopes of being able to present the problems of peak oil to the Team, with the intent of having the team then take this information back to the individual strategy teams. Unfortunately, that wasn't what was on their agenda. Instead, I learned that the strategy teams had all put together reports on their findings, actions, and priorities, that these were being finalized, and that "although peak oil may be an important issue, we really don't have time to get into that here today. If peak peak oil turns out to be real and does occur at some point, that may be the time we can address it". This position was typical, and not so unexpected, but completely naive. I was informed by the Team Chair that if I wanted to present information on the issue that perhaps interested parties could stay behind after the meeting to listen. Two people stayed for five minutes. It was a terrible disappointment.

Donna Maebori plans to attend the next meeting to see if there is a consistent attitude, and perhaps to network some more, but it appears that that the Planning Team already has their agenda and action items and are not open to receiving further information which could change those items.

Moving on, I have continued to send small tidbits of information to the County Board of Commissioners. Commissioner Dick Schouten is becoming somewhat of a champion for us. He has become peak oil aware and agrees we are headed for trouble. The other Commissioners are not responding to my notes at all.

An example of one such recent exchange was a copy of an article from the Columbus Dispatch, the newspaper in Columbus, OH. The Article, entitled, Higher prices for gasoline could hurt Ohio road projects, said,


"The Ohio Department of Transportation estimates that it may face a $1.5 billion deficit by 2013, partly because the high cost of fuel has Ohioans driving less and buying vehicles that are more fuel efficient. Those choices mean less gas-tax revenue for the state.

Earlier this year, incoming ODOT Director James Beasley wrote that the department is inundated with projects that can't be funded in the foreseeable future. Officials haven't said how they'll decide which ones take priority.

So I sent an email to the Washington County Board of Commissioners and all the Washington County Mayors, attaching a copy of the article, and asking what affect this phenomenon (lowered gas tax revenues due to higher gas prices and demand destruction) would have on Washington County. I received one response -- from Dick Schouten. But he copied everyone in my original email, and this is what he said....

Peter:

Gas taxes are, and I expect will continue to be a relatively declining source of local revenue to pay for this County's transportation. We already rely on property taxes and development fees for a significant part of our collective County transportation funding, and I think the property tax share of such funding will increase over time. This also means that we should (for reasons of equity and efficiency) use non-gas taxes and in particular property taxes expended for transportation to pay for "alternative" transportation and land use policies that reduce demand with respect to motorized vehicles, not just spend such taxes to increase the supply of (and demand for) roads and fuel.

I agree with you, we are entering a very different world: much, much stronger competition on world markets from resource hungry India and China; a world with much higher oil/gasoline costs; oil supply interruptions of a very serious nature will happen; ever growing political instability in parts of the world with most of the remaining oil resources ( e.g., Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Venezuela among other places); and increasing costs and burdens will inevitably be placed on all world carbon resources (related to regulating green house gases such as carbon dioxide, etc., per Kyoto and post-Kyoto treaty regulations, emerging carbon trading markets, etc.).

Dick

So, the rest of the Commissioners and all the Mayors received this response. Will anything happen as a result? We'll see.

Peter