Normal Director of Zoning and Planning Mercy Davison said town staff is making great progress on the town’s Vision 2050/Sustainability plan.
Davison, who gave an update Monday to the town council, said immediately after the plan was adopted, town staff worked on what the community was most interested in.
“As we reported to you last year, we dug into all sorts of data that pertains specifically to Normal and then we also did some really high-quality surveying, including a scientific survey,” she said, adding “84% of people surveyed were supportive or highly supportive of the town taking steps to invest in sustainable practices. They were very excited about that.”
Davison said high interest areas were planting more trees and exploring alternative transportation.
In line with seven goals discovered in the surveying, Davison said town staff formed a sustainability committee that fulfilled the plan’s requirement of a sustainability office to carry out planned changes.
“This committee is filled with people from key operational departments, and everybody on the committee is somebody with deep expertise in their field and some level of authority to actually call for action and then follow it through,” said Davison. “The purpose of the group is to look at the goals set forth in the plan that’s adopted and figure out what specific actions can different departments take to meet those goals.”
Davison said the committee has been meeting monthly since February. Each meeting is led by a different department, where they outline the goals and ideas they have that their department can undertake.
Davison reported from each department with their current goals and recent accomplishments.
Cultural arts
Davison said at places like Uptown and the Connie Link Amphitheater, single-use water bottles are plentiful. At large events and meeting places, the department would like to see them eliminated.
“It’s very specific, but it’s also a very high-profile item that we have at a lot of our events, especially when you think about all the events in Uptown and at Connie Link most of them are happening at the hottest part of the year,” she said. “And people need to drink water, that’s super important.”
Davison said the town will have a higher promotion of its WaterMonster tanks, large water reservoirs available to the public at large during events, and facilities will install a water bottle filling station at Connie Link.
“We’ve got hundreds of youth that go through Connie Link every summer and they’re hot … if they can fill up their water bottles at a filling station, it’ll be really great for them,” she said.
Davison said other accomplishments include an energy-efficient laser project at the Normal Theater and LED lights at Connie Link.
Inspections and facilities
Davison said the Inspections and Facilities area is highly qualified and already incredibly sustainable, which they would like to see shared among other staff.
“Although we are all doing fairly sustainable things during the workday, we don’t necessarily talk about it. We don’t celebrate our wins, and we don’t talk about where we might be missing the mark,” she said. “And one of those things is the water bottle filling stations that we have throughout the town at all our facilities. We went and added up how many bottles we avoided since we’ve installed them — it’s more than 370,000 bottles.”
She said Facilities is also certified through the CIMS program, the Cleaning Industry Management Standard for green buildings. She said they continually replace and update town infrastructure to be energy efficient, like replacing every light in Normal’s parking decks with LED lights.
Parks and Recreation
Davison said the Parks and Recreation department is one of the most visible because it regularly maintain the town’s land.
“Their goals coming up in the next year are to expand tree planting … they’re hoping to plant two trees for every one that’s removed,” said Davison. “They’re also looking at maintaining trees differently, because we can’t just plant more trees. We have to maintain the ones we have … they’ll be looking at trying to prune up 15 to 20% of our tree inventory every year.”
Parks and Recreation also is continuing to move all annual planter beds to perennials which would house native plants. For their recent wins, the department has already moved to native planting at Connie Link and Normandy Village apartments.
“It’s great for pollinators, it’s great for birds and really great for people. It’s a really calm and relaxing place,” she said, referring to Connie Link.
Planning and Zoning
As for her own department, Davison said Planning and Zoning is working on renewing the town’s bike-friendly community status and starting a partnership with Bird City Illinois after Normal was named the newest Bird City in the state at Monday's council meeting.
“We’ll be collaborating with other departments on Bird City activities,” she said. “Recent wins for us include the application for Bird City Illinois.”
Bird City Illinois works with communities around the state to implement bird conservation practices which include enhancing the environment for birds and educating the public about the relationship between birds and people. Initiatives include reducing light pollution and promoting native plants.
Davison also said the department had great success working with Ride Illinois to complete a bicycle training program.
“It’s very hard to get volunteers to give up two days of their life to be trained to be high-level bike educators,” she said. “But we did it here and so now we have Tessa Ferraro on staff whose a certified instructor. Along with four people who lie in Bloomington-Normal who can help us with all of our bicycle education activities, which is great because we work with a lot of kids.”
Davison said the department also helped Illinois State University obtain its bike-friendly university designation.
Other departments working in the sustainability plan include the Normal Public Library, Public Works and Engineering, and the water department.
