Agenda - 10-07-2008- 7b - Laserfiche WebLink

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Page 3 of 4 165 7) Requiring Energy-Efficient, high-]Performance Buildings. The Comprehensive Plan must ensure that new construction and renovations result in energy-efficient, high-performance buildings. Abundant resources are available that would provide starting points and guidance for the County in this effort. Orange County should lead the state, as it has in the past with other critical environmental issues, in modeling codes and ordinances that will reduce the impacts of new growth and per-capita resource needs when it is most efficient to do so: at the time of construction or rehabilitation. The housing, commercial, industrial, and institutional development envisioned by the Plan will be around long into the future. Let's make it worth keeping anal maintaining. On a procedural note, we encourage the Board of Commissioners to ask each Element-lead advisory board to submit comments by July 9 to the Planning Board for their consideration as they continue to refine the Comprehensive Plan this summer. Regarding stakeholder participation generally, we also request that the County advise the people and organizations who have generously volunteered their time to understand the Plan and the planning process how their comments have been and will be taken into account in the final drafts of the Comprehensive Plan and subsequent implementation planning phases. In conclusion, we return to the topic of sustainability. One final comment on the Plan illustrates a tension we have long noted in the County and would lilte to see resolved through the Comprehensive Plan: The term "carrying capacity" is a useful concept in population ecology, but in a planning document at the County scale, "carrying capacity" is a dubious and misleading notion. In order to analyze "carrying capacity," the analyst must define the boundaries of the system. For animals, this involves looking at foraging, habitat,. migration patterns, etc. The concept of carrying capacity is highly problematic when applied to I'[TTMAN populations. Human populations and developed nations in particular 1) exploit the resources of the ENTIRE planet, and 2) affect the ENTIRE planet with their waste (pollution). Until this is no longer the case, using the concept of carrying capacity -particularly for relatively small areas such as a county - to "analyze" the number of humans an area can support is arbitrary and erroneous. The most prudent course of action is to use the resources we have as efficiently as possible. As residents of one of the wealthiest nations in the world, we have not met this challenge adequately. If Orange County were to maximize the efficiency with which it uses its resources and to find ways to recycle•our waste, additional population could easily be accommodated in the county without additional environmental impacts. It simply depends on the choices we make. As a society, we are trying to bring about a major shift in how we live. Unfortunately, we are late. It is incumbent upon all of us, and governments in particular, to do everything in our power as humans to live in ways that tread very lightly on our beleaguered planet. There is much work to do, but we see the potential of the Orange County Comprehensive Plan to make a positive difference for people and for the environment. Sincerely, James Carnahan, Chairman, 6/6/2008