By Councilmember Rochelle Swanson
April 14, 2012 (Washington DC) – Today has been a busy day of prep as the Sacramento Metro Chamber Capitol-to-Capitol trip gets into full swing. Most of the 300+ delegates arrived yesterday (Saturday) and represent cities, counties, big and small businesses, agencies, utilities, and community leadership from the 6-county Sacramento region.
The original Davis/Yolo County team has now been split up and joined the Cap-to-Cap teams of Innovation, Flood Protection, Jobs & Business Growth, Agriculture & Food, Health Care, Education, and Transportation, among others. So to start the day, we met in our respective new teams to go over the appointment schedule and determine leads for each appointment and pertinent topics based on our issues papers generated prior to the trip.
Some of the Davis/Yolo team were also fortunate enough to be invited on a White House Garden tour this morning that was arranged courtesy of Rep. Garamendi’s office. This tour was a great opportunity to do some team building while enjoying the grounds of the White House. Several of the team also attended a working brunch that included networking opportunities with regional leadership.
I attended a Leadership Steering Committee meeting this afternoon as part of my honorary co-chair duties. The meeting discussed objectives of the trip and discussed specific desired outcomes from the Metro Chamber leadership, including documenting follow-up on action items that will have come from the appointments over the next few days.
The evening activities started with a Chair’s Reception for the entire delegation, and the Davis/Yolo team used the time well and created many connections and opportunities for follow-up in the coming weeks with representatives across the region. We were able to talk with several staff of our region’s federal elected delegation and recently elected Rep. Ami Bera came to the reception to show his support for the regional effort. Some of the team also attended a networking dinner that was centered on the topics of health care and energy.
Tomorrow morning we will have policy briefings from DC-based experts in the areas of infrastructure financing, the future of health care, innovation, tax exempt municipal bonding, civic amenities, and basic & applied research. Then we are off to the Hill for meetings with senators, congress members, and agencies. I won’t list all of the appointments here as there are over 12 policy teams. Each team has a full schedule of appointments and they include appointments with our federal elected official as well as representatives that are on key committees for areas of interest to Davis and Yolo County.
In the afternoon, the Davis/Yolo team will come back together for meetings with the Sustainable Communities office of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the director of National Institute for Food and Agriculture. We will be talking about many topics including the SACOG RUCS initiative, conservation lands as research “living laboratories,” and the sustainability actions that Davis and Yolo County have worked hard to achieve.
It was a quiet day on twitter, but follow us tomorrow at #DavisinDC as well as the Cap-to-Cap official hashtag of #cap2cap13 to see more pictures and descriptions of our Davis and Yolo County reps efforts throughout the day.
Tomorrow starts the heavy work for the entire Metro Chamber Cap-to-Cap team. Will update you more then,
David… any word yet on how the costs for Davis electeds’, staff, was paid?
For information about this second part of the Washington DC initiative, the Metro Chamber’s region-wide Cap-to-Cap effort go to [url]http://metrochamber.org/Captocap[/url]. There you will be able to link to the Policy Team papers prepared by the following Policy Teams in preparation for the meetings in DC.
Agriculture and Food
Air Quality
Civic Amenities
Clean & Green Technology
Community Development
Flood Protection
Health Care
Homeland Security
Innovation
Jobs & Business Growth
Land Use & Natural Resources
Transportation
Water Resources
Workforce Development & Education
Here is a LINK ([url]”http://metrochamber.org/External/WCPages/WCWebContent/WebContentPage.aspx?ContentID=5155″[/url]) to the MetroChamber’s summary of the key points of these 14 Policy Teams.
To see where all of this is going, please see “One Bay Area” (citation below) where UN Agenda 21 is being played out in detail in advance of its implementation within the Central Valley.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYObnEScEEU
More about UN AGENDA 21 from democratsagainstunagenda21
The policies of UN Agenda 21 are woven into all the General Plans of the cities and counties, it’s important for people to know where these policies are coming from. While many people support the United Nations for its ‘peacemaking’ efforts, hardly anyone knows that they have very specific land use policies that they would like to see implemented in every city, county, state and nation. The specific plan is called United Nations Agenda 21 Sustainable Development, which has its basis in Communitarianism. By now, most Americans have heard of sustainable development but are largely unaware of Agenda 21.
In a nutshell, the plan calls for governments to take control of all land use and not leave any of the decision making in the hands of private property owners. It is assumed that people are not good stewards of their land and the government will do a better job if they are in control. Individual rights in general are to give way to the needs of communities as determined by the governing body. Moreover, people should be rounded up off the land and packed into human settlements, or islands of human habitation, close to employment centers and transportation. Another program, called the Wildlands Project spells out how most of the land is to be set aside for non-humans.
U.N. Agenda 21 cites the affluence of Americans as being a major problem which needs to be corrected. It calls for lowering the standard of living for Americans so that the people in poorer countries will have more, a redistribution of wealth. Although people around the world aspire to achieve the levels of prosperity we have in our country, and will risk their lives to get here, Americans are cast in a very negative light and need to be taken down to a condition closer to average in the world. Only then, they say, will there be social justice which is a cornerstone of the U.N. Agenda 21 plan.
You’re getting into conspiracy theory territory now.
Complete Web Address is:
http://www.DemocratsAgainstUNAgenda21.com
Sorry!
Steve, what evidence do you have that there is even a whiff of this at play in Davis or Yolo County?
Yolo County has a clearly stated goal of protecting and enabling its agricultural economy. How does that goal tie into U.N. Agenda 21?
Davis has passed Measure O and Measure J and Measure R. How do those voter decisions tie into U.N. Agenda 21?
Agenda 21: [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21[/url]
Voluntary, non-binding. But the Tea Party crowd is completely unhinged about it. And the Chamber event has nothing to do with it.
Interesting to see the conspiratorial wing of the far left aligning with the Tea Party on this.
Davis is listed as a participant in one of the implementation arms of UN Agenda 21, which see:
http://www.icleiusa.org/about-iclei/members/member-list
ICLEI (get used sorting out acronyms) is distributing 12 billion plus in free money this month to participants. Follow the money trail.
Very interesting Steve Hayes.
Excellent.
[url]http://www.icleiusa.org/about-iclei/faqs/faq-about-iclei-local-governments-for-sustainability#what-do-local-governments[/url]
Is there a problem with this?
By the way, further down on the page Steve copied text from we have this nugget: “[i]Bike groups are being used as the ‘shock troops’ for this plan.”[/i]
So, BikeDAVIS — we’re on to you now. You’re the shock troops for the UN!
Steve Hayes said . . .
[i]”Davis is listed as a participant in one of the implementation arms of UN Agenda 21, which see: [url]http://www.icleiusa.org/about-iclei/members/member-list [/url]
ICLEI (get used sorting out acronyms) is distributing 12 billion plus in free money this month to participants. Follow the money trail.”[/i]
Steve, do we have any sense of where/how the participation is happening? Looking at the website, I can easily imagine that the CoolDavis initiative would have resonance with the goals of ICLEI. UC Davis would seem to be logical as well. Rather than painting with a broad (and very negative) brush, can you please help us drill down into both 1) the specifics of Davis’ involvement so we know whether there actually is something to be concerned about, and 2) what the heck the acronym ICLEI stands for.
Matt: [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICLEI[/url]
Thanks Don. That answers 2). Hopefully Steve will answer 1).
ICLIE is an acronym for The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives. Today, (April 15, 2013) ICLEI will be distributing nearly $12 million in funding for state, local, and tribal governments from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Economic Development Administration (EDA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Funders’ Network that can be used to support climate and energy initiatives, including local agriculture, sustainable planning, and urban forestry. Follow the money.
.
“…that can be used to support climate and energy initiatives, including local agriculture, sustainable planning, and urban forestry.”
They distribute grant money? Again: I am not understanding why that would be negative in any way. Funding for local initiatives regarding climate, energy, ag, planning, and urban forestry is very useful to local governments. Please explain what you find so negative about all this.
Steve Hayes said . . .
[i]”ICLIE is an acronym for The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives. Today, (April 15, 2013) ICLEI will be distributing nearly $12 million in funding for state, local, and tribal governments from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Economic Development Administration (EDA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Funders’ Network that can be used to support climate and energy initiatives, including local agriculture, sustainable planning, and urban forestry. Follow the money.”[/i]
Steve are they as insidious as the pew Charitable Trusts or the Gates Foundation or the Turner Foundation? Follow the money.
In taking up the ICLIE gauntlet thrown down by Steve Hayes in this thread I reached out to Chris Granger of Cool Davis to get her take on ICLIE. Here is her response.
[quote]Climate change is real and an urgent matter and is not a conspiracy of the UN. Responsible, smart and good people are working every day in this community and all over the world to help us get out of this climate mess we have gotten ourselves into. Action to reverse green house gas emissions will improve our health, make our communities stronger, and reinvigorate our economy setting it on a sustainable path.
ICLEI is the preeminent organization and collaborative effort, working with Cities all over the country and world to move forward on green house gas reductions and adaptation strategies for cities. They are working in particular on setting standards for measuring green house gas reductions at the city level. They work with cities to promote very systematic approaches to focus on what works — so that we don’t reinvent the wheel, but instead learn from each other and make real green house gas reduction progress that we can both measure and talk about as a community. Researchers from all over the country including UC Davis and UC Berkeley and UCLA are working with ICLEI on setting these standards and identifying approaches for change in cities all over the country.
I was just recently at conference with ICLEI leaders and several of the cities that are functioning as working laboratories for ICLEI.
The ICLEI protocol for measuring green house gas emissions (which is being refined annually as we get better at it) is what we use to do our own green house gas inventory in Davis.
However Cool Davis goes beyond ICLEI to use a UC Berkeley model that looks at green house gases from a lifecycle perspective. That means that each person and each group of people is not just responsible for the emissions we produce here — cooling our houses or driving our cars, but also the emissions related to the creation of all we purchase and use. Thus the ghg emissions from coal that is burned in China to produce products we buy here is also our responsibility.[/quote]