Mean Green Pegeen

However, on the matter of image, it's fair to say that humans are naturally drawn to people who share characteristics with themselves. If your state's legislature is full of people who wear Birkenstocks and T-shirts, then by all means, dress like that. But if your legislature is full of people wearing business suits or cowboy hats and boots, then you're handicapping yourself the minute you walk in the door, almost like wearing a big sign that says, "You and I don't have much in common: My values are not your values." To me, if environmentalists really want to change public policy, then we need to:

Frankly, some of us would rather be on our high horse than win. That's a big, selfish sellout for the environment if you ask me. If our issues are that important, then we need to get our act together and do what it takes to create change. It's true that under fortunate circumstances we can change policy through citizen activation: writing, calling, emailing, and showing up. But for every one time that happens, there are 100 times that policies are quietly changed behind the scenes by those in the know (which, for the record, ain't us!).

Most social and environmental activists think elected officials are going to do things for purely altruistic reasons, because "it's the right thing." The problem with that perspective is that with very few exceptions, the person on the other side of your issue is making an equally appealing argument, and also helping the decision maker raise campaign donations, find volunteers, put out press releases, and attend the best social events in the capital. You can't compete with all that with nothing more than your version of the truth on your side. For example:

You say: Passing that bill will pollute our air.

They say: Passing that bill will provide jobs with benefits, reduce poverty, and still protect the air. Oh, did you like that new volunteer I sent over to your campaign headquarters?

See the difference?

I know that most people reading this are saying, "Well, that's ridiculous." Frankly, I agree. But that's how it works. Note that campaign finance reform might help, but not altogether: No one would ban volunteers, or information exchange, or social contacts, which mean as much as cash. It takes a huge amount of time and money to get elected to public office. If you're not helping, or are even hurting the official you're seeking to influence, then you're at a strategic disadvantage relative to those who do this well and care enough about their issue or their paycheck to prioritize actually being effective.

To me, the best solution to bad growth is to get better people elected to office. Here's why:

The elected officials appoint the planning commissioners, set transportation priorities, and approve or deny development requests. It's hard enough to get decent elected officials to do the right thing, much less bad ones (see more on this issue below). The only hope for stemming the tide of sprawl and "anywhere U.S.A." schlock is to adopt strong regulations for growth management and land development, both at the state and local level.

One of the difficulties of obtaining good local standards is that state legislatures normally dictate the basic framework for planning and transportation funding. Due to the influence of money in politics, local officials and state legislatures are typically heavily skewed toward builders, developers, and landowners, over citizen activists or environmentalists.

The toughest part is to find candidates who are both willing and able. Usually the willing aren't able, and the able aren't willing. But once you have a viable candidate, the rest is comparatively easy. The thing that's most difficult to overcome is the gap in what a grassroots candidate can easily raise in comparison to a corporate candidate. Fortunately, though, groups like MoveOn.org and candidates like Howard Dean are showing us that a larger number of smaller donations can be just as powerful as the opposite.

It's important to remember that no matter how great a single politician may be, he or she needs allies to actually get anything done. When people ask what it takes to get something passed on the seven-member City Commission, the answer's simple: a motion, a second, and two more votes. If your legislature has 120 members, you need 61 who'll vote the right way.

That said, it's hard sometimes to know exactly what it means to vote the right way. While I'm a big believer in new urbanism, quality infill, and historic preservation as antidotes to sprawl, it seems to me that few developers in our area have actually figured out how to do these things well. It's also important to remember that most Americans really don't prioritize environment protection over, say, green lawns, cheap power, and free-flowing traffic. That's why it's important to both continually educate the public and look for opportunities to build alliances with people whose primary issues may be different from your own. Even great environmentalists have to be able to appeal to voters in other ways.

My given name is Margaret Evyleen Hanrahan. Most people called "Peggy" are actually named Margaret. In Ireland, "Pegeen" is also a nickname for Margaret. My parents gave me my full name intending to call me "Pegeen," taking the "Peg" from Margaret (my paternal Aunt's name) and the "-een" from Evyleen (my maternal grandmother's name). You do see the name around occasionally. There's an old Rosalind Russell movie called Auntie Mame that has a character named Pegeen in it. There's a child's book named Pegeen, and a character in Playboy of the Western World named Pegeen. There's a fancy children's clothes shop at Pegeen.com, and there was a famous New York Radio personality named Pegeen Fitzgerald.

Of all my names, Evyleen is my favorite, but when I wanted to call myself that as a child, my grandmother said, "Everyone deserves their own name, and that one's mine." She was a great lady who emigrated from Ireland shortly after the Irish Revolution. She was a bit of a revolutionary herself, and would say things to me like, "You haven't seen real pain 'til you've seen the blood of your brothers running in the streets." That would tend to shut me up from making further complaints.

When I first decided to run for office, I called the chair of the local Democratic Party and she said, "Oh, Pegeen, this is great, this is wonderful, now we have a problem with your name." But I think it's more a help than a hindrance in politics. The good thing about having a strange name is that once people learn it, they don't normally forget it.

Betty Castor is helped by the fact that she has been elected statewide in the past (as secretary of education) and has strong ties across the state. In addition, I generally think it is an advantage to be a woman in politics, as women are a larger part of the voting population and tend to favor women candidates. Also, it's tougher to attack a woman in an election (not that Mel isn't trying, and even enlisting Jeb Bush for this purpose).

On the other hand, Martinez has the advantage of being Cuban. Democrats running statewide depend on the fact that most non-Cuban Hispanics vote Democratic, but are thought to be attracted to a Hispanic candidate, so if Betty loses those crossover voters she'll have to make it up among Republican women.

It's true that Martinez is being helped by the Rove/Bush machine, but Betty Castor is one of the key candidates of Emily's List, which is one of the nation's largest and most competent political action committees. Emily's List not only has helped Castor keep up money-wise, it also has an army of volunteers and outstanding political strategy.

One other strike against Martinez is that he ran an extremely vicious Republican primary against Bill McCollum, a quite conservative but also very decent former congressman. His attacks called McCollum "the new darling of homosexual extremists" because he had supported a hate crimes bill in Congress. It was so bad that the St. Petersburg Times actually withdrew their endorsement of Martinez. Ouch! All this makes it rather tough for Martinez to reach out to moderate Republicans and swing voters.

On a local note, the City of Gainesville had a terrible problem with Housing and Urban Development under Martinez's leadership. Kennedy Homes, a federally funded housing complex, had severe maintenance problems to the point that the units had become dangerous for residents. The city worked hard to try to get Martinez's attention and commitment to solve the problems, writing letters and leaving numerous messages, even via our Republican congressman and U.S. senators. The situation was never effectively resolved. When local African-American leaders recently held a press conference to raise awareness of Martinez's inaction, he again pled ignorance of the problem. Either his office was extremely incompetent, or he's just not telling the truth. I don't know which it is, but either way it's unacceptable.

Regarding your question on the impact of this election on the environment, again, you could look at it in a few different ways. In Congress, most Democrats have better voting records on the environment than most Republicans. There are of course exceptions, but I'd doubt that Martinez would be among them, as his expressed positions to date closely mimic those of the Bush administration. On the other hand, when he was an elected official in Orange County (Orlando), he led the fight to limit growth in areas with inadequate schools. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but it was well received at the time, as developers generally control the agenda in that part of Florida. It is also worth sharing that Jeb Bush is far better on the environment than his brother. He supports land conservation, restoration of the Ocklawaha River, and the Everglades project. Most politicians who run statewide in Florida, regardless of party, realize that they need to at least appear to be environmentally friendly. Castor actually is environmentally friendly. In fact, her start in public life was as a member of a grassroots organization working to clean up Tampa Bay.

Interestingly enough, one of the first public officials in Florida who advocated addressing global warming was U.S. Senator Bill Nelson. I first met him more than 10 years ago, when he was the state's insurance commissioner. After Hurricane Andrew hit Miami and destabilized our insurance industry, Nelson took a real interest in the correlations you reference.

Bernie Machen, our new university president, is very focused on working more closely with the community. In addition to the quality of life issues mentioned above, a university is also a huge economic engine that can lead to new start-up businesses. Our substantial medical, engineering, business, and agricultural programs have great and growing potential for technology transfer and job creation.

President Machen is well aware that the faculty, staff, and students that come to UF are choosing between Gainesville and cities like Chapel Hill, Madison, Austin, and Ann Arbor. A great university needs a great university city. We get that, and are doing everything we can to live up to the challenge. UF has a constituency and a support base that go well beyond Gainesville, though, and we do have to understand that.

You're right that most students care a great deal about the environment, but are also focused on getting through school and getting out. There are some good groups on campus that focus on environmental issues, and many that do various types of charitable work. I think it's important to do a lot of outreach to student organizations, and I seem to speak on campus at least once a week.

The local Sierra Club chapter, which covers a several county area, has about 900 members. There's also a strong Audubon chapter, focused mostly on bird watching. The statewide groups located in Gainesville are Florida Defenders of the Environment, which is focused on restoration of the Ocklawaha River, the Caribbean Conservation Corps, which does sea-turtle research, and the Florida Conservation Alliance, which is affiliated with the Federation of State Conservation Voter Leagues. There are a few staffed local organizations, such as Alachua Conservation Trust, the Conservation Trust for Florida, Sustainable Alachua County and Florida Wildlife Care. There's also an effective political action committee called Women for Wise Growth. Note that most of these groups have at most one or two staffers. The best jobs for environmentalists here are not in nonprofit organizations, but in local or regional government (city, county, regional planning council, or water management districts), or in environmentally aware consulting firms, of which there are several.

We have a few renewable-energy initiatives, including some solar demonstration projects at schools, and capturing of the methane gas at our closed landfill as an energy source. Our city utility also promotes purchase of green energy from other generators (from windmills, for example). Customers can make a voluntary donation toward this effort. This year we're adopting a number of new conservation programs, and are considering using biomass as part of the fuel mix in the new generating capacity being planned. Our utility is primarily pushing use of clean coal technology, because of cost and fuel availability considerations. We're holding meetings on Nov. 1 and 15 to weigh the pros and cons on this. The newer air-pollution control technology will reduce most contaminant levels, with the notable exception of carbon dioxide. I'm not convinced yet that this is the way to go, and have suggested pulling together an objective expert panel to give advice on all the possible alternatives. This is a classic economics vs. environment issue. Natural gas is far cleaner (and is the fuel source we used when we re-powered our peaking plant a few years ago, which I was an advocate for), but is also far more expensive.

We do have a reasonably good recycling program. Our curbside collection picks up aluminum, glass, plastic, newspaper, magazines, and cardboard. There are local outlets that collect white paper, Styrofoam, and plastic and paper bags. We also have mandatory commercial recycling, but could use a better-funded enforcement program.

Gainesville covers about 54 square miles, roughly 5 percent of the land mass of Alachua County, but over 50 percent of the residents and over 60 percent of the jobs are in the city limits. The sprawl is mostly in the unincorporated area outside the city, so our primary efforts toward sprawl control are to work toward increasing quality of life in the city, encouraging infill that restores urban areas, and funneling transportation funding toward projects that enhance transit and human-scaled roads in already built areas, rather than oversized roads to nowhere. Alachua County's comprehensive plan is probably better than most in Florida, but still allows too much suburban growth in areas that are and should be high-quality agricultural and natural areas. Our best hope is to try to insure that the true costs of that growth are covered up front and not subsidized, that we buy as much public land as we can afford, and encourage voluntary clustering and agricultural conservation easements.

It is also worth noting that most families choose where to live based on school districts, so it's important to try to make sure that the best schools are in the urban areas, not the far-flung suburbs. Fortunately, our school board has been visionary in placing the most prestigious magnet programs in otherwise underprivileged schools. While this hasn't changed the development patterns per se, it probably has kept those schools from falling into decline.