Burbank City Council:

'Sustainability's #1'

Burbank's City Council chose to make sustainability the City's number one priority at its annual goal setting meeting held May 3, 2005. Each year the Council holds this meeting on the first Saturday in May to specifically choose the focus for the upcoming year free of the distractions of the regular business conducted on Tuesday nights. Traditionally, five priorities are chosen and ranked. Council members submitted their top five concerns. After combining similar ones, a vote was taken and sustainability came in first, having appeared on four members' lists to start with, it received a unanimous vote of five. Most interesting is that no Sierra Club or other overt lobbying led to this result. This is great news for the environmental movement. It means the concerns that must drive public policy to secure the long-term habitability of the planet for our and other species have become internalized by elected leaders and are just 'common sense', natural, not some mere lobbied-for outcome.