Passing a Community Benefits Agreement in St. Pete - a Pathway to Housing for a Better Climate

 The following blog post and project were created by Will Shedden:

The City Council of St. Petersburg is currently in intense conversation over whether or not to apply a CBA (Community Benefits Agreement Policy) to new developments in the city that receive city funding. Part of this Community Benefits Agreement would require developers to take steps that mitigate climate change, as well as prepare for sea level rise. Unfortunately, those requirements are currently lax. For the last few months, I’ve been working with the Suncoast Sierra Club and partner organizations to convince the council to pass a plan that creates a more equitable and sustainable St. Pete.

    At first glance, the CBA does not directly connect to climate change as a whole. Mostly, the document deals with labor requirements and contractor hiring requirements. There are a few loose, weak environmental regulations tied to future developments to be sure. But nothing stringent. However, the space exists for this to be a transformational document that shifts the fabric of what could be required for large developments in the future. For instance, the Tropicana Field site – 86 acres in Downtown St. Pete could be affected by the CBA. If it is, and if we were able to change the ‘maybe’ requirement of LEED Silver to a ‘definitely’ requirement of LEED platinum, it would have an enormous effect on emissions – apply that standard to all large development in the city, and it would be huge.

    While my work has gone on for a while and has taken many different shapes, the specific action for this project is a message (email) to city council members from various Eckerd student leaders. The message, found below, is intentionally “vague but supportive” for strategic reasons and reasons we’ve discussed in class. First, an overly technical ask, or even specific ask, is less likely to succeed at this stage in the process. As we’ve discussed, communicating overly scientific language to policy makers and lay-people alike can backfire easily. Rather, the message sticks to a general theme that as Eckerd students, they want to see as young people solutions that will keep St. Pete livable moving forward. Stoknes discusses this in What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming, when he talks about the effect of group behavior on the individual. Stoknes initially discusses examples like a hotel placing a sign explaining most guests tried to reuse towels – and towel reuse went up as a result. Especially at the local level, messaging directly to office holders can have a similar effect. When council members get a flood of messages, or a message from 20-odd student leaders, they pay more attention than they would a single message.

Additionally, the rhetoric in the piece does not stray into overly climate-specific language. As the piece by Alex Fox in The Hill points out, conservatives across the Gulf Coast are more than willing to address sea level rise as long as they don’t have to acknowledge climate change. Similar thinking applies here – the language represents pressure from students, but not language that will turn off some of the more conservative members of council.

St. Pete City Council,

We, the undersigned members of the Eckerd College community, urge you to quickly pass a Community Benefits Agreement policy that affects the entire city of St. Pete. A well-written CBA will make St. Pete a more equitable, livable and environmentally sound city.  As young people interested in the success of St. Pete, we are the future of the city. We believe that a CBA will help make the city more sustainable and livable for us. St. Pete is a city threatened by sea level rise, storm surge and increasing temperatures. By shifting the city’s thinking around what type of developments to prioritize, St. Pete can become more resilient. The CBA can be an important part of that.

Thank you so much!

To go with this message, I want to mention as well as some of the previous actions I’ve taken on the CBA prior to this project. Attached is a video of me speaking to Council back in early March, in slightly more specific terms than the above message, but still pretty general. Also attached is a PDF of the current environmental CBA requirements, highlighted in green. Another part of my work was to draft a list of changes that needed to be made to the CBA for it to be more effective in addressing environmental concerns – those changes were eventually used in part as talking points by councilmembers last month.

Overall, this one small email fits well into the overarching project of getting Council to eventually pass an environmentally friendly CBA policy. The project likely won’t be complete until late summer or fall, or even past the next election. Rest assured though; a variety of climate change communication techniques will be utilized to make sure it happens.

References:
Fox, A. (2020, January 21). Conservative states along the coast prepare for sea level rise without mentioning climate change. TheHill. https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-change/479244-conservative-states-along-the-coast-prepare.
Stoknes, P. E. (2015). What we think about when we try not to think about global warming: toward a new psychology of climate action. Chelsea Green Publishing.