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The Evanston Environment Board weighed in Thursday on the just-launched effort to revise the city’s comprehensive plan and zoning code, and got an update on ongoing efforts to reduce waste. But the board did not discuss another issue that was on many minds, but not on the agenda: efforts to ease the city’s ban on gas-powered leaf blowers.
On Monday night, after hearing complaints from several local landscapers, the city’s Human Services Committee directed staff to draw up a resolution to temporarily lift the gas leaf blower rule this spring.
At Thursday’s meeting, Environment Board co-chair Matt Cotter said that, by the time leaf blowers became a hot topic, the board’s February meeting agenda had already been posted. But the board received multiple public comments, mostly via email, in support of the existing ban.
Cotter added that the panel intends to take up the issue at its March 6 meeting.
Seeking Envision Evanston input
The Envision Evanston 2045 push involves adopting both a new comprehensive plan, the city’s first since 2000, and the first zoning code overhaul since 1993. Board members said Thursday that they hoped there would be extensive community outreach, even while some acknowledged that inevitably, there is always someone left out of the process.
Jon Brooke, an architect with HDR Consulting, one of the firms advising Evanston on the comprehensive plan, said the major goal is to reach residents who don’t usually come to public meetings. And another part of the outreach is to get feedback from all Evanston boards, committees and commissions. Brooke said that the Environmental Board will get monthly updates.
Board co-chair Michelle Redfield was among several members who said they wanted robust community engagement. “The thing I’m most optimistic about is the engagement process [that would] get the parts of the community that are not always easy to get to,” she said.
Council Member Jonathan Nieuwsma (4th Ward), said that, while he supported extensive outreach, it was important to acknowledge that it was impossible to reach everyone – citing the leaf blower controversy as an example.
“Inevitably, we’re not going to reach everybody that could be reached,” he said. “Case in point: leaf blowers. We did everything we could [when weighing the ban] to engage landscapers, particularly Hispanic/Latino-owned businesses. … It’s going to happen again.”
Reducing landfill waste
Later during the nearly 2½ hour meeting, Brian Zimmerman, the city’s solid waste coordinator, gave an update on efforts to reduce the amount of waste going into landfills. The city set a goal of diverting all of the waste citywide from landfills by 2050, with a more ambitious target for city departments: eliminating waste from municipal operations by 2030.
Zimmerman indicated that, while the intermediate goal is to divert 50% of the community waste by 2025, as of 2022, Evanston isn’t on track to meeting that figure – only 20% of the waste is diverted.
Zimmerman said his department has done extensive community outreach in 2023 on ideas to reduce landfill waste, engaging with residents, waste haulers and businesses, community groups and city and regional government entities. He said some of the major takeaways were that the city should provide incentives for recycling, support entrepreneurs developing innovative ways to reduce waste, and advocate for state and federal solutions to the issue, which extends far beyond city borders. Zimmerman noted that, for example, there is little Evanston can do about Amazon, since the e-commerce giant is outside its jurisdiction.
“Our hope is to have the final [Circular Evanston] road map in the end of summer,” he added. “We want to align it with the budget cycle.”
Environment Board talks zoning outreach, waste-reduction efforts is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.