I’m writing in response to Linda Butler’s July 7 guest column (“How lucky we are to have CAPA”) in which she repeats a poker game rumor: city teachers fired to fund CAPA (Department of Climate Action and Project Administration). Later, the writer expresses distress about the spread of disinformation — “disinformation infecting local discussions of city services.”
There’s something disingenuous about using ridiculous poker game banter as the basis for an op-ed to justify the existence of CAPA and to take the “frustrated” community around the school budget to task for “spreading such stories.” If a city, our city, is thought of as a living organism, then city government, including all of its offices and advisory boards, is responsible for supporting “life” within the city. It is responsible for keeping the city — the infrastructure, sidewalks and streets, public schools, parks and conservation areas, the local businesses as well as the the community of people and our institutions — healthy.
In order to meet this huge responsibility, urban planners from Jane Jacobs to more modern practitioners urge city planners to focus on “real life” rather than top-down flash that might look good but does nothing to honestly sustain the city or contribute to its livability. What most people, are looking for in a place, is “… pretty mundane,” according to writer Nicholas Lemann, “… a neighborhood, a patch of ground, a measure of peace and security, a family, status, dignity.”
It isn’t clear why Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra agreed to establish CAPA when we have a well-staffed planning and sustainability office whose mission is to: Identify and implement community vision for a sustainable and resilient future with a healthy and equitable economy and environment. It’s unsettling that after six months CAPA lost a highly experienced director who was the decade-long director of the Department of Energy and Sustainability in Greenfield. I don’t know her replacement, Benjamin Weil, or his qualifications aside from what the Gazette reported — that he taught courses on energy efficient buildings at UMass. But on the surface, his range of experience seems much less than his predecessor, and I’m wary of an appointment that highlights the candidate’s support for the mayor’s primary trophy project, Picture Main Street .
All this said, let’s get the city back to fulfilling the very basics, and there are many that need serious attention. In light of that, do we really need CAPA? Isn’t or shouldn’t it be the job of every department and board in the city, and of every concerned citizen and organization to be concerned about the changing climate, to take it into consideration and take action in whatever work they do? Let’s create a budget for “real life.” Let’s take care of the basics.
Claudia Lefko lives in Northampton.