Councillor Chris Harris

In Elizabeth Farrelly’s piece on the Surry Hills Neighbourhood centre (Quest for green, yet engaging, public building May 16, 2007) she tells us that striving for viridity in urban design is worthwhile.

But she also says we all need to become eco-heads because we ‘can’t trust government to find the green pastures and lead us there’.

She uses the Surry Hills Neighbourhood Centre to underline her point. But is she right?

It’s true we are living in an age where greenhouse gases are at levels rarely seen in the history of the world. However being an ‘eco-head’ is not that hard.

With 75 per cent of the world’s energy being used by cities we need to design our buildings in such a way that we don’t go on pumping water from a far away dam to flush the toilets and pump our sewage to a far away ocean outfall. By the way the electricity that we use to do all this pumping is provided by burning coal, and guess what? Coal contributes 33 per cent of our total greenhouse gas emissions.

So how do we fix this?

First up we take less water from our rivers so our farmers can do what they do best – provide us with food. How? We simply work out what the yearly rainfall is, how much water each building needs and install water tanks to meet that need. How hard is that? If there is a shortfall – say unexpectedly low rainfall - then dam water can be used as a back up. The dam of course, by not being drained for toilet flushing, is now full.

Secondly we treat and recycle our sewage and use that water to flush toilets - 70 per cent of a non-residential building’s needs - water gardens, circulate through cooling systems and eventually, when we get over the ‘yuk’ factor, drink it as does half the known world including London and Singapore. Read the rest of this entry »

The delays with the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre at Ultimo are not because of the inclusion of green initiatives (Pool Centre delayed till water a deeper shade of green SMH 22/5/07) but because of complex engineering problems. Nor will the addition of the Greens initiative to include an energy-saving, co-generation power partnership between the Powerhouse Museum and the pool hold anything up because this work can easily be done even after the pool is built.

On the Surry Hill Community Centre, the reason for the cost blow-out is because of the Lord Mayor’s mis-management of the project not the ‘ecologically sustainable features’. For example the cost of the water tank is less than $200,000 out of a budget of $19 million. The Surry Hills Community Centre still uses airconditioning, is still on mains water and sewerage using coal-fired electricity to pump dam water in and sewage out.This is not about the Lord Mayor’s ‘expensive green tastes’ it’s about expensive greenwash.

Chris Harris
Deputy Lord Mayor
City of Sydney 22 May 2007

(Letter to the editor, The Sydney Morning Herald, unpublished to date)

Sydneysiders will soon have an easy way to advertise a garage sale, lost pet, room for rent or a community meeting since council unanimously supported a Greens proposal to introduce 24-hour public access noticeboards across the city.

This might seem a small thing to some but now the ‘City of Villages’ will have an equivalent to village wells, places where people can make contact with others in their immediate community. For free.

The villages around our CBD suffer from a fractured local newspaper setup. In many areas, you might have to advertise your computer for sale in two or three different weekly publications to reach your surrounding community. This is costly and time-consuming. Read the rest of this entry »

Clover Moore on Monday night used her casting vote to approve the new Surry Hills Community Centre knowing it would be environmentally unsustainable and that the cost had blown out from $3.6 million to $19 million.

Of course, this long-awaited centre with its library and childcare centre will be a fine social asset for Surry Hills.

But this is the first major building project this council has started from scratch, in an era that recognises climate change as the greatest threat to our way of life.

And what do we get? An overspend of millions of dollars for a building that relies on mains water, pumps its sewage into the ocean and will cause over 400 tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution per year.

In contrast to the $19 million we are coughing up in Surry Hills, a far more sustainable building of similar size in Knox Street Double Bay cost under $9 million.

The floor space is the same, the height is the same, the demand for quality is the same, so why such a massive difference in cost? Read the rest of this entry »