Is Rocky Anderson the Country's Greenest Mayor?

The following conversation with Rocky Anderson is an excerpt from the new book Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots (PoliPointPress, 2007) by Kevin Danaher, Shannon Biggs, and Jason Mark. You can read more about the book here.

Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson is the mayor of Salt Lake City (SLC). He received a B.S. degree from the University of Utah and obtained his law degree from George Washington University. For twenty-one years, he worked as an attorney specializing in civil litigation. He also worked as a community volunteer, serving on the boards of several community-based nonprofit organizations. Anderson took office as Salt Lake City's mayor on January 3, 2000. He has initiated many innovative green policies in his city, and has been a leader in getting other city governments to adopt sustainability policies. He has also been a prominent voice calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush.

Q: Given that our book is titled Building the Green Economy, what are the green accomplishments in Salt Lake City you are most proud of?

Rocky Anderson: We focus on sustainability in everything we do. In our budgeting, in our day-to-day city operations, in planning for the future, in what we do with the local business community, in what we do with local residents, and even with our tourists. We started with our municipal operations. Just before the winter Olympic Games in 2002, I made a commitment that we would at least meet the Kyoto goals in our municipal operations. Kyoto uses 1990 as the base year for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, with a target year of 2012. We didn't have adequate data for that, so instead of saying 7 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the 1990 level, we increased it to 21 percent from 2001. Nationwide, there was about a 13 or 14 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions during that period. The pledge was a 21 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2012. We reduced our emissions by 31 percent and we did it in just three years.

Q: How did you do that? Was it mainly city vehicles?

RA: It was across the board. It was changes in our fleet. I got rid of a number of SUVs; that made a huge difference. We downsized our fleet everywhere we could. We used to have sedans that did traffic enforcement. Now we have these little three-wheeled vehicles that use one-eighth as much gasoline. We even use electric chariots: little vehicles that run on electricity and take the place of an automobile. If we didn't need large four-wheel-drive vehicles, we got rid of them and put smaller vehicles in their place. At the same time, we are utilizing alternative fuels whenever we can.

We have 89 compressed-natural-gas vehicles in our fleet right now. My personal car is a CNG Honda Civic. I think that's really important in this region. We have the second largest number of natural gas outlets in the country in Utah. So it's very convenient. It costs about one-third as much for natural gas as regular gasoline at the pumps. It's all domestically produced. When you run natural gas there are almost no criteria pollutants: the kinds of air pollutants that create the air quality problems that we have in this region. Although I don't think natural gas is the long-term solution, it's a very good interim solution. It's much better than running on regular gasoline.

We retrofitted the lighting in our city and county buildings. We got rid of the incandescent lights, and we have a lot of them because we've got these beautiful chandeliers throughout the building. We put in compact fluorescent bulbs. That means saving about $33,000 per year. Much less electricity has to come from dirty coal-burning power plants, which provide about 96 percent of the energy in this region. Then we used about $12,000 a year from that $33,000 savings to purchase wind power. We not only dramatically conserved the amount of electricity that we were using but then we also shifted over to clean renewable production of the energy we do use. Those two things alone-changing out the light bulbs and then utilizing some of the savings for the purchase of wind power-reduces global warming emissions by the equivalent of about 1,100 tons of carbon dioxide a year. Then we changed the bulbs in our traffic lights, and we now save about $50,000 a year because of the massive reductions in electricity.