De Blasio Still Searching for Sustainability Chief

In 2007, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched PlaNYC, a broad environmental agenda to drive down greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by the year 2030. It called for more bike lanes, more street trees and 125 other measures intended to make the city more livable.

Bloomberg set up the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability to oversee the effort and staffed it with Ph.D.’s and other experts, earning accolades from editorial boards and academia.

By the time Bloomberg left office, emissions had fallen by 19 percent, two-thirds of the way to his goal.

But the last director of the office, Sergej Mahnovski, left in February. And Bloomberg’s successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, has yet to name a replacement more than 10 months into his term, raising questions about how aggressively the new mayor will be able to move on sustainability issues.

“It’s very clear that sustainability is part of his progressive ideology,” said Steve Cohen, the executive director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “So I’m not concerned that this is not something that he is interested in. But it’s very clear that he has higher priorities: income distribution, housing, poverty, certainly pre-K was.”

De Blasio’s top aides are interviewing candidates, Cohen said, and the new mayor has made a few environmental announcements, most significantly committing to reduce the city’s greenhouse gases even further, by 80 percent by the year 2050. (The Bloomberg administration had conducted a study on the notion and concluded it is “theoretically feasible but would require change at an unprecedented and technologically untested scale.”)    

Some environmental leaders said the lack of a director of the sustainability office at this late date in the mayor’s first term was a cause for concern. A once-every-four-year update to PlaNYC is due in the spring.

“The longer it takes to get somebody in place, the tighter that window of opportunity is going to be to come up with the kind of agency cooperation and inter-agency discussion to meet a bold plan,” said Eddie Bautista, the executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and a director of city legislative affairs under Mayor Bloomberg.

Interagency coordination may sound bureaucratic, but it is considered key in developing a city-wide agenda such as PlaNYC. Under Bloomberg, for example, PlaNYC prompted the parks department to work with the education department so that school playgrounds would be kept open after school and on weekends. That created hundreds of new recreation areas without having to buy any new land.

An acting director, Dan Zarrilli, is currently leading the PlaNYC effort, but he was also put in charge of the Office of Recovery and Resiliency, a new agency that de Blasio broke off from long-term planning and sustainability office to oversee post-Sandy efforts.   

A spokeswoman for the mayor, Amy Spitalnick, said that planning for the update is well underway and that Zarrilli and Bill Goldstein, a senior advisor, have been “extraordinarily successful.” She also noted other initiatives, such as proposing revisions to the clean air code and releasing a plan to make new and existing buildings more environmental friendly.

“This administration's environmental record speaks for itself — and will be even further expanded on in the upcoming PlaNYC update,” Spitalnick said in an e-mail. “It's a shame that some are choosing to fixate on fabricated issues, rather than on the actual policies that have been heralded by advocates and experts across the board."