Sustainable Jersey Urban Suburban Rural Caucus 

We would like to invite you to play a leadership role in helping us improve the Sustainable Jersey program. As you know, we have been talking about the need to better refine the actions and the program to be relevant to different types of municipalities or portions; namely urban, suburban, and rural communities.

We would like to convene three caucus groups to review existing actions and their applicability to three basic typologies of urban, suburban and rural.   We would like to invite one or two members of your green team to participate in the caucus meeting to be held on October 17, 2013 in Plainsboro, NJ. This  meeting will be to identify key issues, and provide guidance to the staff and Task Forces. The purpose of the exercise is to develop better and more focused actions and certification standards, and to provide better guidance to municipalities as they determine which actions to pursue and how to implement them.

Complete Streets is a good example of the issue. Many people view Complete Streets as only an urban or suburban action. Yet it is applicable to all three typologies but its implementation changes with the context. In a rural context Complete Streets might be planning for pedestrian and bicycle connectivity both on the rural roads and with off road trails, providing for pedestrian opportunities in the villages and hamlets or providing signage to support sharing the road with bicycles and pedestrian in areas of high usage where the road bed and shoulders are narrow. Currently our actions do not provide this level of guidance.

Please register if you are able to attend.