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City cashes in on green prizes
But city council still aiming for more improvements in sustainability

Simon Whitehouse
Northern News Services
Published Friday, April 20, 2012

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
It may be no secret but the city of Yellowknife has been piling up awards in recent years as government agencies and environment groups heap praise on being "sustainable." Being this far away from the main action down south, people would be right to wonder why we're being noticed.

Yellowknife was acclaimed three years in a row - 2008 to 2010 - as the most sustainable small city in Canada by Corporate Knights, a Canadian company that promotes business practices with an environmental conscience.

The first year's award was in large part a nod to the city's Smart Growth Redevelopment Plan, which set the course for a more sustainably organized city.

In 2009, Yellowknife scored again for being the only small city to have a LEED certified green-energy building with the federal Greenstone Building on Franklin Avenue.

A three-peat was scored the following year when Corporate Knights recognized the city's trail development network and the high rate of people walking to work.

"We won the award for Canada's most sustainable small city three times in a row, which no other city has won even twice," Mayor Gord Van Tighem is quick to point out, noting that he tries to keep these attributes in the minds of citizens.

"I keep trying to point out to people who live here that we are doing some amazing things here."

Similarly in 2011, Yellowknife was awarded a Sustainable Communities Award from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.

But with all these awards being handed out, what is it the city actually does to serve the public, and how does the city define its green bonafides. Talking to the mayor and city councillors, the principle of sustainability seems to comes down to managing assets and growth prospects while planning responsibly for future generations.

Coun. Mark Heyck notes there are different interpretations of "sustainability," often having to do with tying in economic, social and environmental factors to produce municipal policy.

"The definition I prefer of sustainability is meeting our needs today without compromising the needs of future generations," he said. At the same time, he notes it is always an ongoing process.

Both Heyck and Van Tighem point to the founding of the city as well. With Yellowknife having been reliant on non-renewable energy since its beginning, the direction of the city has to constantly be re-evaluated.

"The reason in Yellowknife that we look at sustainability is that Yellowknife is a community that's at the end of the road," said Van Tighem.

"There's no historic or geographic reason for us to exist. Therefore we have to manage our existence or we could end up being like a town in Saskatchwan where they straighten the highway that goes through town and the town shrivels up."

Van Tighem says other municipalities are paying attention to what the city is doing in developing a district energy system with hopes of extracting geothermal energy from the closed Con Mine.

Still there are other items that need to be addressed in the future. Among them are curbside recycling and encouraging higher participation in public transit, which was found to have a ridership rate of just one per cent.

Heyck said curbside recycling is something the city has been looking at for many years. With the recycling facility 1,500 km away in Edmonton, the questions on that file have to do with what residents are willing to pay.

"It is clearly going to be more expensive to collect and process and try to sell recyclables to offset some of the costs of those programs," said Heyck.

"In the last few years we have certainly improved on our record on the amount of waste being diverted away from the landfill."

As for transit, Coun. Paul Falvo says he would like to see Yellowknife have as clean and efficient a transportation system as possible.

"There is always more we could do," he said of Yellowknife's transit.

"A lot of people might not have another option to get to work other than driving either because they don't have terrific bus service or because it is just too far to walk. But I'd like to see changes to the transit system. It is just that so far, nobody - myself included - has been able to articulate how that should be."

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