Leading By Example: Baltimore's Progress Towards Adopting Smart Surfaces

Mark Conway is a Baltimore City Councilmember and Executive Vice-President at the Chesapeake Conservancy.

This interview is part of a series of blog posts highlighting prominent members of the Smart Surfaces Coalition team. The conversation below with Mark Conway checks in on Baltimore’s progress adopting Smart Surfaces following the Coalition’s Smart Surfaces for Baltimore report.

This interview was conducted by Ivy Moore (IM), Digital Media and Communications Intern at Smart Surfaces Coalition, with support from Amy Turner (AT), Senior Fellow for Cities Climate Law Initiative and an Associate Research Scholar at Columbia Law School.

IM: Why are Smart Surfaces important to Baltimore’s future?

MC: We know climate change is a huge problem, and we know it's not going away. Often when you look at some of the best ways to address climate change you're looking at forests, open space, and green space. In cities, we don't have very much of that opportunity, so thinking about better ways to leverage the services that we do have in a targeted way is important. In our cities we have tons of impervious surfaces and built infrastructure, and if we can think of ways to make sure that infrastructure serves us not only for shelter, but also in reducing the impact of heat and stormwater—we could save two birds with one stone.

IM: How can Smart Surfaces be implemented?

MC: I think that's really the trick—how do you create incentives? How do you change policy, how do you change the way people act to be more thoughtful and intentional about choices for surfaces for rooftops and roads? We're looking at policies, laws, housing codes, built infrastructure, and ways to fund this stuff going forward. I think as much as possible, making it easy to make these decisions more automatic, in many ways, simplifies the process and greases the skids. These are great ideas, and if we could snap our fingers and make them happen it would significantly change some of the impacts that we see within the city. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to stamp my finger to create a green roof. Incentivizing those things, making it easier for folks to navigate that process, are some of the things we're going to have to put in place to make it a reality.

IM: Can you walk us through your proposed bills?

 MC: I have a couple of bills out there and a couple of bills that I'm working on. I call it my climate package. The bills are all related to climate in different ways, and reduce the contribution that the city adds to the problem in a way that other cities can repeat. First, we put out a resolution that would explore what it would take to reduce our carbon footprint to zero by 2050. And then we put some teeth to it—we put forward an ordinance that would require the city government take that step by 2050 to go carbon neutral.

Looking back at our contribution to the problem, we realized that transportation infrastructure is a key part in that calculation. So we proposed an ordinance that required that the city would have to move to electric vehicles by 2040. It's a very achievable timeline. We're currently spending millions of dollars every year to buy new vehicles. We generally recycle our vehicles, sell them, or transition into other uses every seven to 10 years, so the bill would require that we've moved to fully EV by 2040.

The other bill is a cool roofs ordinance that would require that all new roofs that are being repaired up to 50% or beyond would have to be cool roofs. This includes reflective roofs, solar roofs, and green roofs. At the very least, a reflective roof can be painted white, or used with lighter colored materials. That costs builders almost nothing. Looking at taking it a step further, if we can create energy that gets us off of fossil fuels and reduces our carbon footprint further, it adds an additional benefit. Or if we're looking at green roofs, which have an impact on stormwater in Baltimore, it adds that additional benefit as well.

We also have a couple other bills that we've yet to introduce. One is a resolution talking about the urban heat island effect, which impacts different neighborhoods disproportionately. Our poor neighborhoods with fewer trees are also the neighborhoods that have the least ability to respond to heat. It's really problematic when you go through a neighborhood and there are no trees, no parks, and residents can't afford the energy in their homes. Thinking of ways to address those issues are going to be key toward our solutions going forward. Smart Surfaces can really help us out there as well.

Last but not least, one of the things that we are pulling together now and looking at some of the other best practices across the state is creating a resilience authority. We have the idea, but do we have the money to actually execute, and the resilience authority is intended to do that.

IM: What has the general response been from the public, colleagues, and other council members after proposing your ideas?

MC: So far it's been great. We have almost a brand new council completely, and a much younger council than we've had in previous years, which means folks that are going to be here to deal with all the impacts of climate change. Folks like myself that have children that will be dealing with the impacts of climate change. I think folks are not ignoring the problem and really thinking strategically about how we can address these problems. So, it's been received very well.

AT: How do Smart Surfaces play into Baltimore’s larger climate plans?

MC: Every rooftop is an opportunity, every road is an opportunity, and every sidewalk is an opportunity. If we're not thinking about the benefits that we could give or gain by slightly tweaking some of our approaches to those surfaces, we're losing that opportunity. So Smart Surfaces are smart for exactly that reason. A couple of weeks ago, we had cars floating down the road, quite literally. And this is happening across the country. In Baltimore, we can begin to figure out how to integrate these strategies and opportunities to really rethink some of our services into our plan for managing stormwater, for managing heat, for managing energy, energy usage, energy creation—it's almost a no brainer. If we can change the way we think about these spaces going forward, I really think we can do so in a cost effective way.

AT: A couple of the bills that you’re planning to introduce identify equity issues as central to Baltimore’s climate work. Why is this?

MC: Before I joined the Baltimore City Council I ran a nonprofit planting trees in Baltimore that focused on low-income communities. Trees have an impact on the urban heat island effect.  One study I did a number of years ago with that organization showed that well treed neighborhoods and especially parks, were to the tune of 10 to 14 degrees cooler during the summer than those neighborhoods that did not have trees and parks in green space. Shade goes a long way in reducing energy costs. Now, the interesting thing is, you've got wealthier neighborhoods that have more shade and they're essentially getting a discount on their energy usage because they use less energy. Whereas low income communities that don't have as many trees now spend more on energy even though they may have smaller homes, because they don't have the benefit of trees, parks, and open space to provide shade. This is an equity problem, and until we start to think about it that way we're going to continue to make the same mistakes of building and not thinking about how to build efficiently and effectively to address some of these issues.

We can take a number of approaches. We can provide subsidies for energy, we can think of ways to reduce the cost, but it builds into its own problem if we're not thinking about the long term impacts, so I think we need to do both. We need to be thinking strategically about our neighborhoods and planning for some of these energy costs going forward. Ultimately, what we find is where the greatest need is for heat and stormwater concerns are often in the communities that have the least ability to pay for those costs.

AT: What does Smart Surfaces and climate action mean to you, personally?

MC: climate change is what brought me to environmental issues to begin with. A long time ago in college I wouldn't say that I was much of an environmentalist, but in realizing the imminent threat that has existed over the last two decades—seeing the change that we've had in our world and our cities, in our communities, how it affects people every day. There's an overwhelming urgency to the problem that I wanted to be a part of. And then I had kids and you realize I'm going to be handing this problem to them. The meaning for this work now is that much more important, because they [kids] don't have a decision on whether or not a roof is reflective, or a sidewalk or parking lot is pervious or impervious, they don't get to make those decisions. They have no idea that those decisions will have an impact on the world that they're dealing with when they're my age. Hopefully my 3-year-old is not dealing with the same issues in the same capacity that we are now and hopefully there's a much brighter prospect for our world. But it starts with the decisions we make right now.