Greetings Folks,
Wow ! September went by fast !
Hoping you can set aside some time on Saturday, October 6th from 3-4:45 to meet together for the next Restoration and Resilience Council. We will be meeting again at the Ojai Library meeting room behind Twice Told Tales.
Ben Werner, the author of the Sustainable Living Research Initiative (SLRI) will be joining us at the Council this month to give us an overview of his initiative, designed to provide a framework for permitting sustainable project designs and climate resilient materials that can demonstrate equivalent performance standards to the traditional designs currently being permitted.
The purpose of the SLRI is to support the creation of pilot housing and land use projects that demonstrate sustainability, in terms of environmental impacts, and in terms of community impacts. Although green building standards continue to improve worldwide, building, zoning, and environmental health codes have evolved incrementally over the past century.
The SLRI is intended as a safe, secure pathway to permit innovative, performance-based projects by providing clear guidelines and authority for local building officials to permit such projects.
As the City of Ojai moves toward updating its own General Plan in the near future, strategies to revise our City permitting processes to include innovative, sustainable and fire resilient designs should be at the top of the agenda…Ben Werner has an excellent template we may want to build on.