Meeting Notes: May 15, 2008

Thursday's meeting of the Task Force on Sustainability was devoted mostly to exploring ways to encourage carpooling at the Center. We also welcomed Elba and Kari to the team.

The meeting was spurred by Elba's concerns about carpooling and finding ways to reduce personal commuting. Here is the result of our discussion. We decided to adopt a six-pronged strategy to encourage carpooling. The people whose names appear in parentheses have volunteered to take on the various tasks described.

We will do the following:

1. Develop a carpooling signup list on PAW (Erin)
2. Work toward instituting Friday as carpooling day (Mark)
3. Ask directors to allow employees to have flexible working hours so that they can more easily carpool (Mark)
4. Encourage the use of local transport, including the Calabasas trolley (Elba)
5. Look into establishing a carpooling parking space (Mark)
6. Investigate options for telecommuting, perhaps one day per week to encourage reduction in carbon emissions. Each department would be asked to submit its plan for either telecommuting or a short week/longer daily hours plan (Kari)

At Elba's suggestion, we agreed to post on the bulletin board our notes from each meeting as a way of making our work more readily available to Center staff.

Also, Natale will develop a plan to gradually eliminate plastic silverware, etc., from the lunchroom and replace with more permanent flatware in an effort to reduce waste.

All of these efforts will be communicated to staff in an upcoming email, to be written by Mark and shared with the entire task force before transmittal.