Environment

Above: Some of the vacant buildings downtown set to be demolished this year.

Every week, East Lansing Info (ELi) sends one or more reporters to City Council to bring you a complete "Council Capsule."

Permit parking debate reaches some resolution: Tuesday night’s City Council meeting was again dominated by the issue of residential parking permits (RPP), the only item on the Business Agenda. See our special separate report on that.

Photo of Naomi Klein by Kourosh Keshiri courtesy www.naomiklein.org

Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein spoke the evening of April 4^th to a nearly full house in the Wharton Center’s Great Hall, on the Michigan State University campus. Before she came on stage, a giant screen behind the speaker’s podium announced her timely topic and ultimately hopeful thesis: “How climate change is going to change everything (for the worse—or the better).”

The Zika virus was raised as a concern during a discussion of mosquito abatement at last week’s City Council meeting. The virus is not expected to reach East Lansing this summer but the latest research shows an increased risk throughout the lower Midwest and southern New England.

Bicycle advocates in East Lansing are concerned that CATA’s plan for a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) does not include more and better provisions for bicycle use in the downtown East Lansing/Grand River Avenue corridor. But City Planning staff told Council last week that CATA it is doing what it can while being hampered by space and funding limitations.

Do you place bottles, cans or other recyclables in plastic bags before disposing them in your single-stream curbside recycling container? If so, it is likely that your recyclables are not actually getting recycled at all.

Curbside recycling materials picked up in East Lansing are combined with City of Lansing recycling items and hauled to ReCommunity’s Material Recover Facility in Ann Arbor. ReCommunity sorts the materials using a wide variety of manual and mechanical methods including vibrating screens, gusts of air, magnets and optical sorting.

Above: City Council congratulating and thanking new members of the East Lansing Police Department

Logistical update: All Council members were present at tonight’s meeting, including Mayor Mark Meadows, Mayor Pro Tem Ruth Beier, and members Erik Altmann, Shanna Draheim, and Susan Woods. Before the meeting’s official start, Meadows noted that Tuesday’s meeting was being recorded and broadcast via fixed-position cameras in accordance with Council’s new schedule and frequency of video recording meetings, as previously reported by ELi’s Coleen Moyerbrailean.