Here in the District of Columbia Office of Policy and Sustainability, we have been continuing to work on the STAR Community Index, a new nationwide sustainability tracking program for local governments. Washington on DC is a number of pilot communities throughout the country.
Very similar to LEED, this program is designed to be a dynamic tool for identifying and eventually tracking and quantifying all aspects of community sustainability efforts, addressing multiple parameters within the three larger local government spheres of social economic and environmental components.
There are somewhere between 300 – 400 individual data entry points. At first the task was very daunting and even know many of the categories have embedded with them specific excel sheets for specific data tracking, it was necessary to create several very large excel databases of our own just to keep track of the status of each of the individual data entry points.
The program requires identifying and uploading many GIS maps, policies, working plan or budget, interagency MOUs, data tables and any number of other government documents. Identifying the correct one and accessing that requires interaction with a multitude of other agency points of contact, POIs. Our own excel sheets were necessary to record potential locational information of these above items inquiries sent to POIs, responses received, accuracy or completeness of data, and missing data for each data entry. In a city like Washington DC this involves massive amounts of research both very broadly across the city and the larger region and deeply within individual agency program information stores.
The developers of the STAR program (some of whom also developed LEED) are very open and receptive to feedback regarding all aspects of the program including specific language in their technical guide, confusing or vague expectations, degree of ‘fit’ between how the information exists in the community versus how they want it uploaded. They view this as a long-term development process, again like LEED, wherein the program will involve in response to community profiles and need, all with the single goal of encouraging and supporting community sustainability.
Ann Pierce