lightblueline

As we head into the action in a couple months, I'm going to blog the process as a part of the educational model this action is building for similar actions in other cities. By recording the meetings and the technical and practical details of getting the line on the street here, we hope to make it easier for people in other cities to mark their own environment's vulnerability to climate change.

I met briefly with Browning Allen and Nick Cabugus on the afternoon of July 12. We are building the communication links between the lightblueline action team and city street painting staff. Nick will be the lead on the painting information front. He will be getting us the exact specs. on the paint we will be buying and will supervise the cutting of the stencils the city will use for the streets they will be painting. City painting staff work from 3-4 AM to noon in order to get paint on the street when the trafffic volume is low. The City will paint the high-traffic streets in the days before the main "Drawing the Line" date.

The city uses metal stencils, and plans to manufacture some metal lightblueline design stencils in Goleta. The Action team will try to create a video that shows how this stencil is made. We discussed the use of Wagner airless paint sprayers, and Nick was concerned that they might not handle the viscosity of street paint. So we will need to test this. Also, all paint sprayers work up to the point where they get clogged and stop working, so we will need to plan for this contingency.

We have planned for six neighborhood teams, but Browning suggested we might need to increase this to 8-9 to cover all the streets we are planning to paint on "the day." I asked if we could have weekend access to the Community Arts Workshop facility, which is across the street from the City offices. Browning is checking this and will get back to us. I plan to see if we can get some assistance from the Solstice staff in terms of training on recyling paint, etc..

The City will have a vehicle for it's supplies (cones, etc.) for each team (or so), but each team will need to have it's own transportation and a truck for the stencil.

We will need to arrange for water, communications, etc. for each team.

We will be making several stencils from the 1 mm plastic blanks we can buy from the stencil company. The original stencil we cut seems to work fine. It will take a few weekends of work to cut, say, 11 more.

We also need to coordinate with the city on their schedule to slurry-seal some of the streets where the line is being painted. Of course we want to paint after the slurry is down, and also not paint the same week. Browning suggested that the City can paint the streets where this year's slurry seal has not been done by "the day."

The City's new every-other-Friday-off schedule means we need to look to paint on a day when the paint crew does not have a 3 day weekend. So we are trying to nail down an exact Saturday in late September/ early October.

The City budget will cover all the overtime for the staff, the stencils, extra cones, if these are needed, etc. Lightblueline is still fund raising for education and outreach and staff support for "the day."

I imagine that in August and September we will be meeting almost every week to go over various details and train team leaders and volunteers.

It was a great meeting, and we are very excited to be working with the City staff to make this a success.