What does sustainability mean to the City of Dubuque?
Sustainability is an important economic and workforce recruitment tool. It is about managing our resources and using them in the most efficient and economic way possible. As a community, we need to re-engineer the way we look at lifecycle costs. Smart energy systems and green initiatives may in the traditional model seem like a more expensive way of doing business. But our community has been around for 175 years, so we should be looking at lifecycle costs of 25, 30 or 40 years, not 10 or 15 years as we have done in the past. Sustainability is also about creating an environment where today’s worker wants to live. We are a technology society and today’s worker can live anywhere in the world. Sustainability is about creating a community that employees want to live in. Where you have workers, you have employers and you have jobs. As both a mayor and a resident of Dubuque, why was saving and revitalizing the Warehouse District important to you? As a river town, our community was shaped with
