Brookhaven Mayor To Talk Environment At U.S. Conference of Mayors

BROOKHAVEN, GA -- Insight into the city’s newly launched Sustainable Brookhaven initiative and ongoing efforts to regulate installation of small cell technology on public property will be shared by Mayor John Ernst at the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors. The conference takes place June 28-July 1 in Honolulu, HI. Approximately 250 mayors from across the United States, including numerous Georgia mayors, attend the conclave each year.

Ernst will be a panelist on the conference’s energy committee to discuss the city’s newly launched Sustainable Brookhaven initiative highlighting installation of electric charging stations in city parks, pilot program of electric police vehicles, LEED-certified building practices, and new environmental operational measures.

Ernst will also join mayors from San Jose, California; Plano, Texas; Santa Ana, California; and Eugene, Oregon, to address FCC efforts to usurp local control of city rights-of-way/public property. His input will focus on Brookhaven’s recently written ordinance putting restrictions on the size of small-cell “nodes” to be attached to poles and the associated fee for access to the city’s right of way as a work around recently enacted legislation by the Georgia General Assembly that restricts cities of local control rights of this technology installation.

Ernst is representing the interests of all DeKalb County municipalities on the small cell subject at this forum. The DeKalb Municipal Authority is underwriting $2,000 of his travel expenses.

The Conference of Mayors, founded in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, is comprised of every chief elected official of cities 30,000 and larger. Topics at the conference cover a wide variety of priorities that contribute to the overall health of America’s cities, as well as consider and adopt policy resolutions that guide the advocacy agenda of the organization. The policy positions adopted at the annual meeting collectively represent the views of the nation’s mayors and are distributed to the President and Congress.

“My overreaching goal at this conference is to see and hear what innovative approaches other cities are doing to improve the quality of life of their residents efficiently and bring those lessons back to Brookhaven,” said Ernst. “I’m most interested in sessions covering infrastructure, affordable housing, cybersecurity, and community-based zoning.”