and then also an image:

how well will this work?

Just got back from Winchester Hall, where our county commissioners in a 3-2 vote have approved the resolution endorsing the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.

Commissioner Kai Hagen also told me that he’ll be coming to Step It Up Frederick to read the resolution.

A great step forward for our county! Cheers to the Commissioners (Gardner, Gray & Hagen) who made this happen!

Ray checked out our event on our website and emailed us asking:

this event has a lot of interest in my friends. The ride is rather short though; is there anything longer planned, even on streets??

That’s a great idea!

We’re going to keep the short ride for lots of short (i.e. young) riders. But it would be very cool to have a group (or groups) of riders to longer rides across the county that finish up at Parkway Elementary. Then everyone could ride together downtown to the Carroll Creek Ampitheather.

Interested? Please post a comment below and the groups can organize.

Christine, our dedicated volunteer graphic designer, has finished our poster. You can download it as a PDF here:

DOWNLOAD

Isn’t it beautiful?

Furthermore it is a great way for us to get the word out about our great event.

So download it. Print it out and put it up. Send it to your friends. Do you part for Mother Earth!

Check out the article about Step It Up in the NY Times. 

There is an article today in the Washington Post about how Fairfax County Board Chair Gerald Connolly (above) is announcing a series of initiatives in how his county is going to become a Sierra Club Cool County. Sounds great! Also sounds like what our Frederick County Board Chair Jan Garnder is advocating. Let’s make sure it happens here soon!

Thanks to the efforts of some of our great volunteers, we now have two sponsors for our event: BP-Solar, the world’s leading solar power company, based here in Frederick; and Wheel Base, Frederick’s (the world’s?) leading bike shop.

We could not imagine two better sponsors for our event. Together they embody so much of what our event stands for.

And we feel particularly honored to have them because, although we hope that through their sponsorship they find some economic gain, their support of our event demonstrates their real commitment to the cause of climate stability and to the community of Frederick.

Due to their support, we’re going to be able to hold a much better event that hopefully attracts many more participants. Our great thanks to them!

I just received the following reply from Commissioner Gardner to our invitation for Step It Up. She says:

Dear Toby,

Thank you for the information and the invitation to Step It Up – Frederick.    I have noted the date on my calendar and will attend if I am in Town.   I may be in Boston watching my son in a play at MIT that same weekend.

I do want you to know that I am preparing a resolution for the County Commissioners to consider which will endorse the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.   Howard County and Anne Arundel County have recently endorsed this effort through a local executive order/resolution.   As you know, the international agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, has been ratified by 141 countries but the United States is not among them.   Thus, local jurisdictions are stepping up to take leadership and I believe we should join them.

I would encourage the City of Frederick to endorse the same US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.

Jan

Hot damn! Commissioner Gardner is one of the best leaders we have in our community, and this initiative she is taking (that I’ll admit I did not know about) is great! It is one of our events goals! Now we just need to follow her lead and push this over the goal lime!

Hannah Poffenbarger, one of our event organizers, has offered to give the “Inconvenient Truth” climate change at our rally!

Hannah, a student at Walkersville High, recently received training in Tennessee from Al Gore & team on giving this presentation. So immediately following our rally on Carroll Creek, she’ll be presenting in the activity room of the C. Burr Artz Library on the other side of the creek.

Thanks Hannah! This is really going to add to the event!