It's a common story that resonates with many local governments: plunging building permits, shrinking budgets, hiring freezes and overworked staffers who are charged with driving sustainability initiatives — such as encouraging green building — with little support. The story is no different in King County, Wash., the state's most-populous county and home to Seattle and 38 other cities. But King County's green building program, GreenTools, has helped its cities overcome those obstacles through encouraging collaboration across jurisdictions.

Four years ago, GreenTools launched its Sustainable Cities program to help cities maintain and enhance their green building efforts, especially those with limited resources. The program's backbone includes guidance and green building program templates that are offered through an online roadmap and toolkit, free on-site technical assistance, city staff training and project grants. It is in part through those efforts that green building activity in the county has more than tripled since 2007.

Gathering at the roundtable

Sustainable Cities' peer-to-peer networking forum — the Sustainable Cities Roundtable — is proving to be one of its most catalyzing efforts. The informal monthly gatherings, which started in 2009, bring together the people who are charged with creating and implementing sustainability initiatives to learn from one another, receive free training from experts and share ideas and resources.

The program's mantra is that climate change is not constrained by jurisdictional boundaries, so why should the great ideas, experiences and strategies to combat climate change be confined to those boundaries? "Having neighboring jurisdictions in one room and talking about the same issues helps our staff see how our work can benefit others, best practices implemented by others that can be adapted, and possibilities for collaborating with cities focused on similar goals," says Alex Pietsch, department of community and economic development administrator for Renton (population 92,590) and a Roundtable participant.

For many city staff persons who are working alone or with small teams on green building and climate change-related issues, the roundtable helps them work more effectively by leveraging a large knowledge pool. "The roundtable is like having a clone or several clones, really," says Cathy Beam, an environmental planner with Redmond (population 54,000), who is charged with leading implementation of her city's Climate Action Plan. "We are all trying to do similar work, and when you hear others talk and pose questions, it validates that you are on the right track or it spurs new ideas."

Although the core roundtable group is made up of city planners, the meetings also attract building officials, public works engineers and elected officials, depending on the topic. Topics have included climate change mitigation strategies, green remodeling, and the International Green Construction Code. Roundtable cities are all sizes and in various stages of implementing sustainability initiatives. Some are just starting to inventory their greenhouse gas emissions and do not have a green building program, others have set reduction targets and started programs that are not fully developed, and a handful are implementing policies and code amendments to push sustainable development even further.