The team consisted of myself, thirteen other students from Clarkson University’s Adirondack Semester, and two supervising professors, Dr. Stephen Bird, and Dr. Eric Backus. 

Main Elements: 

• Data Analysis

• Community Engagement

• Stakeholder Relations

• Technical Writing

Background

As part of Clarkson University’s Adirondack Semester, myself and my cohort aided the Village of Lake Placid implement LEED for Communities.

Need

The Village of Lake Placid wanted to Implement LEED For Communities - a sustainability planning system - to track data and improve the community. 

This sustainability planning system had the goal of holistically assessing and improving a municipality's sustainability and quality of life by tracking 14 metrics across the community. 

As students, we were tasked with collecting data from town databases and officials, interacting with stakeholders and townspeople, and creating a whitepaper detailing all our work, methodology, and findings.

This whole process was largely student run.

The main metrics

The students divided up into  groups of two to collect, calculate, verify, justify, and track the data needed for the 14 Metrics. 

From there the processes used to collect data varied. Some metrics could be fulfilled using publicly available data, while others had to be requested, and some had to be calculated from different sets of existing data. 

Results: 

1) Several of the metrics were designed for more urban locations. 

• Metrics relating to public transportation, or number of miles residents had to drive assumed that the community being assessed was urban or suburban and resulted in poor numbers. But these assumptions did not hold in a rural setting. 

2) The scope of the metrics did not reflect the fact that the Village of Lake Placid has a tourism based economy. 

• The metrics did not have a way to effectively separate the impact created by tourists vs the impact made my permanent residents. 

Community Metrics

Armed with these takeaways we set about creating supplemental metrics - metrics custom made for the community to accurately reflect it’s unique location and economic drivers.

In addition to the main metrics, we were also tasked with creating community specific metrics that were not encompassed by the standard metrics. These involved extensive community outreach and interaction with our stakeholders. Over the course of several meetings with community stakeholders we had several key takeaways that affirmed what we had gleaned from collecting data: 

1) Because the town was in a rural and isolated area some of the main metrics were skewed and reflected the town poorly. 

2) Because Lake Placid is a town whose main economic activities were winter sports, outdoor recreation, and tourism, this left several key indicators of prosperity and economic vibrancy out of the main metrics. 

With these insights in mind, we worked to create a comprehensive list of supplemental metrics that better tracked aspects of the community like: number recreational trails per mile, average snowfall, electricity consumption from residents vs tourists, voter turnout, and more. 

These supplemental metrics worked to alleviate the gaps in the main metrics by separating data out by permanent residents and tourists so the differences in impact were clear. 

In whole, we compiled a list of over 100 potential supplemental metrics that, in addition to the fourteen main metrics, could much more accurately assess how the town was doing. 

Whitepaper and Final Presentation

As the culmination to our semester, we wrote a comprehensive whitepaper detailing our findings and presented our work to community stakeholders. 

Tourists had a far far larger impact of metrics like water usage, electricity consumption, miles driven by car, and even housing prices, than permanent residents. 

Final Takeaways 

The process of working with Lake Placid gave me hands-on experience managing a larger team and a project with many moving parts. I often led meetings, encouraged regular communication between stakeholders and team members, and worked closely with stakeholders to find what they wanted from the process.