FAIRHOPE, Ala. — The first field trip of the newly-reorganized Fairhope Environmental Advisory Board is scheduled for next week, and will be a tour of Daphne’s biofuel program.

“I guess Fairhope’s program is moving slowly,” FEAB Chairman Jim Horner said Monday at the group’s monthly meeting at City Hall. “Daphne’s program seems to be very successful.”

The environmental group will assemble at 9 a..m., Feb. 26, at the municipal complex on Section Street and travel to Daphne for a tour of that city’s program to collect waste oil and process it for use as fuel in a fleet of special biodiesel vehicles.

“(Fairhope) is not an energy efficient city at all,” City Councilwoman Debbie Quinn said at the Monday citizen advisory meeting she helped initiate several years ago.

The environmental board’s purpose in touring the Daphne facility is to gather information in order to make possible recommendations to the mayor and City Council as part of the environmental board’s mission, Horner said.

The board was reorganized last year when new members and a new chairman were appointed.

During several meetings late last year, the previous chairman, Harry Phillips, Horner, and other long-standing members of the committee, set out an ambitious plan of public education and action goals and objectives for the volunteer group to achieve this year. It also spent time developing a process for deciding on what issues to address and how to accomplish them.

“A lot of the public doesn’t even know we have a committee,” said committee member Lisa Adams, who is developing a draft environmental mission statement the group intends to edit and present to the city for possible adoption. “This is a real rough draft. The mission statement is not as easy as I thought it was going to be.”

Adams handed out a detailed analysis for how an environmental mission statement for the city could be developed, including examples of mission statements from other cities around the country.

“We are committed to a sustainable future and to improving the social, economic and environmental well-being of the community,” was one of the mission statements the group reviewed with an eye for how a Fairhope mission statement might read.

“Hopefully, we will use (the mission) statement on the Web site as a recruitment tool for new families and economic development,” said long-standing committee member Ron Heveran.

Two goals of the new advisory group is to involve more people in its efforts and produce achievable results during the year, Horner said.

At Monday’s meeting, several new faces were present, including representatives from the local Sierra Club and the Alabama Coastal Foundation, a nonprofit environmental group based in Fairhope.

To encourage more community involvement in the group’s efforts, since he was appointed chairman, Horner has been busy inviting a number of officials involved in environmental issues to discuss them with the group in a public setting.

Attendance at these meetings has been mixed. One regarding the county planning office’s efforts to introduce zoning in unincorporated areas of the county was not what Horner hoped, but the following meeting on Fairhope’s gully system as a natural stormwater conveyance system met to a packed room.

The March 12 meeting, which will focus exclusively on the County Road 13 issue, could have a large turnout, Horner said.

He has obtained commitments from three of the main officials and private scientists and engineers involved in building the new road and bridge connecting County Road 13, east of town.

The building of that road through the Fly Creek watershed and wetland areas has been a closely-watched issue by many in the community.

“The bridge is now going to 540 feet, and it will cross 80 percent of the wetlands,” Horner said. “The mayor was misled when he was told this project was going to get started in March. They now think construction will start in July.”

Horner said confirmed speakers include: Lawrence Wilson, from the county engineer’s office; Craig Martin, Wetland Sciences Inc., one of the private environmental consultants on the project; and Joe Bullock, from the civil engineering firm on the project.

“The city is doing an awful lot of environmental work that is not be publicized,” Horner said. “We’re really ahead of the game on lots of these things.”

The Fairhope Environmental Advisory Board meets the second Monday of every month at 9 a.m. in the mayor’s conference room in City Hall. The meetings are open to the public. For more information, call 928-2136.

Other resources:

The city Web site has some information about environmental projects and about FEAB (although the board information is outdated) at: www.cofairhope.com/environmentalprojects.html.

And a natural resource inventory and the city’s comprehensive plan is found at: www.cofairhope.com/plan_bldg.html.