The police department is one of Bloomington, Indiana’s most fuel-intensive departments, according to a new report from the city’s Peak Oil Task Force. In a coming era of expected oil shortages and wild oil-price volatility, they say, crime rates are likely to rise, at the same time that it becomes more difficult to fuel the police cars.

Consequently, the Task Force recommends that the department add more bicycles, Segways, and motorcycles, and change most of its patrol car fleet to electric vehicles.
    
In October, the Peak Oil Task Force in Bloomington released its report, Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience. While not produced by an official Transition Town organization, the report is very much like one of the 12 ingredients of Transition Towns, the “energy descent action plan,” or EDAP.
     
Dave Rollo, a member of the Bloomington City Council and chair of the Task Force, explained the motivation for creating the task force: “We are tremendously vulnerable to energy supply disruption and price volatility if peak [oil production] comes soon. Preparing for the peak not only promises to save citizens money, but gives us the collective opportunity to make a great community even stronger.”
     
The Task Force report weighs in at a hefty 245 pages, and it covers the broad economic impacts of peak oil; municipal services like water, police, fire, and buildings; land use and housing, and how they interact with transportation; sustenance issues of food, water, waste, and health care; and opportunities for citizens to act.
     
While a different individual was responsible for each section of the report, it’s notable for not getting locked into silos. For example, the task force was apparently concerned that the electric patrol cars they recommended might be too slow for high-speed chases, so they suggest that city streets be redesigned to make it difficult for any car to travel faster than 35 mph. The redesign would have the added benefit, they say, of encouraging the transition away from cars to walking, bicycling, and other forms of transportation.
     
Redefining Prosperity also has a flexible vision of how people will define their needs in the future. Oil shortages and prices may stop the long-distance food imports that fill most Bloomington plates. After noting that there’s not enough agricultural land in the county to feed the county’s population using standard agricultural methods, they examine the potential of labor-intensive cultivation of small plots. With this different method of production, they find enough green space within the city to feed the city’s population on a “basic, albeit mostly vegetarian, diet.”
     
The closest thing I’m aware of in Vermont to Bloomington’s Redefining Prosperity is the enVision Montpelier process. Montpelier’s planning commission is now incorporating into its new Master Plan ideas the community has generated for a 30- to 100-year plan for sustainability.
     
There has been a narrower focus on energy sustainability in the town plan in Waterbury, where the planning commission asked the town energy committee (Local Energy Action Partnership, or LEAP) to draft energy-related language, according to LEAP co-founder Keith Thompson. Thompson says that LEAP provided goals and objectives to the planning commission, which is about to revisit the town plan language.
     
Writing an EDAP is a different sort of Transition work from planting edible public landscapes or installing wood stoves. It results in no immediate, visible changes, other than the existence of the document itself. However, it gives a road map of the way ahead and provides a yardstick for Transition Towns to measure their efforts. Bloomington’s Redefining Prosperity is a good example to read while working on your town’s master-plan revision or full-blown EDAP.