Perhaps they weren't expecting such a big turn-out, but local political leaders expressed delight Saturday morning when about 170 people showed up at 10 a.m. in El Cerrito to see a documentary and talk about the climate crisis.

Addressing the filled seats at Cerrito Theater, state Senator Loni Hancock said,  "When we walked in and saw this packed room, thinking this is really quite extraordinary, Mark (state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier) said, 'It's El Cerrito.'"

The crowd came to see a documentary and talk about reducing greenhouse gases and building "sustainable communities." Several area political leaders also attended the screening, which was followed by about half the crowd moving to the nearby Vietnamese restaurant Nông Thôn to break up into seven discussion groups on transportation, economic development, affordable housing and other topics.

"It is an incredible priviledge to represent an area like El Cerrito – not just El Cerrito but our whole East Bay corridor – where at 10 o'clock in the morning this number of people would show up for such a discussion," state Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner told the gathering.

The event kicked off with a screening of segments from The New Metropolis documentary series about the challenges facing America's first suburbs because of their aging infrastructure and fleeing businesses and residents. The two-part series also addresses the contribution to global warming caused by the growing sprawl away from urban cores into wider and wider circles of surburban development.

On hand was the filmmaker, Andrea Torrice, who called the Bay Area her "home away from home" and noted that her filmmaking career began 25 years ago with a video for El Cerrito's public-access cable TV channel.

The event was sponsored by El Cerrito's Environmental Quality Committee and hosted by the city. Environmental Quality Committee member Paloma Pavel, chief organizer of the day's activities, said the gathering was designed to gather "community suggestions and input" for a regional strategy on building sustainable communities.

Community suggestions from the meeting will be given to the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) to develop a "sustainable communities strategy," Pavel said. Producing such a strategy is a requirement for the state's metropolitan planning organizations under a state law, SB375, "Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008."

The law, a companion to the state's pioneering greenhouse-gas reduction law, AB32, requires that the "sustainable communities strategy" demonstrate "how the region will meet its greenhouse gas reduction target through integrated land use, housing and transportation planning," according to the state Air Resources Board.

"This has been a really amazing morning," said JoAnn Bullock, an ABAG planner working on the strategy. "I feel juvenated." She said the meeting had been a good antidote to resistance she encounters from global-warming deniers, whom Skinner had earlier referred to as the "Flat Earth Society."

Among the suggestions reported by the individual discussion groups at the meeting's end were increasing food production on urban land, regional permitting for such measures as solar panels and "gray water" reuse, sustainable development education in public schools, improved public transit and securing physical spaces for communities to meet together and plan.

One of the participants, Doris Pummill of Berkeley, told Patch she learned about the event from an email and that she'd never seen such a meeting. "It was so many people who attended as well as officials who were interested not only in giving their ideas but also in receiving ideas from the people who came," she said.

The process is tied to what ABAG and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) call "Plan Bay Area," which is being developed to meet the sustainable communities strategy mandate of AB375.

Political leaders who attended – in addition to DeSaulnier, Hancock, and Skinner  – included El Cerrito Mayor Bill Jones, El Cerrito City Councilwomen Janet Abelson and Rebecca Benassini, Richmond City Councilman Jeff Ritterman, Stege Sanitary District Board of Directors member Al Miller, Contra Costa County Board of Education member Pam Mirabella and AC Transit Board of Directors member Chris Peeples.