City Council Work Session

Greg FarleyThese are, again, things that are relatively easy to quantify. And then finally, just a smattering of three priority actions that the Environmental Sustainability Committee would like you to consider. is the hiring of a full-time climate and energy manager. Speaking as someone who cooperates in this effort for a large public university, having the personnel to do this properly will be critical to its success. Development of a climate and energy action plan on behalf of the city is also a goal that we'd set forth. And finally, we'd ask the city council to work with us on the adoption of the green building policy. It's then subsequent implementation and assessment of how well it's working with the idea that once again

Pradeep Chilkaa climate and energy action plan, and we have specific targets of greenhouse gas reductions. and with that we'll kind of get into what we you know what I think we are really accomplished that I wanted to highlight within climate action so we have the green building policy was developed and completed and I thought that that was a huge win for the city. And I was quite involved in that because I was reviewing it just as a citizen. It was one of my interests. So kudos to the staff, kudos to the council for actually getting it completed. And now we have to get it adopted and actually put it into practice. this. The second set of projects that I'm going to highlight are the ones that are kind of lighting related. And the reason why I'm kind of wanted to highlight this is because

Next. Adopt and operationalize the green building policy. We've already developed it, but it needs to be adopted. It needs to be put in practice. And the only way to get that done is if you have that staffing position, because it does require 25 hours a week of staffing resource. So that is another one of our recommendations. Next. And then you've heard about this. I think we need to course correct on the climate action plan. We need to reprioritize that. We need to fast track it. And we need to make sure we pull it in from fiscal year 28 to as early as possible. Because I think the risk, especially on the adaptation side, is huge. And we have done absolutely no work on adaptation. We've started some work on mitigation, but that's a whole new assessment of risk to the

Stefanie Kupkastaffand adapt to the effects of climate change. As noted earlier, the city has an adopted goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% from 2005 baseline levels by 2050. We do work with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments to do a greenhouse gas inventory every few years. So we are working to track our progress over time. Our current programs and projects are listed to the left. The first one has already been mentioned tonight is that we're developing a green building policy which will establish green building standards sector. We will be going this into more detail at the February 10th work session where we'll be talking further about adoption and implementation. For the Old Town Lighting Project, we are

So this is in the transition district. So we requested funding for fiscal year 27 and 28 for that. So that way we can replace all of our gas lights with LEDs. And then also we'll be requesting funding to implement the green building policy. As the ESC has mentioned, in order to adopt the policy as it's written today, this requires 25 hours of staff time since this is a brand new program. And that will cost the city about $85,000 a year. For energy efficiency renewables, we aim to minimize energy demand and increase renewable energy sources. adopted a goal to achieve 100% renewable electricity for city operations by 2035 and community-wide by 2050. Some of the current programs and projects that we're

Billy Batessuch as the LED conversion project, where it is a significant initial one-time cost, but may actually lead to cost savings in the long run. That's something that I would see as a very high priority because of that, because it's a win-win. So others that, you know, I'm not sure that we know what that would look like for some of these other ones but you know the solar initiatives and EV infrastructure but basically things where we can see some direct impact on sustainability but also the green building policy I think it's very important to make sure that we have the infrastructure in place the staff infrastructure to see that because that is something that really kind of permeates the entire community

Stefanie KupkastaffYeah, so the guidance that we received from the previous city manager was that any initiative that would potentially cost the city more money was paused. So the residential solid waste assessment, the commercial waste assessment, the climate action plan, the EV, so there There were multiple initiatives that were paused. Also the green building policy because these are new programs. They do require additional staff and resources to implement because it's been such a tough budgetary time right now. He was trying to be sensitive about not presenting new initiatives that would then cost the city even more money when the council was looking to cut costs. So that's where I guess that was coming from.