SWAMPSCOTT — The Climate Action Plan Committee of Swampscott met on Tuesday to discuss its goals for the new year.
According to Ryan Hale, the chair of the renewable energy committee who’s worked closely with the group since its inception, the committee’s overall goal is “to have a warrant article” with climate action and resiliency be adopted by Town Meeting later this year.
“What the committee is exploring today is the draft plan document that includes some proposed actions/objectives that will be written into that warrant article,” said Hale, whose wife Suzanne Hale is a member of the committee. “Our work over the coming months will be to build support in the community for an affirmative action on the article during the Town Meeting.”
Kim Lundgren Associates (KLA), a company that helps counties around the country “create climate action solutions,” gave the committee its recommended goals for the new year, which the committee reviewed Tuesday night. KLA’s plan was sectioned into different focus areas including transportation and mobility, solid waste and recycling, community resilience, and buildings and energy.
Under transportation and mobility, the KLA plan recommended that “Swampscott reduces transportation-related emissions through electrification of cars, trucks, buses, and trains.” One of the strategies for this is to “expand infrastructure needed for rapid electrification of vehicles in Swampscott.”
The plan then offers a recommended action to achieve that. Each section of the plan has this structure. The committee reviewed the recommended goals from KLA to decide what would work for them and how they could execute them.
“They’ve looked at everything that this group put together, kind of summarized it, added some things, removed some things and now what we’re looking at is kind of the merged output of this group and KLA,” said committee member Douglass Thompson.
KLA is requiring the committee to give its feedback on the plan by Jan. 11.
Hale said the main challenge of the group is taking a “very complex and technical topic” to the community to show them how their choices can impact the environment. These choices could be small, such as deciding what to recycle or trash. Other decisions could be bigger, like deciding to buy an electric vehicle.
“In a community like Swampscott, the big levers are residential energy use and transportation. So as a town government we need to provide education about what options are available to our community members and make policy choices that ‘nudge’ home and business owners to make decisions that support our long-term goals,” Hale said.
The next committee meeting is Jan. 17. It plans to meet every two weeks.
