EP 62: Cities Initiative on Climate Change
Calling climate change an intimidating issue may be understating it. It's massive, right? Being so global and often pulled into intense debate, climate change may have us individuals feeling helpless against it. But there are local-level approaches for making a difference, and municipal governments are sharing best-practices with one another to that end. We travel to Chapel Hill -- the electric-vehicle capital of North Carolina -- to learn how they are others are leading the charge in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and minimizing other environmental impacts as part of a program called the Cities Initiative, which seeks to remove the barriers to sensible policies and practices that could be exactly what the world needs right now. To join or pose questions about the Cities Initiative, email Zach Ambrose at zambrose@ambrosestrategy.com. Cities Initiative overview and consensus action items https://www.dropbox.com/s/u8gb42d1jyzwajm/Cities%20Initiative%20Outcomes.pdf?dl=0 Description of phases 1 and 2 https://deq.nc.gov/energy-climate/climate-change/mitigation/cities-and-towns/cities-initiative Mayor Pam Hemminger, Chapel Hill, North Carolina https://www.townofchapelhill.org/town-hall/mayor-and-council/mayor-council/mayor-pam-hemminger
Top Keywords
- chapel 0.013
- city initiative 0.012
- chapel hill 0.011
- cities 0.011
- city 0.010
- hill 0.009
- initiative 0.009
- north carolina 0.009
- carolina 0.009
- climate 0.008
- north 0.008
- environmental 0.007
Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation. Doing something smarter can save money and help protect the environment. So that I think that's really the way to go about it. We have the most electric vehicles in the state concentrated here in Chapel Hill. Part of what we've tried to build the conversation around here in North Carolina is what the cities can do as a collective.
Climate change is a tough subject, just in how overwhelming it can be. You know, with the world being such a big disorganized and segmented place, what can we do about it right here? What for example is in the purview of my local government, the government of my small town? Like what can my town do to help? We talk about that today and how it relates directly to local community and economy. My name is Ben Brown and this is Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns adapting in the face of change from the North Carolina League of Municipalities. Episode 62.
Caring about the environment has been part of my professional career, dating back to my my time at, as an undergraduate at UNC Chapel Hill, I was a member of a group called NCPurg, Public Interest Research Group, and they were really environment was one of their topics that they were really engaging. So it's something I've always been interested in and marrying the the challenges of protecting and enhancing the environment at the same time, protecting and enhancing the quality of life for folks and the economy. So I've always seen the two as being really important connection between the environment and the economy. My name is Beau Mills. I'm the executive director for the Metropolitan Mayors Coalition here in North Carolina.
So I know Beau Mills a number of different ways. Just being in the line of work that I'm in and our organizations, mine being the North Carolina League of Municipalities and his being the Metropolitan Mayors Coalition, work together. The coalition represents the unique interests of the higher population municipalities in the state, and all of them are also members of the league. Anyway, back to Beau. He used to work for the EPA in Washington DC in an earlier career. So picking back up at the intersection of environment and the economy. Yeah. Could you expand, on that a little bit? Because sometimes, you know, economic arguments really kind of solidify things that we want people to understand or things that that kind of need some kind of currency to get through and be talked about at a business level? How are climate and the economy tied?
Well, in the big picture, obviously, sometimes environmental regulations can cost money and be seen as a sunk cost. I view that as part of, investing for the future and the sustainability is a term that you hear thrown around a lot, but you hear thrown around about the economy, a sustainable economy, as well as sustainable environment. So, to me, those two go really well together. You want an economy that provides for the quality of life of folks, good jobs, good salaries, good communities, but at the same time can sustain us into the future, you know. So, people need to have healthy economies and healthy communities. That is really one of the great advantages, people coming together in a city. The things that we do as cities operational activities, you know, collecting garbage, having transportation systems, those are the ways to break down the challenges associated with, environmental sustainability and climate change. You know, you can talk about the science, but you can also talk about the big challenges and get sort of, as you said, overwhelmed by the ideas behind, the impact of climate change. But at the end of the day, cities can make an impact just in the little things that they do, just in the way they design their cities, the way they operate, the systems within a city.
While I work with Beau in other capacities, I linked up with him for this episode through his support of something called the Cities Initiative, which I wanted to learn more about. It's a, collab of different municipalities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it's being led by the Environmental Defense Fund.
So what the intent of the city's initiative is is to identify systemic institutional barriers in the state and or partnerships or the lack of partnerships that could create opportunities
to reduce greenhouse gases. This is Dionne Deligatti.
I work for the Environmental Defense Fund. Fund.
I am the director of clean energy for the Southeast. She's focused on local government sustainability most of her career. She used to work for the city of Dallas and was also a state and local government liaison for the EPA before she joined the Environmental Defense Fund. There were a lot of opportunities here in North Carolina
where, climate and clean energy were coevolving, so we built a program to try and start to capitalize on those synergies.
The city's initiative brought 12 cities and towns from across the state of North Carolina that had all made some kind of greenhouse gas or renewable commitment or were working very obviously in that space somehow. Different sizes, small towns, big cities, different geographies, all kinds of communities. Wilmington, Winston Salem, Asheville, Highlands, Chapel Hill, just to mention a few. And the city's initiative convened them to think together and identify institutional barriers to minimizing environmental impacts and emissions. Can you give me a a fairly real life example of what, a barrier would be? An institutional barrier?
One of them is the building codes. K. So building codes can be very,
very limiting. For example, the building code. Yeah. It's set by a state board. They revise it every six years, and there are a few local government officials who sit on that board, but local governments aren't allowed to adopt stricter energy codes than what the state board adopts. And so some people involved with the issues say the state board, which is called the building code council, maybe needs more members in local government or more who were experts in sustainability. So that's one thing they identified. Another one they identified, utilities don't provide access to customer usage data aggregated at a granular level, but that kind of data could help local governments better prioritize programs and see about improving areas, parts of town that really burn energy. They'd also like to see a utility billing platform that helps cities and customers understand their energy usage.
Anything like that to partnerships with the utility to try and expand opportunities for purchasing renewables or building electric vehicle infrastructure.
So the group overall identified 12 action items that included potential tweaks to state law, such as what the building code council makeup. That's written in statute. The city's initiative is also about identifying best practices, you know, things that can be done, things you can scale from different sized towns, idea sharing. So I drove out to one of the participating towns in the initiative, the town of Chapel Hill, so I could talk with the mayor. I'm Pam Hemminger. I'm the mayor of Chapel Hill. I've lived in this community for thirty four years, and I've been mayor for the last four years. Chapel Hill is a cool town. It's got an amazing music history, of course, the nineteen nineties indie rock thing. But day to day, it's a university town, UNC Chapel Hill, and about 60,000 full time residents live in the corporate limits.
It's a brainy area overall and is part of the Research Triangle Park region. So when the federal government didn't sign on to the Paris Accord, a lot of mayors, across the country were like, what do we do now? Because the federal government is not going to lead the way. They're not going to be the ones setting the standards and helping us along. And I, as a mayor, you get access to lots of different organizations, mostly online, but there's also conferences, but there's weekly updates. And there's groups out there who have formed. So a mayor's coalition came together and said, mayors for climate change, the city's initiatives, the Sierra Club, different groups, coming together online in forums and holding, seminars across the country, webinars, all kinds of information working together so we don't have to all recreate the wheel, but we can learn best practices and what kind of things might work for our own communities. And it's been really, really helpful. We also have Metro Mayors in North Carolina, which is the 40 mayors of the 40 largest towns in North Carolina coming together also to share best practices, what's working, what's not working so that we can help. So if I'm a Chapel Hillian and is that the right word, by the way? Okay. Okay.
If I'm a Chapel Hillian and, you know, I I've heard about you know, I I know very abstractly about climate change and, you know, I hear about it being talked about on the radio. I'm not necessarily sure about what problem we're trying to solve with the city's initiative and why my town Chapel Hill is involved with that. How would you explain that to someone who maybe needs a little bit more?
Our citizens want to figure out ways to set a good example, to do the right thing, to reduce their carbon footprint, to use more renewables, to reduce their waste. Trying to figure out out the best practices here. And I love this community because they care more about than just their own community. They care about the bigger world at large. We have the most electric vehicles in the state concentrated here in Chapel Hill. People care about these issues. They want to be involved in environmental change. We in Chapel Hill are experiencing a lot of stormwater issues with climate change. It's we've had more intense, weather events that have caused more flooding. Chapel Hill is kind of built into a bowl in certain areas of the towns that they didn't know about fifty years ago when they were doing some of the buildings. So we have some places like Eastgate Shopping Center that goes underwater because it was built over a creek. We know better now how not to do that today, but we've gotta fix existing businesses, residences, and for wildlife too. And so we're trying to work together to make a difference on all those kinds of things. We have free public transportation here in Chapel Hill. We were trying to reduce our need for more parking, which increases your need for more impervious surface. It adds to the air quality, those kinds of things, trying to encourage people to use public transit or alternative modes of transportation. We just finished another piece of one of our green ways to connect in so that people have other ways to get to and from work, to and from activities, healthy living. So these things are important to our community, and I and I'm very proud that our community considers these things important. We've been trying to do a push on reducing single use plastics. We've been looking into composting different ways, and we have the solid waste advisory group, SWAG, that meets together in the county with the cities and the county to talk about ways to reduce our waste, recycle more. We have a very good recycling rate, but now the goal is to reduce the waste overall. So looking at all these so that we can reduce our footprint, help, show others how to do the same in hopes that we can have a healthier planet in the long run. We're starting our tree replenishment committee next month, to start replanting more trees back into Chapel Hill, which we already have a large tree canopy, but our community says we want more.
And so these are things that a town
by itself can become conscious of and enact policies and ordinances and things to try to effect change, the kind of change that people want to see, what's the power of joining an initiative of something greater? Well, one thing with the city's initiative is you end up with a menu of options or a toolbox of different things you can pick and choose from that one city may have tried and had great success with, but another city says, well, that one's not gonna work for me, but I could tweak it and make it my own. I learned about a program up in Burlington, Vermont where you can ask your utility coming company to come in and do a home energy saving program. Well, I didn't even know that existed here. Came up, came home, called Duke, said, have a neighborhood I'd love to do this with. They came in and did over 830 homes with a energy savings plan. I learned that from other cities, from the city's initiative. I I wouldn't have known how to even look for that here because it wasn't on my radar. And that's where the city's initiative, you can see this menu, you get to share these best practices, there's a list of things, there's contact information, to be able to say this might work for us. We've created our, environmental sustainability officer here who's working with all the different departments. He has access to all this, and combining and working together with the city's initiatives gives us ideas of things we can try here in our community.
Beau Mills. Just sharing best practices, that can have an impact on the environment, but it can also have an impact on the bottom line for cities where it can be less expensive to operate. So for example, the exam I was talking about the police department using hybrid vehicles. Reducing the cost of fuel consumption
makes good sense for taxpayers and it makes a lot of sense from an operational standpoint, but also reduces the impact on the environment and and obviously then the, you know, the impacts of on climate change. I mean, you can really, connect some dots. We, replaced all the light bulbs in our park and ride lots. We knew it was gonna take about a three year window to pay back the cost of the new LED lights. Now, what ended up happening, it took less than three years to pay back the cost, but the LED lights, the citizens liked them better. It was better lighting. So and it was cooler and so reduced cost and increased savings. And after the three year window or less than three year window, the savings are going to just keep mounting up, and those bulbs last a lot longer. So you actually reduce your maintenance cost too because LED bulbs last far longer. You have very strong
leadership in the sustainability management at the municipal level in North Carolina. You have strong leadership in Raleigh, Charlotte, Durham, Asheville, some of the big cities.
Greensboro is doing a lot of creative things. These cities, under the initiative they make up, say they would like to see things like additional locally controlled revenue for transportation projects or transportation needs. While the League of Municipalities is a separate organization, the League itself also has an advocacy goal of boosting funding availability for public transit and transportation programs under currently limited resources.
Part of what we've tried to build the conversation around here in North Carolina is what the cities can do as a collective. And so if you start to change some of the policy and remove policy barriers at the state level, then that creates opportunity across the board for every size municipality. You create opportunities and spaces You create opportunities and spaces that may not have the resources to do it themselves or would take them significantly longer to get there.
Mayor Hemminger also got in on the point about time and how long it can take to catch up to demand. I would just say that technology is changing very quickly. There are all I've been going to energy conferences and learning as much about the different kinds of technologies for making environmental impact, and it's moving pretty quickly. Governments tend to move slowly. So the city's initiative and pulling together and working together helps keep people up to date on the newest technologies that are out there so that we can all benefit from them. Learning from each other, it's moving fast. And when governments move slowly, it takes a while. But we can make that difference together. And educating the public is another huge part that the government needs to play a role in about what things they can actually what your government's doing and what things they can actually do to make a difference. A lot of our citizens here are moving to the electric cars. Electric cars are harder to find because so many people their demand is so high. So you're seeing that results play back out in the markets, and you're gonna see some win wins. But the counter side of those kinds of things is we have to change as a government, and the secretary of transportation knows that. As more people move to electric cars, gas tax monies drop, and that's what fuels our road system. So we're gonna have to find other ways. And, again, we have to move a little faster because technology changes quickly. Governments have
have to be a little more nimble, and the way to be nimble is to learn from each other and work together. While the first phase of the city's initiative was to identify those action items and barriers, the second phase, which began in June, is about getting the strategy going to reach goals. So this story is not over. They've got a series of round tables over the next couple years to keep the momentum with the 12 cities involved and with any other local governments that would like to join. So I'll be following the progress. If you're a North Carolina municipality and you'd like to join the city's initiative, you can reach out to Zac Ambrose. And his email address is zambrose@ambrosestrategy.com. Zambrose@ambrosestrategy.com. And if you're outside of North Carolina, a lot of the spirit of this conversation and some of the practical ideas still apply. And there are other initiatives spread across the country with similar missions. You should seek them out. I I'd love to hear about what's up in your state. I'm at b brown at n cl m dot o r g. Again, bbrown@nclm.org. Or get me on Twitter with the handle at muni equation, at m u n I equation. And remember, what we've been talking about here is not a big dissection about climate change and policy today. We've been looking at what's in the purview of municipalities and what their visions are, the governments of of the cities and towns we live in, and again, what goals they can set and what barriers to success they can remove to do more. The, Energy News Network recently wrote a pretty lengthy piece on what these local governments are going for in North Carolina. They quoted Charlotte city council member Dimple Ajmera as saying this, we have to start with the easy wins first, the short term things that we can do now, and really lead by example. End quote. One of the things I like that we all kind of hit on in our conversations for this episode was that a lot of the things that fall under the definition of sustainability or are things that do directly have better long term benefits are really just kind of nice things to do anyway, whether they save money through efficiency or just contribute to better community health. Final word from Beau Mills of the North Carolina Metro Mayors Coalition.
At the end of the day, a lot of the things that you can do around climate change and reducing the impact of cities on the environment just make a lot of sense. And I think that's the way a city official can approach it. If there's a way to do something that's more efficient and reduces the impact on the climate, that's really a smart thing to do. And you can take specific examples where doing something smarter can save money and help protect the environment. So that's, I think that's really the way to go about it. And I really, one of the things that's most exciting, I've seen a number of the cities I work with that have, appointed officials within their city to focus on environmental sustainability. And these environmental sustainability officers can really take on a lot of the practices that they share with each other and make a huge impact on the bottom line for these cities.
Okay. So where have we been? Where's Municipal Equation been? It's been a few months of downtime after a good streak of more than 60 episodes. So what happened? Well, we've been busy. Lots of projects and special initiatives, but this has all led us to expand our team here in the communications office at the League of Municipalities. And that's allowing me to restore focus on the podcast. And I promise you, there are some awesome episodes coming up. Really fun, quirky stuff in addition to the serious tones when they're called for. But we're back and have a long list of episode topics to explore, and, of course, they can come from you as well. If you have an idea for a show, send me an email, bbrown@nclm.org, or reach out on Twitter at muni equation. And we will refresh this conversation about cities and towns adapting in the face of change. Municipal equation is the name of this podcast, and it's made possible by the North Carolina League of Municipalities. My name is Ben Brown, and I'll talk to you again very soon. Thanks.