Funding Sought For Climate Action Plan

ORLEANS – An article will be prepared for October’s special town meeting seeking funding to help the town craft a climate action plan.

The town’s energy and climate action committee is working with Assistant Town Manager Mark Reil and Kim Grant, the town’s new energy and sustainability manager, to put together the article, which will seek money to hire a consultant to help the committee craft the plan.

The committee is due to go before the select board Aug. 28 to give an update of its work and outline its vision for the plan. On Aug. 8, the committee voted to draft a short letter to send to the board ahead of the Aug. 28 meeting requesting its support for the plan moving forward.

“We’ll really just be providing the select board with our thought that this is important, and what we’ve done to date,” John Londa, the committee’s chair, said when reached by phone last week.

Londa said the action plan, if adopted and put into effect, would identify attainable climate change goals for everyone in Orleans. The goal, he said, is to “look at the entire town and how we use energy.”

“This is an attempt to not just look at municipal energy use and green up town infrastructure,” he said. “It’s to reach out to the entire town. It’s going to pull in lots of municipal entities, different municipal boards and departments, but it will also reach out to different community organizations such as the Orleans Climate Action Network.”

Londa said the plan would look at options for achieving energy efficiency across a number of areas including the town’s waste management and natural resources operations. There would also be a focus on mass transit in the region and efforts to further promote electric vehicle usage and infrastructure.

The committee in recent months has looked at climate action plans already in place in the communities of Plymouth, Melrose, Acton, Gloucester, Watertown and on Martha’s Vineyard. Londa said those plans offer some sense of how Orleans might proceed with its plan.

“We think we’ve got a lot of things that have to happen in Orleans, and they’re not going to happen overnight,” he said. “If you could do them overnight you probably would, but realistically that’s not how things work. So this kind of helps us provide direction to the way forward over the next decade or so.”

One thing that needs to be ironed out ahead of town meeting is the article’s cost. Reil told the committee Aug. 8 that the “scope” of the article, including a dollar amount, will be pinned down in time for the Oct. 28 special session.

Select board member Andrea Reed, the board’s liaison to the energy and climate action committee, previously asked if there is money already available through free cash or some other means to fund the article. Reil said he would check, but noted a free cash transfer would still be subject to a town meeting vote.

“It would be nice if we already had the money and we were just moving it from one pocket to another,” she said.

In addition to the climate action plan, the committee will also seek the select board’s support next week for pursuing a “Climate Leader” community designation through the Green Communities division of the state Department of Energy Resources.

Acceptance into the Climate Leader Communities program would make Orleans eligible for state grants that could cover some or all of the cost of implementing “energy efficiency measures and projects,” according to the Department of Energy Resources website. But there are six criteria that towns have to achieve to earn the designation.

The town already meets some of the requirements, including its status as a green community and the establishment of a committee to help direct the town’s clean energy initiatives. But other criteria include the adoption of a “Zero-Emission Vehicle first policy” and a long-term decarbonization plan.

“It’s looking at the town infrastructure and identifying what things are going to happen over the next that will trigger a structure to go from using fossil fuels to becoming an electrified building,” Londa said of the decarbonization plan.

Other criteria include a commitment from the town to cease on-site use of fossil fuels at all municipal buildings by 2050, and the adoption of a specialized opt-in stretch energy code. The optional code sets higher standards for energy efficiency for new construction in town than those set forth in the existing state stretch code, but an article put before town meeting voters in May 2023 narrowly failed. Londa said the committee will aim to bring an article to opt in to the specialized code back to voters in May 2025.

Email Ryan Bray at ryan@capecodchronicle.com