Brewster Turns Attention To EV Charging Stations; Only Lower Cape Town Without Public Chargers

BREWSTER – It may be the lowest level of medal in the Olympians, but Brewster is officially targeting bronze when it comes to the Charging Smart program.

 “The energy and climate action committee has been very interested in seeing what we can do to support EV charging broadly across the community and perhaps on municipally owned property,” Town Manager Peter Lombardi told the select board recently.

The Cape Cod Commission first became involved with the Charging Smart program in 2025. The federal government funded the program through the Department of Energy, but that money vanished.

 “The funding was there, then it wasn’t,” Lombardi said. “It has since come back on line.”

So the town and commission have fired up efforts again, but the emphasis has shifted from chargers on municipal land to private property.

According to the commission, 55 percent of the Cape’s greenhouse gas emissions are due to transportation, so any effort to reduce those emissions would need to target automobiles, as they make up two-thirds of the transportation source. 

 “Buildings have been superseded in decarbonization,” Colin Odell of the energy and climate action committee said. “Transportation is the more important thing.”

Electric cars are much more common than they were, trippling in number on Cape Cod since 2020, but there are still only 134 registered in Brewster, and people are still pumping their own fuel, even with the price of gas rising above $4 a gallon.

Range anxiety is one of the big issues. No one wants to turn a commute to Boston or a holiday visit into a two- or three-day trip. That’s linked to the car’s battery capacity but also to the availability of public charging stations.

The Charging Smart program was providing technical assistance to several communities — Brewster, Orleans, Chatham, Truro,Yarmouth and Sandwich — as of June 2025. In addition to promoting charging station infrastructure, it funded ride-sharing initiatives and EV sharing. The commission is working with the state on a program encouraging publicly owned vehicle fleets to convert to electric or hydrogen power.

The Charging Smart program has bronze, silver and gold designations. On June 25, 2025 Brewster committed to angling towards a bronze level, which would indicate the town has a standard permitting process for charging stations, has identified potential zoning restrictions and collaborated with electricity providers. 

 “It’s important to take a first step, so we are looking at the entry level,” Lombardi said. “We are focused on ways we could potentially identify permitting processes for charging stations.”

The committee was asking the board to support a vision statement toward that end. At present Brewster has no public EV charging stations, unlike Orleans, which has public chargers opposite the Chocolate Sparrow, Tesla chargers at Stop and Shop and new chargers in the renovated Cape Cod Five parking lot.

 “What makes public charging good is you’ve got a central location and it has got some kind of activity around it, so if it’s a fast charger somebody can plug the car in for an hour and go do some shopping or take a walk on a bike trail,” Odell said. “Brewster doesn’t have a town center. We have a town longitudinal road.”

That made it difficult to find publicly accessible locations, but the committee identified a dozen or so potential spots.
 “But then the money dried up,” Odell said. “So now the emphasis is on doing things to facilitate private individuals and organizations.”

Zoning can be an obstacle. For instance, if a property installs chargers in its parking lot it may need to add new spaces as the charging stations no longer count as general parking spots under zoning rules. So the committee’s goal under the Charging Smart program would be to remove those hurdles. Charging Smart would also make it as easy as “putting solar on a roof in town” according to Odell.

If the select board approved the mission statement and the committee put it on display at Conservation Day at Drummer Boy Park, that would mean five points towards the bronze designation. Identifying zoning laws that might be changed is another step, but Lombardi pointed out actually changing them would require a town meeting vote and the board isn’t obligating themselves on that front, just supporting identifying possible changes.

 “The town of Brewster proposes a clean, connected and future-ready community. Installing public electric vehicle chargers aligns with Brewster’s sustainability goals, supports residents and visitors and positions the town strongly in climate conscious infrastructure on Cape Cod,” the vision statement reads. It also enumerates benefits to different segments of the population.

Select Board Chair Amanda Bebrin wondered if the vision statement was too broad and who exactly was being targeted.

Most people who own an electric vehicle have a charger installed at their home, Odell conceded.

 “The problem is the people that live in multifamily houses or the ones that don’t have an electric service that can handle a charger,” he said. “Vision statements are meant to be broad. The Brewster vision statement is not a narrowly constructed thing.”

 “We are behind the times compared to other towns,” he added. “You have to look at all the opportunities and have it broad enough to be able to address all the potential opportunities.”

 “It is nevertheless a public statement the town is making with presumably some commitment to follow through,” Lombardi concluded.

The board voted 5-0 to support the statement.