Opinion: Is The Town Manager Fiddling While The Planet is Burning?

Local and Green

A version of this column appeared previously in the Amherst Bulletin.

Each year, the Town Council creates one-year performance goals for the Town Manager to accomplish in the next calendar year. The 2023 goals were adopted on January 9. Since the inception of the Council, Climate Action has appeared as a top policy area for goal-setting and this year was no exception.

Both the Town’s Energy and Climate Action Committee (ECAC) and the Amherst Climate Justice Alliance (ACJA) have requested a mid-year update from the Town Manager Paul Bockelman on accomplishment of the 2023 Town Manager goals. ACJA requested a meeting with the Manager, but has not received a response in more than three months.

The big questions are: who on staff is responsible for implementing each goal during this calendar year and what is the timeline?

Most of the climate action goals have been repeated in the manager goals year after year, since 2019. In the past, they have not been tackled because the Town Manager has not hired or assigned additional staff to implement them, even if the work is grant funded. At a minimum, goals need to be implemented in the calendar year they are made and additional goals added each year. That is the only way to accelerate climate action. Delay suggests a failure to treat climate as the existential crisis that it is.

Let’s take a look at the Manager’s 2023 climate action goals in the hopes of getting mid-year specifics and timelines for implementation from the manager soon. This would be in addition to the July 13 presentation the Sustainability Director gave to the Town Services and Outreach Committee.

The first climate action goal for calendar year 2023 is “using a climate lens when making budgeting, construction, repair, hiring, and other decisions that involve energy”.  The town has started using a ‘climate lens’ when reviewing all capital purchases. But the goal also includes budgeting, construction, repair, and hiring; areas that haven’t yet been tackled. The town needs a transparent policy, uniformly implemented across departments, Boards and Committees – and data on how it has been implemented and how it has improved our sustainability.

The second goal is to “submit our Community Choice Electricity Aggregation (CCA) application (from Amherst, Northampton and Pelham)  to the Department of Public Utilities, complete the Joint Powers Entity formation, and start implementation upon approval”. An emphasis was put on “implementation” this year because things have been progressing so slowly. Though the towns have now completed all the requirements, the application has not yet been submitted and the Joint Powers Entity application has been temporarily tabled. Amherst is the lead community.

Ironically, the CCA application was delayed in part because our Sustainability Director’s time is taken up with tasks that could be done by less experienced staff, like organizing the Sustainability Fair for several months this spring. It was also delayed in 2021 because our consultant contract sat in the Amherst Accounting Department for many months – until Accounting Director Anthony Delaney resigned. At that point, the Finance Director (who just resigned) had to take on approval of the contract.

The third goal is to “take necessary steps toward and support the Town Council in developing a waste-hauler bylaw that is feasible and meets the goals of offering universal curbside compost pick-up and pay-as-you-throw fee structure and, if adopted, start implementation”. The Council referred the bylaw proposal to one of its committees in August 2022 – a full year ago. That Committee has discussed the issue but has taken no action yet. The main hold up is that the manager has not dedicated any line staff to assist with the cost analysis.

Other climate action goals for the manager are: “including in the Capital Inventory a timeline for the transition of municipal buildings, vehicles, and equipment from the use of fossil fuels”, “updating the Green House Gas Inventory”, and starting to implement a “heat pump program for residents and utilization of the PACE program for multifamily and business retrofits”.

One area where there has been progress is in “completing a solar assessment and to supporting the work of developing a solar bylaw”. The town hired a consultant to work with the Solar Bylaw Working Group. The assessment was completed on time and confirmed the prioritization of rooftops, parking lots and brownfields as preferred sites for large scale solar. The solar bylaw working group recently received an extension of its timeline to complete their bylaw creation and recommendation.

The 2023 Manager goals also include creation of a Climate Community Dashboard- “a publicly available dashboard and database to track the town’s energy transition in its municipal capital infrastructure”, and the “maintenance of a list of future road and sidewalk repairs that incorporates the town bike and pedestrian plan and that is available to the public and updated regularly”.

Again, l hope the manager will share with climate action groups and residents answers about the status of progress on climate action in Amherst.

Every climate action the town takes helps to avert a degree of warming. Every degree of warming that we avert is a degree that our children and grandchildren don’t have to suffer with – and a degree away from the critical point where our planet fails as a hospitable home for human life. 

As for cost, the long-term cost savings from reducing our emissions and preparing to be climate resilient are far greater than the short term costs we may need to incur, whether governments, institutions, businesses or individuals. This all means we need to be doing everything we can as fast as we can, and not fiddling around.

Darcy DuMont is a former Town Councilor and sponsor of the legislation creating the Amherst Energy and Climate Action Committee. She is a founding member of Zero Waste Amherst, Local Energy Advocates of Western MA, and the Amherst Climate Justice Alliance.