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HomeMy WebLinkAboutClimate Council Meeting Summary - 8-20-2020Orange County Climate Council Meeting Summary August 20, 2020 3:00pm - 4:30pm Online Meeting Attendees: Mark Marcoplos (Chair), Brennan Bouma (staff), Crystal Cavalier, Patricia Clayton, Cathy Cole, Paul Cough, Ray DuBose, Robb English, Tyrone Fisher, Laura Janway, Kathy Kaufman, Adam Long, Melissa McCullough, Donna Rubinoff, Owen Ryerson, Sammy Slade, Mary Tiger, Stephanie Trueblood Public comments received by advertised deadline: None Observers for the meeting: Members of the interest list as well as Benjamin Li and Bo Chi – interested CHCCS students I.Call to Order, Land Acknowledgement - Marcoplos called the meeting to order at 3:06pm. Cavalier gave a native lands acknowledgement for Orange County, recognizing that Orange County sits on the historic lands of the Occoneechi, Saponi, Tutelo, and historically the land where Orange County now sits had Tuscarora, Sissipahaw, Eno, Shakori, Saura, and Catawba Cavalier began by thanking the Council for bringing the land acknowledgement into the meeting agenda as it is important to acknowledge the long history of this land. It is important to note that indigenous people still exist in the present and colonialism is a current ongoing process that we need to be mindful of. Cavalier encouraged members to take the land acknowledgement back to their own organizations, and directed everyone to the website “Native-lands.ca” for more information and an interactive map. This map is not the most current and complete, but it is the best widely available resource. There are 8 state-recognized tribes and Cherokee is federally recognized. Bouma proposed that at a written or verbal land acknowledgement be a regular part of future meetings, and the Council agreed. II.Additions or Changes to the Agenda Members discussed an issue that Orange County At-Large representative Jonas Monast will have with the regularly scheduled meetings due to his fall teaching schedule. Monast offered to stay engaged in committee meetings and other activities but since he would not be able to participate in the regular meetings, he offered to step down if the Council wished. McCullough suggested that the Council consider changing meeting times, if we could find one that worked for everyone. Perhaps we could find an alternate for his position. Bouma said that the Council’s meeting schedule was long-discussed and was hesitant to change it. Acknowledging that Monast would continue in his work with the Policy Committee, it was decided to revisit this discussion if getting to quorum became an issue. III. Approval of Meeting Minutes from June 18, 2020 and July 16 Council members had reviewed the minutes and had no comments or edits. Trueblood moved to approve the minutes as written and English seconded. The minutes were approved unanimously. IV. Update from Climate Action Reporting Committee Tiger reported that the committee had begun analyzing what is in the CARD now that it is nearly complete. It will be a good tool to catalog and celebrate the climate actions being done in the community as well as a tool to align actions and see opportunities where we can share experience. There are quantitative summaries built into each row and column helping to track how many organizations have done each action and how many actions have been completed by each organization. Tiger added that some key takeaways so far. Within the diversity of Council members, not all fields are applicable. Most Council members have climate action goals and there may be opportunities to align the time targets. Some actions are not as popular and may show an opportunity for further action and partnership. For the September event, this committee aims to share the CARD itself as well as a 1-page summary of our key takeaways. Bouma thanked the group for their ongoing work and pointed out the elements of a Report CARD summary table that updates automatically. He pointed out that this summary takes into account what is applicable to your organization in its calculation of the percent that each organization has completed. Bouma invited members to revisit the CARD in advance of the meeting to see if there are new actions that we are tracking and need member input. V. Update from Policy Committee Trueblood reported that the Policy Committee has created and sent out a link to a list of policy actions that members can take. Trueblood has worked to include descriptions of each action in the table, as well as examples of where the policies had been implemented elsewhere. The Committee’s other group of creating a list of actions that are potentially more costly or difficult and is adding detail and ranking them. The group is currently looking for feedback from the Council to ensure that they are in the right track before investing much more time in elaborating further. Trueblood asked the Council if they would be interested in advocating for these policies or if these lists were meant to be informational and coordinating resources similar to the CARD. Given the budget constraints of the pandemic, should the Climate Council coordinate on the bigger impact items and pool resources? McCullough offered thanks for their work and supported the idea that the Council advocate. Identifying actions with a good return on investment for governments and residents and promoting them would be a good role for the Council. Trueblood agreed and pointed out the overlap of all of the committees on this point, and that many of these policy ideas might align with LEED for Cities applications. She offered that she has been referring to this list as a menu of options and that the low-cost items are “appetizers,” recognizing that they may be easy to implement but may not make the biggest difference. The other list has more of the “entrée” items that could make a bigger difference in emissions. Trueblood then reiterated that their group is looking for more input before going further and that they would be happy to wait until after the public event to incorporate feedback on next steps. Kaufman then said that we would likely want to have input into how the Climate Action Tax funds are allocated. Trueblood added that she’d had discussions with Richardson and Janway about being sure to avoid competition for the use of funds. If one municipality had a good idea, then the other members should support them. Coordination on project would help to get larger projects completed and these would make a bigger impact than a series of smaller projects. Cough then added that he likes the idea of choosing a few actions that we could focus on together, and asked if any were already jumping out as good focus areas. Trueblood said that investing in renewables, greening the grid, electrification, and electric vehicles are likely to make the most difference locally in the short term. McCullough wondered whether there was a possibility to create a recommended actions committee to prioritize across the lists and bring back to the Council. Bouma said that may make sense and align with a conversation of the Communications Committee to use the opportunity to gather some feedback on priority actions during the public event. He then referred to the Climate Action Tax saying that the notice of funding availability is coming out soon announcing the formal grant program desired by the Board of Orange County Commissioners. This will be the ongoing process by which climate action tax fund projects are chosen. The Commission for the Environment and the Human Relations Commission will be scoring submitted applications and then the Commissioners will have the final say. That said, there may be opportunities for the Climate Council to weigh in and suggest projects, it is just not currently on the table for the Climate Council to have a formal role in allocating funding. Bouma added that there are other funding sources that need to be aligned with climate actions. The County expects to see several smaller projects come out of the grant program going forward, and this can be part of the overall strategy to take advantage of opportunities where we find them. Marcoplos added that he feels the Council will find a way to participate in the grant process, if only by spreading the word and assisting applicants in creating projects. There may be other ideas, and we should consider them. Rubinoff then said that nearly each member has a climate action plan, so it will be useful to compare across them to find areas of overlap in priority and action. Collaboration would be an opportunity, and one of our original motivations in creating this council was to identify actions that require the action of more than one jurisdiction. This will help us articulate how we are adding value to the member organizations. McCullough then said that one of the opportunities in participating in the grant program might be to suggest a list of projects to consider for various types of applicants. This would leverage work the Council has already done., and may encourage additional applications by seeding ideas. Bouma added that the Council should approach advocacy carefully so as not to put staff members in an awkward position. He pointed out that a strength of the Council is that we have elected officials as members who are elected to represent residents and advocate for policies, and it may be best for the Council to work through those elected officials to carry messages back to the member governments where the final decisions will be made. Cough then voiced his support for Rubinoff’s focus on actions that require more than one government to act in order to be effective. That logic can apply to our own priority list and aligning it with the state’s climate action plans. Trueblood said that it would be useful to know whether we intend for their policy lists to be merged with the CARD or stay separate. Bouma responded that the CARD committee had discussed a way to align those lists under the logic that the CARD would represent actions that at least one member had already started and the policy list could represent actions that no one has done yet and could pull Council members into further action. This may be a difficult thing to pull off in practice, so it may be best to have a meeting of the two committees to explore this further. The Policy Committee agreed to have a separate meeting with the Climate Action Reporting Committee on this topic, ideally in advance of the public-facing event. VI. Update from Communications Committee Bouma summarized that the Communications Committee had primarily discussed plans for the upcoming public-facing event. Current plans were to highlight voices from the Council itself in presentations. Marcoplos and McCullough would provide an introduction highlighting overall progress and purpose, and tying to the present moment in the pandemic. Then we would move into presentations from two members on each of the three committees since that is where the Climate Council has been conducting its focused work. We would begin with the Climate Action Reporting Committee giving a snapshot of where we are, then move to the Policy committee to say where we could go and then the Communications Committee could take it from there. This proposed agenda moves away from our earlier discussions around having a big name outside speaker and ensures we focus on communicating about our efforts. Having two speakers per committee should allow for us to highlight the diversity of our membership and organizations. McCullough added that we would also have a Q and A session for the public and then a closing statement. Cole then added that we wanted to ask Cavalier to kick off the meeting with a land acknowledgement. Marcoplos added that Kaufman would be the moderator and would also be asking for feedback from participants on the meeting itself and the work of the Council overall. Kaufman added that we were thinking about the evening of October 1st, and asked for any thoughts on the idea of soliciting feedback from meeting participants. Trueblood asked if the purpose of the event was more educational about the work of the Council or if it would be more focused on hearing from the community about climate action priorities. In her experience, it does not work well to try to do both at once. If you’re asking for feedback, you have to be very clear about what feedback you are asking for before they show up at the meeting. If it’s more about making contact sharing information, and building a relationship then it can be more open. Marcoplos agreed and said that the event was mostly meant to explain what we do and what we’ve done. McCullough said that we could not consider this an official feedback generating event since that requires a much more intentional approach to ensure representation. This is more educational. What are we doing and why is it relevant. Trueblood said that sounds good and said that some virtual platforms are better than others in allowing people to provide a small amount of feedback. Mini-survey on where you are from, for instance can be good for warming up the participants. Bouma agreed and said that the committee had discussed that somewhat as well as doing a follow-up survey. He had reached out to the Clerk’s office as well to get guidance on which platform might work best and to see if they might provide a technical support person to help manage the event. Tiger like the idea of a survey, as a way to get feedback and provide a call to action that people might be interested in. They may be looking for things they can do themselves. Kaufman agreed that it may be good to suggest a way to get involved. Rubinoff added that this is what Mary Parry said was a good thing to do. Getting people to share what they know about climate change and climate action with others. Marcoplos and Kaufman also stressed the importance of recording the meeting and providing the recording to others. Bouma confirmed that would be done. Cole offered that we would likely have people register for the event and that would facilitate follow-ups afterwards. Tiger recommended that every Council member be introduced and volunteered to collect and piece together a video of everyone introducing themselves. Everyone liked that idea. English and McCullough recommended that everyone follow a similar script or word count for their 1-2 sentences. Cole agreed, Marcoplos suggested that it be a number of seconds. Tiger suggested that 10 seconds might be best. Bouma then brought up one final discussion point for the Council that came up in the Communications committee, and that is that it may be best to postpone the leadership succession until January of 2021 in order to avoid conflicts with the normal processes of committee assignments that takes place at the end of each year for the elected officials and their colleagues. That way we can be sure we know who is on our roster before selecting leadership. McCullough made a motion to approve the change in succession date and Kaufman seconded. The council voted unanimously to approve the motion. Council members could not all agree with the October 1st evening time that was proposed for the event, so Bouma said that he would send a Doodle Poll to identify the best date for the meeting. VII. Discussion of Public Event and Succession planning This discussion is merged with the update from the Communications committee above. VIII. Adjournment Bouma asked for a motion to adjourn the meeting and this was provided by Kaufman and seconded by Cole. The Council voted unanimously to adjourn the meeting at 4:33pm.