Chester County Municipalities Unite for Climate Action Education
Posted July 23, 2024
Chester County's Climate Action Plan is a plan for everyone: indeed, there are at least 60 actions in the plan that can be implemented by local governments. Although some of these actions are things municipalities have been doing, like adopting ordinances that encourage smart growth and implementing traffic calming projects to make walking and biking safer, some of the actions have more of a learning curve, like converting municipal fleet vehicles to electric or switching to renewable energy to power municipal facilities.
To help speed up that learning curve, Chester County and its Environmental and Energy Advisory Board convene a Local Government Climate Action Team to learn together about these newer topics, to share information with each other, and to learn about available resources for implementing sustainability projects. The Action Team is geared toward municipal staff and elected officials, but other representatives can participate if delegated by their municipality. Currently about 15 municipalities participate in the group. If your municipality is interested in participating, please contact CCPC's Sustainability Director, Rachael Griffith at rObfuscationgriffith@Obfuscationchesco.org.
The most recent meeting of the group was held in June and focused on regulating electric vehicle charging through municipal ordinances. Three municipalities discussed their recently adopted ordinances and shared information about how enforcement is going. At the next meeting, planners from CCPC and Montgomery County Planning Commission will share a draft of a new toolkit for incentivizing the energy transition in new construction and renovation projects through zoning and subdivision ordinances. The workshop will be highly interactive and will feature municipalities who have already included some of these cutting-edge provisions into their codes.
Other topics the group has expressed interest in covering include renewable energy procurement, community composting, building energy management, and lawn-to-meadow conversion projects.
Between meetings CCPC aims to give municipalities information about which of their fellow municipalities have implemented a variety of sustainability practices. An inventory of municipal sustainability practices was newly launched on CCPC's website and shares information about which municipalities have implemented practices like EV fleet conversions, renewable energy systems, and lawn-to-meadow projects.
The series of interactive maps are based on information reported by municipalities, so if your municipality has implemented one of these practices but is not on the map, please contact sObfuscationustainability@Obfuscationchesco.org.