GRAND RAPIDS — The Grand Rapids City Council unanimously adopted a climate action plan at its meeting Monday, Oct. 14. The city declared a climate emergency that called for the action plan in January 2022.
The plan combines actions the city has already completed or is currently doing with future project ideas, grouped into four categories: rain gardens, solar power, transportation and waste.
Dan Swenson, assistant community development director, will be the city staff member primarily overseeing the plan. He’ll report progress to the Council annually and as needed until the plan is updated in 2027.
The plan was created by the city’s Climate Action Advisory Committee, made up of citizens and supported by city staff.
Molly MacGregor represented the Council on the committee. She said they decided not to include anything about reducing carbon emissions, partly because of challenges in measuring them.
“We did include activities that the city has done and is continuing to implement that will have that effect of reducing carbon emissions, but we decided to focus on climate resiliency and recognizing that what the climate is, is very changeable and dramatically so,” she said, pointing to the recent alternating examples of drought and heavy precipitation as examples of the dramatic changes.
The plan lays out examples of resiliency, including ensuring city building and infrastructure can withstand climate variability and generally working to reduce carbon emissions.
“We’re not trying to litigate the whole question of what is climate change. Smarter and better people have done that, and it’s really not appropriate for a city of our size anyway,” MacGregor said.
“But we did want to emphasize that the city is thinking about this, and the city is working really hard to find actions that are climate resilient for the very simple reason that they generally are better solutions for those kinds of problems; they’re less expensive in the long run.”
Much of the plan builds on existing projects, like rain gardens and solar arrays. It also sets simple, achievable goals, like not idling city vehicles, and supporting local waste projects.
Some of the first results of the plan may include solar panels returning to the library, neighborhood maintenance of rain gardens and a new city waste contract, though all ideas are still in the exploration stage.
As part of the development process, the committee looked at Minnesota cities with climate plans like Bemidji and Grand Marais.
“We didn’t want to make a goal for something that we couldn’t achieve, and that was, I think, one of the things we realized from reading other cities’ plans, is that they had some good ideas but achieving it was really difficult,” MacGregor explained.
She said the committee didn’t want to create extra costs, especially ones that would require additional tax revenue. She wants the intentions of the plan to be clear.
“And the intentions are to reduce costs, be climate resilient and serve the community in a positive way,” MacGregor said.
Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).
