Task Force Hopes For More Connections With Town Decisions
Volunteer Members Set to Edit Town's Climate Action Plan This Summer
BAR HARBOR—The Bar Harbor Task Force on the Climate Emergency met on Monday afternoon. Members couldn’t take any official action due to a lack of a quorum. The attending members still had an active discussion where they touched on school construction and EV charger placement and waste management, but it all came back to how to help the Bar Harbor community come closer to a net-zero carbon footprint and updating the group’s Climate Action Plan.
They have a lot of ideas though the task force members felt hampered without a town sustainability coordinator, and one of their key hopes is increasing people’s awareness about what the town, the task force, and individuals can do to create a more sustainable community when it comes to the carbon footprint.
According to its bylaws, the task force formed in 2020 and is meant “to define and recommend climate goals with the objective of drawing down carbon from the atmosphere and reducing community-wide greenhouse gas emissions by December 31, 2030.” Governor Janet Mills pledged three years ago that by 2045, Maine will be carbon-neutral. Being carbon-neutral basically means that a person puts out the same amount of carbon as they offset.
The hope is that by becoming carbon-neutral, people, communities, and businesses can help decrease greenhouse gasses. As MIT’s Climate Portal explains, “Greenhouse gases are gases—like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide—that keep the Earth warmer than it would be without them.”
Listening Session Feedback
Much of the Monday meeting focused on feedback from the June 15, a Bar Harbor Climate Action Planning listening session, which the task force hosted. The goal was to try to get thoughts and criticisms about the Climate Change Action Plan.
Committee members heard a lot of buy-in to the current plan for the town and new ideas, but not a lot of pushback. It was more additive ideas rather than criticism of current strategies. Chair Ruth Poland said it might be a feature of the attending audience’s psychographics, but Bar Harbor as a community is quite supportive of reducing the carbon footprint.
“I really want to get people who aren’t part of the choir,” Poland said about attendance at the next two listening sessions, co-facilitated by A Climate To Thrive, of which she’s a member of the board. The first session will likely be in October.
“Most people came (to the June session) because someone told them to come,” she said and while she’s appreciative and thankful for the attendance, she hopes for more diversity of opinion in the future, perhaps reaching people who don’t have sustainability issues on the forefront of their thoughts.
Making people more aware of the sessions, the action plan, the committee, and what they can do themselves to reduce their carbon footprints was also touched on during the meeting.
Poland hopes to take the feedback from the listening session, further organize it, input it into the Climate Action Plan, and then bring back those edits to the task force for its August meeting.
The group also discussed data about waste management in Bar Harbor and discussed again a “stick and/or carrot” approach (such as pay per throw for trash) for individual and business waste reduction, so basically how to keep less trash from entering the waste stream. Part of the need is understanding and having enough data about waste management so that the town can be able to deal with waste.
Task force member Brian Booher said that he noticed at the listening session that there was a “disconnect between being in support and not knowing what your heating system is.” It’s hard to take action on your personal carbon footprint when you don’t understand the factors or when changes feel too stressful or costly or difficult to understand, he said.
“Even a well-intentioned person who believes this is important might just not get around to it,” he said.
So, while carrots and sticks are nice. . . .
“It comes down to policy,” task force member Margaret Jeffery said and added that it also relates to to the town’s incentives and disincentives.
And that is all about revisions to town codes and getting information out to people.
“There are a lot of good hearted people who just don’t know,” Poland said. The task force quickly discussed potential workshops for residents to help them understand their carbon footprint and how to change it. “Making it personal can be powerful.”
Even behavioral changes like walking vs driving in Bar Harbor proper, understanding utility bills and being more appliance savvy, seeing how much you drive and pay for gas or how much trash you throw away can all lead to a better understanding and to making a difference.
“They care about it. They worry about it. They don’t feel like it’s accessible and too stressful to even look into,” Poland said was a lot of people’s mindsets.
So, the task force wondered: How do we provide information for the people who don’t know what their heat source is, their fuel source? How do we get people to knowing about the most basic stuff?
Not overburdening people but giving them the highest impact for the action was suggested.
Vice Chair Tobin Peacock said that he wasn’t super comfortable with the stick approach to create change because he could foresee people throwing their McDonald’s trash out the window rather than in the garbage or not insulating the house the way they are supposed to as work arounds. Still, he worried that carrots were working well enough either. He said, “There are a lot of carrots out there in the world right now. A lot of state money for change. A lot of federal money for change.”
INTERCONNECTIONS AND NEEDS
The task force members also expressed their desires to be more fully connected and updated on the work of the Comprehensive Planning Committee. Their member had resigned. The former Sustainability Coordinator, Laura Berry, attended those meetings and gave the task force updates, but she was let go in January after the resignation of Town Manager Kevin Sutherland.
The task force hoped that a new town manager and sustainability coordinator would be hired soon to coordinate with the Comprehensive Planning Committee, but also to be a voice for sustainability issues in town meetings and decisions, including those decisions about the construction of the Conners Emerson School. Voters approved a $58 million bond early this June. The school’s construction decisions will be mostly fine-tuned this summer by its building committee. The group suggested reaching out to Misha Mytar who is on the Comprehensive Planning Committee and School Board.
Poland said that there are pieces in the action plan that move toward the Comprehensive Plan. She sees the Comprehensive Plan as a place where the integration of sustainable systems and community can happen. That’s because the Climate Action Plan is about carbon emissions and a more working plan, flexible and able to be updated more frequently than the Comprehensive Plan, which is state mandated and has a lengthier process. The Comprehensive Plan is meant to give a community a blueprint that lasts for years.
Poland said the task force is just volunteers, albeit amazing, hard-working volunteers, that meet twice a month. “We have very little capacity to do much,” she said, but she’s proud of what they’ve done. Having a staff person in the town office being part of those conversations, is essential, she said.
“There’s so much going on with the town and the Comp Plan and decisions are being made and we’re not at the table,” Poland said.
The group also discussed just reminding officials about sustainability opportunities and input into town decisions.
“I feel like I should go to every Town Council meeting and at the beginning say that … our school should include solar panels,” Jeffery said.
Booher said he’d reached out to School Board Chair Alexandra “Lilea” Simis about school construction, solar panels, and heat pumps. She said that they’d love the task force’s input.
The next meeting is scheduled for July 25 at the Bar Harbor Municipal Building at 4 p.m. All the meetings are open to the public.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
https://www.barharbormaine.gov/468/Task-Force-on-the-Climate-Emergency
https://barharborstory.substack.com/p/climate-action-plan-about-more-than
https://www.barharbormaine.gov/468/Task-Force-on-the-Climate-Emergency
To email the task force, send to tfclimate@barharbormaine.gov