4 years after protests, Fargo advocates question the city's commitment to climate action - INFORUM

4 years after protests, Fargo advocates question the city's commitment to climate action - InForum | Fargo, Moorhead and West Fargo news, weather and sports

4 years after protests, Fargo advocates question the city's commitment to climate action

“Fargo created a committee where it seems like ideas are going to die,” Zac Echola said. “I think they’ve been trying to find footing for a long time and they haven’t really done a whole lot.”

FARGO — Fargo’s youngest residents gathered on the steps of City Hall over four years ago as part of the global movement to demand action on climate change.

Bullhorn in hand, 11-year-old Penelope Echola led her peers back in 2019 as they rallied and demanded that Fargo's leadership prioritize sustainability efforts.

Following those protests, the city of Fargo created the Sustainability and Resiliency Committee, tasked with recommending actions and policy changes to city leaders that create a more sustainable, environmentally friendly community.

Now, Echola is in high school and finds herself questioning what action the committee has taken in the last few years as the local impacts of climate change become seemingly more and more apparent.

“We have been protesting this exact same thing since 2019,” Echola said. “The city agreed to take action and then failed to execute it properly.”

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Echola isn’t the only voice questioning the sustainability committee’s progress. Mark Taggart, a fellow Fargo environmentalist, attended their last meeting and expressed concern that city leaders have taken very little action over the years towards sustainability.

Commissioner John Strand — chair of the Sustainability and Resiliency Committee and instrumental to its founding — understands their concerns but said there is more to the city's work than meets the eye.

Continuing problem

“Even at 11 I could recognize that there were problems with our ecosystem,” Echola told The Forum. “Although I might not have been able to comprehend them as well as I am able to now, I still can realize that there was in fact an issue and that issue is continuing now.”

These are big topics but they aren’t just topics for adults, she said.

“I can recognize the features that are happening around us. I can see that the air quality is getting worse. Winter disappearing for the first time ever in North Dakota. I can just visually see climate detriments happening.”

It’s the sustainability committee’s responsibility to address such issues by getting ideas off the ground and pushing them forward, Echola said.

As the captain of her school’s student congress, Echola has some experience with leadership.

“I really believe that you need to give your peers something to work for and work towards for them to actually succeed. Without motivation you can’t excel at what you do. I think the best thing that we can do is be motivating these committees rather than push it off and saying nothing about it.”

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Her father, Zac Echola, stood by her side during the protests back in 2019. He works as a Minnesota Master Naturalist and serves on his union's executive committee. He has been pushing for action on climate change for years and has been thinking about it since he, too, was 15.

“We’re all aware that the city of Fargo can’t solve climate change.” Zac Echola said, but there are many policy choices and operational decisions that the city could make that would mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis and help make resident’s quality of life better in the long term.

“We can’t change the wildfires in Canada but we can act in ways to mitigate it so that our air quality here in Fargo is better,” he said, by tweaking city building codes to require higher-quality air exchange systems in new buildings, for example.

The committee could be making plans to help with emissions, trying to invest more in renewable energy over fossil fuels and make recycling more accessible and widespread.

For example, there is no recycling program for apartments or businesses in Fargo, Zac Echola said. That would be a straightforward thing for the committee to fix.

Ideas like this should be flying through the Sustainability and Resiliency Committee, he believed.

“Fargo created a committee where it seems like ideas are going to die” Zac Echola said. “I think they’ve been trying to find footing for a long time and they haven’t really done a whole lot.”

The problem, Zac Echola said, stems from the very top. He feels that the city of Fargo creates committees following citizen-led protests that — lacking any real authority or clear initiatives — flounder for purpose.

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'Nothing happens quickly'

The fact that Fargo was able to even get a sustainability committee off the ground is an achievement in itself, Strand said.

North Dakota’s political climate doesn’t leave a lot of room for climate discussions, he believed.

“I’m proud of the fact that we have leaders in the city sitting at the table. I’m proud that we are making this a focal point of our community,” Strand said.

“Nothing happens quickly,” Strand added.

The city is making incremental steps towards curbing climate emissions, he said.

Fargo has been working on sustainability initiatives for years, he said. Some of those include the Fargo-Moorhead Diversion to provide climate resiliency, installing an electric vehicle charging station at City Hall and reusing landfill gas out of the city’s landfill for emissions reductions, according to a document from the city that included a host of other city actions.

While the diversion project predates the sustainability committee, it is unclear which of the many items in the document stemmed from the committee.

Since its founding in 2020, the committee has heard many informational presentations from various organizations, according to meeting minutes.

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To date, the committee has taken the following actions, according to The Forum's analysis of meeting minutes: issued a proclamation, funded a reusable bag initiative, coordinated carbon capture dashboards for city buildings, hired an outside firm to develop a work plan for the committee with identified goals and grants to fund them, and collaborated with other city boards to put sustainability-themed art on one MATBUS vehicle.

“I’m sensing we’re (the sustainabiity committee) getting closer to actions,” Strand said last week. “Rather than just theoretical studies of things. The public needs it and expects it of us.”

Nevertheless, Strand said the sustainability committee provides an important jumping off point and gathering place for collaboration on these topics.

These issues need to be “frontburner” for Fargo, he said.

“I believe our planet is in a crisis state,” he said. “I believe that we can’t have our blinders on about the realities that are happening.”

The diversion project is a key component to protect residents from “erratic cycles of weather, floods and droughts,” Strand said.

These impacts are already here, he said. In December 2023, the city had to close Elm Street due to the weather, he noted. The closing was the product of the area's first ever December flood warning.

“Imagine if we had city leaders who were in absolute denial about climate issues,” Strand said. “Who didn’t believe the science of it; who didn’t care about the impacts of it. Who blindly go forward doing what the heck they want no matter what without considering the consequences. I just can’t even begin to fathom the alternatives.”

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When asked why the sustainability committee only meets every other month, Strand said it’s in an effort to respect the time of the many city department heads on the committee and “avoid wasting people’s time.”

He did not answer when asked if that is enough of a time commitment from the committee. He said he’d like to have a sustainability department but it is not in the city’s budget.

It is “gratifying and reassuring” to know there are people in Fargo who want and expect more of the sustainability committee, he said.

“I wish more people in our community had higher expectations of us and didn’t just wish this committee to go away,” Strand said. “It’s good that they are paying attention to these issues. I wish the whole state did. I wish this was a clamor all the way across the state demanding action from their elected officials to address these climate issues.”

Missing proposal

More a year ago a local environmental group — Citizens Local Energy Action Network — gathered over 300 signatures in an effort to put their idea to require EV chargers at Fargo apartments before the City Commission for consideration.

Strand felt the idea should go through the sustainability committee first, according to a city agenda from Nov. 22, 2022, and the matter was brought to the committee for consideration. Typically, if a committee likes an idea, the idea will be passed on to the City Commission and recommended for approval.

The proposal has now vanished into Fargo’s inner cogs.

CLEAN hasn’t heard a peep on the idea since then, interim Secretary Paul Jensen told The Forum.

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Strand told The Forum that he informally asked the city’s Economic Development Incentives Committee to take on the idea and evaluate its worth. The request wasn’t an official action of the sustainability committee, he said, but as part of a larger discussion during a public meeting.

He was not sure where the proposal stood or if the EDIC committee members are working on it, Strand said.

The EDIC does not have this idea on their radar, Mayor Tim Mahoney told The Forum via text on Friday.

That the city had yet to take action on CLEAN's idea was news to Jensen.

The custainability committee should have taken action on CLEAN’s proposal one way or another, he believed, either by advancing it to the City Commission for consideration, making a formal motion to pass it to another committee, or telling CLEAN that the city is not receptive to the idea.

“That's the problem,” Jensen said. “They aren’t putting people on the spot to give their opinions or their input. Had they done that we would have had a clear signal. But then of course the committee would have been held responsible for that by sustainability groups.”

“Over the past seven to eight years, it has been our observation that many valuable suggestions to address climate change have unfortunately gone unheeded,” Jensen wrote in an email to The Forum.

“Additionally, the committee, to our knowledge, operates without a budget, rendering it unable to initiate any meaningful improvements for the community. Despite words of good intention, there has been little to no action taken.” Jensen continued.

People look to Fargo as a regional leader, Jensen said, and it’s incumbent on the city to take bold steps forward.

“The problem is that it takes a long time to build this so you have to have vision,” he said. “Our city leaders must have vision that goes beyond what they know.”

Readers with thoughts about this issue can contact their elected officials, write a letter to the editor or email Forum reporter Melissa Van Der Stad at mvanderstad@forumcomm.com.

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