City looks into public presentation on Climate Action and Resilience Plan progress

CARP Implementation Task Force, an Environmental Board subcommittee charged with overseeing how the city implements the eponymous Climate Action and Resilience Plan, is planning to work with staff and possibly community organizations to create a presentation on what CARP goals have been met in 2025.

During its July meeting Wednesday at the City Hall “library” meeting room, the task force agreed that something should be shared with the public in multiple formats and easy to digest. While they would prioritize goals CARP originally set for 2025, the presentation would include some information about progress on longer-term priorities.

The task force also agreed to ask the city senior project manager Bridget Nash to give the Environment Board an update on the Stormwater Master Plan. Dick Lanyon, who served as the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago executive director from 2006 to 2010, told the task force he was worried that there hasn’t been much progress on the plan, and urged either the task force or the Environment Board to push it along. The task force agreed that Nash’s presentation, which is expected to happen in October, would be a good step forward.

CARP goals

As the RoundTable previously reported, the city has a mixed record of meeting CARP goals. Evanston wasn’t able to fully meet any goals for 2025, though it saw more progress on some than others, according to a presentation at the June 12 Environmental Board meeting. City staff also struggled to track progress on some goals. For example, for the goal of having “buses and fleets based and operating in Evanston [be] 50% electric” by 2025, Evanston could track its own fleet of city vehicles, and CTA and Pace bus fleet data is publicly available. Getting data from the U.S. Postal Service and private entities such as Amazon is trickier.

Cara Pratt, the city’s sustainability and resilience manager, said she was looking to put together a report that could be shared with the City Council and the public — and she wanted the task force to weigh in on what it would look like.

A first for CARP

“We’ve never formally done a report [on CARP], to the best of my knowledge,” she said.

Task force member Wendy Pollock, who serves as the RoundTable’s environmental editor, suggested a table that would break down the goals and the ways in which each goal is implemented.

Task force member Jerri Garl wondered whether the presentation should stick to the 2025 goals or look at the plan more broadly. Task force member Paula Scholl, who became the Environment Board co-chair in June, suggested limiting the discussion to 2025 goals, since they were the “canary in the coal mine” and look at the rest of the plan at a future meeting.

Task force chair Katarina Topalov, who also serves as the Environment Board’s other co-chair, suggested that they might not want to get too into the weeds.

“Because it is presented to the public, you want to be as clear as possible, even if you lose some of the details,” she said.

Task force member Hal Sprague suggested that the presentation should have “a set of nicely worded bullet points,” as well as pictures and potentially videos, because they would be “easier to digest” than text.

Garl said that she wanted to make sure that goals that don’t have set benchmarks are captured in the report. Scholl responded that most goals are “pretty darn quantifiable.” But she agreed that mentioning the ones that aren’t was important.

The task force discussed the idea of presenting the goals at an event, and there was broad agreement that members would be willing to work on it, since it wouldn’t be fair to ask the city staff to handle it on its own. But nothing concrete was decided.

Stormwater Master Plan

Lanyon raised concerns about the plan’s implementation in public comment during an earlier Environment Board meeting. With climate change and increasingly extreme weather, he said, it was important to shore up Evanston’s stormwater mitigation infrastructure, and he worried that the city wasn’t making it as much of a priority as it should be.

During Wednesday’s meeting, Lanyon urged the task force to push the city toward implementation.

Purpose is ‘to nag’

“That’s the purpose of this group, to be an aggravating body, to nag people,” he said, adding that he would be prepared to help.

In the ensuing discussion, Pratt noted that while the 2025 budget allocated funding for stormwater mitigation, including $400,000 for smaller improvements, she wasn’t certain where some of the projects were and how much money has been spent.

Pratt suggested that reaching out to councilmembers would be best. Lanyon disagreed, arguing that the city manager would be a more logical person to approach.

After further discussion, the task force agreed that Nash, who updated the city council on the Stormwater Master back in May, would be the logical person to give an update on the plan’s progress.