Red Hook village getting back on track for Climate Smart certification

RED HOOK, N.Y. — Trustees are considering what steps to take for the village to begin moving toward attaining Climate Smart Communities accreditation.

The effort is moving forward as a resumption of work that was abruptly halted five years ago, Mayor Karen Smythe said Tuesday, Dec. 2, during a telephone interview.

“The process towards Climate Smart Communities certification was started in 2019 and interrupted by COVID and got restarted by Trustee Kym Bradley-Rickard and then she resigned in May,” she said.

Coming back into to preparation for certification has included determining what has already been done to move toward assessments, inventory, and planning for projects.

“It appears that the village may have done (planning) in 2019 and we sort of discovered it along the way in working with (Cornell Cooperative Extension) over the last few months,” Smythe said. “This is apparently the foundation on which you then go to the next step…looking at the specific actions you can take and how many points you get because you need a certain number of points to get to bronze certification.”

Points toward certification can also come from steps the village has already taken.

“The list is huge and part of it will be culling through the list to pull up the things that are logical for us to do, that we’ve either already done, or we’ve just got to get a little bit of a definition,” Smythe said.

“We have an electric police vehicle and we have a composting program,” Smythe said. “Those are two obvious ones that we’ve done in the recent past, and that’s part of our next Climate Smart Task Force meeting to go through the list and find out which ones we’ve got.”

Much of the Climate Smart Communities has to do with minimizing flood risk and the impact of watercourses or wetlands. While the village is not immediately affected by those issues,  there are weather-related factors that could play a role in long-term plans.

“Flooding in a floodplain is not our issue, but the concentration of rain in a storm dropping a lot quickly does lead to some issues,” Smythe said.

Once the village is certified at the Climate Smart Communities bronze level, there will be grant options available to move forward with planning and implementation goals.

“There are some grants for completing specific actions …like the comprehensive plan,” said Cornell Cooperative Extension educator Scott Kleinberg.

Advantages to following a Climate Smart program include having a template for updating plans based on changes in community growth for buildings and demographics.

“The plan should…(updated) as new buildings are built, as a population changes, as new weather patterns are gathering the data may be a little different over time,” Kleinberg said.