Roadtrip: Suyvesant Climate Smart Task Force

Last week when I visited Stockport's Town Board Meeting I chatted with Susan Helden, a member of the Stockport Climate Smart Task Force created earlier this year. I was curious to hear what their experience was spinning it up as I firmly believe that Greenport needs to go through the same motions to register with the Climate Smart Communities program.

I am speaking here not as a tree-hugging environmentalist but rather as someone who believes that for a municipality to be eligible for grant money from NY State—which Greenport will need to fix its wastewater issues—it needs to have demonstrated efforts to engage with these state-initiated programs.

During our chat, Susan suggested to visit the task force up in Stuyvesant which I did last night. To my pleasant surprise, they already knew I was coming and had an extra agenda printed out with my name on it. More importantly though, they seemed very eager to answer my questions, of which there were many.

Stuyvesant's Climate Smart Task Force has been in existence since 2022. What sets them apart is that they meticulously collect and publish their records on their website. Reading through their rather excellent meeting minutes gives one an idea of how much work had to be expended to receive a bronze certification from NY State DEC earlier this year in April.

More worryingly, to me anyway, was looking at this group of seven people present at last night's meeting and wondering where I would conceivably find an equivalent set of people in Greenport willing to do this rather unglamorous work. I am sure they exist; I just don't currently know where.

What needs to be stated upfront is that the action items prescribed by the Climate Smart Communities (CSC) program are by no means softballs. They cover a wide gamut, and while some low hanging fruits are amongst them, many require hiring a consultant or engineer, or require the town to make significant financial contributions, or—in the case of Greenport—are entirely inapplicable: PE6 - Smart Growth Policies for example appears to be predicated on an existing zoning plan. Greenport doesn't currently have zoning. A Zoning Commission has created a plan that at some point will become active, but it was purposefully kept light and bare-bones and may not support what this action asks the municipality to do.

I asked Stuyvesant task force member Kathy Schneider, who also represents the Town of Stuyvesant on the county-wide Climate Start Task Force, how they dealt with this, also when considering that their Town Supervisor Ron Knott initially voted against the formation of a Climate Smart Task Force.

Kathy explained that you always start small and find the cheap action items, do those first, and move yourself up the flagpole this way. Some action items also have grant funding available which they took advantage of. She noted however that these grants often incur a considerable administrative overhead with quarterly reporting requirements and such. At no point during my conversations with the Stuyvesant task force members did I get the impression that this was easy or fun.

One such example of something that is in practice quite hard even when it may not appear that way in the action item description was on last night's agenda: Task force member Hannah Sheppard had been working on the greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory and depicted how unhelpful the byzantine bills sent out by National Grid are.

Her task is further complicated by the fact that the Stuyvesant town hall has solar collectors on its roof which leave their own strange marks in the utility bills she is looking at. She described how in a number of consecutive months the apparent power usage of town hall is zero, then it shoots up to some random high number, only to drop back down to zero the following month. No doubt she will eventually sort this out but it will have taken her an inordinate amount of time.

Not all is misery however, especially not when achievements by the task force are well received. Task force chair Bill Schneider described to me that when they procured a number of electric landscaping tools (presumably as part of PE4 - Electric Landscaping Equipment), the guys from Stuyvesant's Highway Department were ecstatic when they realized the new tools were compatible with their already existing battery eco-system and they no longer needed to bring canisters of gas to work sites.

It may have been little things like these that eventually made Town Supervisor Ron Knott warm up to what these nine task force volunteers were doing. It appears that they are now enjoying administrative support from their Supervisor, who more readily supports their efforts by providing required documents, facilitating outside help, e.g. by the Cornell Cooperative Extension, and even giving them a tiny little line item in the annual budget: one thousand dollars. It is not much but then again, the Stuyvesant Climate Smart Task Force was always going to be self-sufficient.

How all of the above could conceivably be applied to the Town of Greenport is an entirely different matter. Our town does not currently have a complete town board—Frank Iaccino resigned last week. Supervisor Kathy Eldridge has stopped talking to her constituents and looks distressed and volatile. My hope at this point is that she has mentally checked out so comprehensively that she will at least not object to registering Greenport in the CSC program.