Five years after the city of Ithaca passed its Green New Deal, city staff say they have decided to rewrite the city’s plan for how it will achieve its climate commitments.
The Green New Deal resolution, which passed in 2019, included a commitment for the city to become carbon neutral and electrify all its buildings by 2030. That promise catapulted Ithaca to national headlines as the first city to make such an ambitious commitment to reduce its climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
The resolution also charged city staff with creating a formal climate action plan that would outline how the city would achieve those goals. Ithaca's sustainability director, Rebecca Evans, wrote in a post on LinkedIn last month that she recently decided to scrap the version of that plan she had been working on.
The decision, she said in an interview with WSKG, does not change the goals of the Green New Deal, but instead reframes the city’s approach of how it will achieve its commitments.
Evans said that rather than prioritizing reducing emissions, the new plan will prioritize helping residents adapt to living in a warming world, while also working towards the city’s emissions-reduction goals. That could include providing residents with better access to social services, like housing and job training, and improving the city's emergency response and electricity reliability.
“We have not gone back on anything we said we were going to do,” said Evans. “If anything, we're just making it more complicated for ourselves.”
Evans said she had been working on a draft of the previous climate action plan for the past several months. But she decided to scrap that version in part because of some conversations with residents, who said they were more concerned with housing and job security. She said she believed that the Green New Deal had lost support and relatability as it became more removed from most residents’ daily lives.
When it passed, the Green New Deal resolution included a commitment to ensure that benefits from Ithaca’s environmental investments are shared among communities “to reduce historical social and economic inequities”. The new framing, Evans said, is a return to that intention.
“Decarbonizing a building became more important than providing housing, and that does not feel worth it to me,” said Evans. “Housing should always be the most important thing that we're providing, and providing decarbonized housing is the ideal.”
The city has faced several barriers to meeting its target Green New Deal timeline, including funding challenges and pandemic interruptions. Evans said the city is committed to its emissions-reduction goals, but acknowledged that it may not meet its deadline of 2030.
“We're very much still building the plane as we're flying it,” she said. “As we always have with the Green New Deal.”
The new plan is now in its early stages. Evans said she intends to present it to the city’s sustainability and climate justice commission and host listening sessions to receive feedback.
The reassessment appears aligned with the Green New Deal’s intent, said Diane Stefani, co-chair of the Finger Lakes chapter of The Climate Reality Project. The group runs the Ithaca Green New Deal Scorecard, which tracks the city’s progress towards its climate commitments.
“Four of the 10 goals in the scorecard are climate justice goals, they’re community goals, people-focused goals,” said Stefani. “This almost feels like kind of a return to center.”
Ithaca has faced a learning curve as it set out to accomplish the commitments of the Green New Deal, said Thomas Hirasuna, who also co-chairs the local chapter of The Climate Reality Project. Rewriting the climate action plan could represent a step in the right direction, he added.
“If it's a better plan, there's nothing wrong with that,” said Hirasuna. “In my opinion, it's better to do it right than to rush it through.”
The news comes as BlocPower, the company Ithaca contracted with to manage its electrification efforts, faces new uncertainty. The company’s chief executive, Donnel Baird, stepped down last month amid concern over the slow rollout of its electrification and job training programs in several cities, including Ithaca. BlocPower electrified no buildings in all of 2022 and only one in the second quarter of 2023, Bloomberg reported last week. Earlier this year, the city of Ithaca announced it had worked with BlocPower to finalize a first group of 10 commercial buildings to electrify.
BlocPower spokesperson Siobhan Johnson said in a statement to WSKG that the company supports Ithaca's reassessment of its approach to its Green New Deal.
“BlocPower remains dedicated to supporting Ithaca's building electrification goals within this new framework,” said Johnson. “We look forward to continuing our partnership and contributing to solutions, particularly those that create green job opportunities for local residents."