Town, Sustainable Princeton to create climate action plan

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton will look to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the community by a still unspecified amount, with the municipality likely using its legal powers to help reach that outcome.
The town and the nonprofit environmental group Sustainable Princeton will spend the next 19 months to create what they are calling a climate action plan that lists ways the town will move in that direction, with an eye also toward how the town can better prepare for “increasingly destructive weather events,” Mayor Liz Lempert said Wednesday. The plan is expected to be finalized in 2019.
Part of the work will be to understand how much emissions are produced, by examining such things as utility data and seeing how far people commute to work. An advisory committee then will set a target goal for reducing emissions and then list ways to accomplish it.
“It definitely is going to take a lot of political will in order to carry out some of the goals that are defined,” Sustainable Princeton Executive Director Molly Jones said Wednesday. “We are trying to develop this in a way that we are getting a lot of the community involved in the development to assure that we’re vested in this, that we’re in agreement that this is a good idea, a good concept, and so that we, as a community, take it forward.”
Mayor Lempert said the town can look internally at where its power sources come from, like for government buildings and vehicles. Beyond that, she touched on ways the town can make it easier for people to get around without using a car.
But asked how the town can change behavior of the public with only limited power of government regulation, Mayor Lempert said “some of the changes will likely have to be voluntary.”
“I think part of the climate action plan will be looking at a combination of education programs to show residents and businesses how changing behavior can have a dual benefit, both reducing emissions and often lowering costs,” she said. “In addition to voluntary, there are definitely things that the municipality can legislate.”
As an example, she pointed to a regulation this year that the town created requiring anyone putting additions on their homes to take steps to capture storm water runoff from escaping their properties. The changes impact additions that create 400 feet or more of impervious coverage.
The timing of the report will come as the community is poised to grow in the coming years, with expected additional housing being built and the population to increase.
Beyond reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Mayor Lempert touched on another facet of the plan.
“An important part of the plan, separate from emissions reductions, is going to be looking at how do we plan and how do we prepare ourselves for increased flooding events, increased incidents of massive loss of power …,” she said.
To help pay for the report, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation gave Sustainable Princeton a $100,000 grant.
The town sees itself as being a green friendly community. Through a trash collection program the municipality offers, residents have the ability to compost their food and other waste to keep it from going into a landfill. The town, earlier this year, unveiled a bike master plan aimed at making it easier for people to ride their bikes. And the town worked out an arrangement to have solar panels go on a municipal landfill, on River Road.