Evanston’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan Implementation Task Force debated collaboration with City Council, the implications of local elections for environmental policy and national environmental attitudes when setting its 2025 priorities on Wednesday.
At the meeting’s outset, Environment Board co-Chair Matthew Cotter announced that he would not be applying for a second term in April, leaving a vacancy on the board.
In the ensuing discussion, several members expressed frustration with the Envision Evanston 2045 comprehensive plan and zoning code documents.
While the second draft of Envision Evanston’s plan is set to be released in February, task force and Environment Board member James Cahan told city staff that the Task Force and the Environmental Board want to contribute to the plans before the Land Use Commission votes on the draft.
For instance, task force members want more time to discuss the possible addition of several chapters relevant to their purview, referring to topics like education and public health.
Task force member Jerri Garl advocated for the group’s ability to provide insights into the plan, citing a need to “be more aggressive” in environmental input following the Trump Administration’s rollback of pro-environmental policies and climate agreements.
“Our input to the Envision Evanston plan and process, and particularly the environment chapter, needs to reflect the importance of municipal action and leadership on climate mitigation and resilience,” Garl said.
Task force members also highlighted the importance of local environmental advocacy in the upcoming municipal elections.
Member Wendy Pollock referred to the 2022 City Council’s unanimous vote to declare a climate emergency in April 2022 as an example to follow in a time of federal policy regression.
Pollock said she hopes a new City Council would be willing to do a similar thing after the April municipal elections. But, she was not convinced.
“From what I’ve seen in their campaigns so far, they (would) not,” Pollock said.
Some members at the meeting expressed dismay over the Council’s most recent decision to delay voting on the Healthy Buildings Ordinance, yet another one of the task force’s 2025 environmental priorities.
Environment Board member Paula Scholl cited the dismantling of federal environmental progress and the uncertainty behind federal grants as a motivator for local policy like the Healthy Building Ordinance.
“I think what everyone is saying is that it’s incumbent upon us to push for local actions,” Scholl said. “The idea is, stuff happens here. Maybe Oak Park or Skokie or somebody else says ‘We can do it too,’ and it mushrooms out of here.”
The disconnect between the task force’s goals and City Council’s policy motivated multiple task force members to call for the revision and renewal of the city’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan, which City Council first passed in 2018 to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
To fulfill a recommitment to CARP and inspire more environmentally conscious contributions to municipal policy, task force members advocated for more face-to-face dialogue with city leadership, particularly when it comes to Envision Evanston.
“Our strategy should be, again, hammering the critical points that we want to see in that document with the understanding that the document is imperfect, it will be imperfect,” Cahan said. “That’s the nature of that beast, and it’s the nature of this particular process.”
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