The 27 recommendations from a city task force aimed at reducing Longmont’s carbon footprint include ideas that are too costly for some industries and residents, city council members said earlier this week.
A proposal to expand agriculture zoning in the city to get Longmonters to grow their own food also was just “wacky,” Councilwoman Polly Christensen, said.
Still, the council on Tuesday voted to send all 27 recommendations from Longmont’s Climate Action Task Force to city staff members to weigh their financial feasibility and when they could be implemented.
Council members praised the work of the task force, which met eight times after being formed in December to research ways Longmont could reduce or mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and tackle the effects of climate change.
But issues about who will bear the brunt of the cost of the proposals remain for several on council.
The building industry, for instance, will pass the cost of upgrading codes to prospective homeowners to meet the task force’s recommendations, Christensen said.
“We have to figure out financially how we are going to do this in a fair and gradual way,” she said.
Christensen said making code changes to allow for residential agriculture to get the public to grow their own food by 2023, also did not make sense.
“That’s just a wacky idea,” she said. “Everyone should grow their own food and sell to farmer’s markets in competition with farmers? That’s not going to happen.”
The city’s Sustainability Advisory Board — which was among several advisory boards that reviewed the recommendations earlier this summer — also called the home farming idea unfeasible.
“It was suggested that supporting and encouraging the local farms we already have, would be a more effective means to this end,” a city report stated.
Councilmember Marcia Martin also took aim at a recommendation to expand and create new programs and initiatives to achieve a 35%- to 40%-reduction in overall water consumption by 2025. The baseline for the reduction would be 2019 usage.
The recommendation”was assembled with no quantitative research and supporting data behind it,” Martin said. “It is draconian and not implementable and would impose an incredible hardship on the city.”
The Sustainability Advisory Board voted to approve a recommendation to create an eight-person Electrification Feasibility Committee to oversee an 18-month effort to research and develop a phased electrification plan by Nov. 1, 2021.
Board members, however, were concerned about the transition to full electrification and the equity impact on families, according to a city report.
The prioritized list of task force recommendations will be reviewed by the council at an undetermined date. The recommendations covered six topic areas: adaptation and resiliency, building energy use, education and outreach, land use and waste management, renewable energy and transportation.
