3_6_24 Planning Board Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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APPROVED WITH CORRECTIONS 4.3.24 50 The Planning Board pledges to the citizens of Orange County its respect. The Board asks 51 its citizens to conduct themselves in a respectful, courteous manner, both with the Board 52 and with fellow citizens. At any time, should any member of the Board or any citizen fail to 53 observe this public charge, the Chair will ask the offending member to leave the meeting 54 until that individual regains personal control. Should decorum fail to be restored, the Chair 55 will recess the meeting until such time that a genuine commitment to this public charge is 56 observed. 57 58 AGENDA ITEM 6: CHAIR COMMENTS 59 Chair Beeman asked about last month's presentation on the Comprehensive Land Use Plan update and the 60 Board had a short discussion on the take-ways from the presentation. 61 62 AGENDA ITEM 7: ORANGE COUNTY CLIMATE ACTION PLAN 63 64 Amy Eckberg, the County's Sustainability Projects Manager, gave a PowerPoint presentation on the adopted 65 Climate Action Plan. She stated that locally in Orange County, we're experiencing more and more periods of 66 drought. In fact,we've been a drought situation approximately 50 percent of the time for the past 20 or so years. 67 In terms of extreme heat,we're experiencing more and more days of that where temperatures are at or above 95 68 degrees Fahrenheit. And those days are anticipated to increase by up to 30 days by the middle of the century. 69 We're also experiencing more and more intense storms, more hurricanes, more tornadoes, which are leaving us 70 with wind damage and flooding issues here in our communities. So the next few years are absolutely critical in 71 terms of limited our temperatures to a 1'/2 degree Celsius increase and mitigating the most severe impacts of 72 climate change. And this is why, last year, Orange County underwent the climate action planning process. 73 We've been doing a lot of really great work over the years. We've been installing solar. We've been putting in EV 74 chargers. We've been installing geothermal wells. Been doing a lot of great work. But what was lacking was a 75 comprehensive road map or a systemic plan that would really lay out all the strategies and actions along with an 76 associated timeline that would help us to meet our overarching climate action goals, which are to get to 100 77 percent renewable energy by 2050, to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and 100 percent by 78 2050. 79 80 Development of the plan was a year-long effort. Very much like the comprehensive land-use plan is being 81 developed now, it involved a lot of community engagement. We held a variety of different focus groups 82 throughout the community throughout the year, speaking to members from our business community, the 83 nonprofit sector, student groups. We had one-on-one phone calls. We had a big survey that went out 84 community wide. We had over 500 responses to that survey. And then we also looked internally at helping us 85 put together this climate action plan. We developed a climate action team which was made up of mostly 86 department directors from a variety of different departments, including our own Cy Stober, so he was able to 87 provide a lot of input into the plan, along with other department directors. 88 89 Our plan is going to need to be updated regularly, at least every 5 years as new technologies come online, new 90 ways of tackling climate change are discovered, new funding sources come to light. We definitely want to keep 91 our plan current. A really unique feature of our climate action plan is the dashboard that we created which is on 92 our website for anybody to go to at any time. It's like the Cliff Notes version of the climate action plan, it gives you 93 the nuts and bolts versus skimming through all 160-plus pages of the climate action plan. (Demonstrated 94 dashboard). 95 96 Another nice feature of our dashboard is our resources tab, and here we have a variety of different plans that are 97 listed. We definitely want all of our plans talking to one another,and we incorporated many of the current Orange 98 County plans in the development of the climate action plan, so you'll see us calling out the comprehensive land 99 use plan in our plan, as well as New Hope landscape-conservation plan, the Orange County transit plan, and of