Three, two, one.

Good evening and welcome to the Tuesday, February 10th, 2026 study session of the Olympia City Council.

For the record, we have a quorum with all council members present tonight.

So we have one business item uh for to discuss, and that is an update on our climate program.

And we have Dr.

Pamela Brath, who is the director of climate programs here at the city presenting tonight.

Hi, Pamela.

Good evening.

Hi, everyone.

I'm excited to provide this update to y'all tonight.

And not only is it an update on all of the climate work we've been doing at the city, but we're debuting a brand new presentation slide deck that we've been working on over the last couple of months to do a little bit better storytelling around our work to address climate change.

So I hope you all like it.

So tonight we want to just talk about from commitments to impact and the work that we're doing to address climate change, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and build resilience here at the city.

So a bit of a presentation over for you all tonight.

We're gonna start with a little bit of background, then go into what we've done, what we've learned, where we're going, and then what we need.

So I want to start by acknowledging that Olympia has a really long history of climate leadership and policy, and really a lot of work that started far, far beyond far before when I joined the city, dating back to the early 1990s when the city developed its first climate plan.

Um and then in 2018, the city started working with uh the cities of Lacey, Tonewater, and Thurston County and the Thurston Regional Planning Council to develop a regional climate mitigation plan, the Thurston Climate Mitigation Plan.

And that was really, I would say the start of the next wave of action at the city to really focus on climate work.

Um, but even with all of that going on, the youth in our community knew that we needed to do more, that we needed to do more to adapt to climate change, prepare for climate impacts, and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And that led to uh youth in our community working with city council to develop a and pass a climate inheritance resolution, which really supercharged the city's climate work and set a goal to achieve net zero emissions by 2040.

This was soon followed by uh the city's acceptance of the Thurston Climate Mitigation Plan as our regional framework for climate action, and then um the city declaring a climate emergency.

Very soon after that.

Well, I guess two weeks before the plan was adopted, uh, you all hired me uh as the city's first climate program manager, and that was really the first um step that the city took towards uh establishing a comprehensive and dedicated climate program rather than having one that was just kind of dispersed throughout departments where folks had time and capacity um doing some additional work.

Um even since all of that has happened, we have seen climate change and climate impacts here in Olympia continue to get worse.

Um in 2020, the city had um a wildfire smoke event where air quality peaked at 217 AQI, the air quality index, which is considered very unhealthy.

Um, in 2021, we had the really kind of unprecedented heat dome event where we experience our highest temperatures ever recorded at 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and then in 2022, um, the highest tide ever recorded in the city of Olympia at just over 18 feet as a part of that pretty extreme kink tide.

And so we know when these events happen, they put our health, our safety, our community at risk, um, and they strain our resources in order to be able to respond to those.

And we also know that events like these are becoming more extreme.

They're becoming more frequent, and they're really just an indicator of what's to come as climate change continues to worsen over the next um decades.

But it's not all negative.

Um, the uh 2045 comprehensive plan is really our north star as we navigate an uncertain future.

As you all know, we adopted this um late last year, and it includes the city's first ever climate element or climate chapter, which really sets out the the goals and policies for how the city is going to address greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change over the next 20 years.

We received more than 500 comments from the community throughout the development of this chapter.

And really, what we heard was very clear.

Uh, our community wants to see affordable, equitable, and high impact climate solutions.

And the climate chapter really outlines how we make this vision a reality.

We know that our greenhouse gas emissions are not yet on track uh with our goals.

Uh, despite our really kind of sharp reduction during the pandemic and early 2020, emissions throughout Thurston County have been rising again since then.

This is not really that unexpected.

And it doesn't mean that we're not doing anything.

It doesn't mean that we haven't put actions into place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But what it does mean is the things that we've done, it's going to take time to see the effects of those.

They build over time.

And it also means that we still have quite a bit of work more ahead of us to get back on track and to reach those goals.

So how do we get there?

The vision that I keep mentioning, that is Olympia 2045, and we're bringing it to life through our citywide implementation plan.

And this is where we go into more detail about the actions and the who and the when and the what to really implement on that on that vision.

We just published this, I think like a week ago, and we're going to be sending out through our next climate newsletter.

We have an interactive table where community members can kind of sort by area of interest, time frame, kind of whatever they want to know to understand how we're how we're bringing this to life.

And it's also a tool to help our departments understand their role in implementing our climate element and the city's climate actions.

I'm not going to go through every single action that's listed there.

You don't need me to go through that line by line.

But I do want to just go over a little bit some of the building blocks, give you a sense of what that looks like.

And so I'm really talking about these as building blocks as we're as, and that's intentional because what we're doing is we're putting the foundation in place.

We're helping make things easier.

And so we have these broken down by net zero or the work we do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as resilience.

And so for our building blocks to net zero, what it means is we need to produce 100% renewable energy.

That does not mean the city needs to produce 100% renewable energy, but we would be uh that would be our uh utility provider, Puget Sound Energy.

Within our community, we need to add 17.6 megawatts of rooftop solar, electrify and improve the efficiency of 100% of the buildings in our community.

So that's all new buildings, and then retrofitting all existing buildings, reducing vehicle miles traveled by 20%, electrify 100% of those remaining passenger vehicles, and then reduce solid waste generation by 50%.