This meeting is being recorded and summarized.

We're ready.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Um, this is Erica Pierce, and we are here today with the Parks and Environment Committee because we are very lucky to have uh the afternoon with Peter McCart, director of office, the Office of Energy Conservation Sustainability to talk about some new uh a new county initiative, but also to talk uh through our our climate action plan and where we are today, they're roughly two years after this latest one was released.

So I will start by calling um the meeting to to well see we I don't know if we have a quorum, but I am present.

Uh the committee vice chair, legislator Williams Johnson.

I see is on the big board.

Hello.

Hello, Jewel, can you hear us?

She's muted.

She's muted, but we're gonna assume she can hear us.

Uh we do not have legislator Truviolo, legislator Nolan.

I know legislator Williams is hoping to be able to get here, and we do not have Chairman Gashi.

So uh we cannot call ourselves to order because we don't have a quorum, but regardless of which we're going to move forward with our important agenda.

Um so we we have Peter for a short, relatively short.

Oh, and I'm sorry, we are also joined, God blessed, by uh legislator Nancy Barrett uh who is not just auditing the class but excelling at it, as we were saying earlier.

Um and we're here uh with Peter to talk about uh two things the uh our new Green Initiative repository, which is a very cool and nifty website and a tool that we want to make certain that the community is aware of, and then as mentioned, uh the climate action plan.

So, do we want to start off by going through the the initiatives repository?

Sure.

Since that's a the shorter piece of this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is something that uh I've been wanting to do for a long time, and I know there's been a call from other groups.

I know um New York State Association of Conservation Councils.

Uh uh they were kind of doing something similar.

FCWC is kind of always wanted to do multiple groups, and we really took it upon ourselves uh with Susie Ross, who is uh on the uh climate crisis task force, and and uh she and I co-chaired the climate reality project, and um we were looking for to do something, and I said this is something I want to do, and a lot of volunteers came forward and we put this thing together.

So uh it's uh we have it up on the screen for anyone who is watching from home so that you can see what we're talking about.

The link is is showing up at the top left corner, and I think Peter will walk us through when I first saw this website.

I did not my screen didn't open in such a way that I saw the search button um aspect on the bottom of it, and so I missed that whole feature rolling out.

So we want to make certain that everybody sees it.

And I was like, uh, yeah, if you click on it, you know.

So yeah, so you we so we have 11 categories that are clickable.

Yeah, and there's 70 initiatives underneath all those uh those clickable initiatives.

So there's 70 other things you can do, so very specific.

So I just found an error on the electric transportation one.

It's not a very big error.

Most people wouldn't even catch it.

I did, so we're gonna skip that one and maybe go down to clean energy.

Uh actually go to go to the electric transportation.

I think it's the most uh um, you know, uh best example of how this thing works.

And you can see the mistake uh right at the top.

It says electric school bus, and it talks about bikes, and then right on the bikes, it talks about buses.

So that's just need to be switched.

But these are different initiatives that you could take.

Um, this follows a lot of the climate smart community, you know, their their initiatives and the clean energy uh uh communities.

Those are two uh programs.

Uh Climate Smart Communities is a DEC and the Clean Energy Communities is a program, you get points, you get certified, and um from that you can get uh money.

So get funding.

I'm guessing it's a safe assumption if they're on this list.

That means somebody in Westchester County is doing some one of these things.

Yes.

We don't have anything here that it hasn't been done here yet.

I don't think so.

There you mean like an aspirational type of thing.

No, absolutely.

I think there is and I it's there might be only one community, maybe Bedford or maybe uh you know, one of the river towns, you know, has done it, but everybody else should do it.

But I'm there might be something there.

That's I I'm not exactly 100%.

I don't want to, I don't think there is, but I don't want to see and the cool feature if you put that together with a search on the bottom is you can find folks you can talk to about how they did the thing that they did.

That was one of the key elements is getting the and that is a work in progress constantly.

Yes, there's volunteer churn, there's uh electives, and there's people that just move their jobs.