The Wilmington City Council held its regular meeting on March 4, 2025, at 6:30 PM in City Hall. The meeting included presentations, public comments, public hearings, ordinances, resolutions, and a closed session. Key actions included approving a 5–2 rezoning for a commercial parking lot, unanimously supporting a substitute resolution urging NCDOT to explore all practical alternatives for the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge replacement, and accepting over $2.4 million in federal funding for a multi-use path.
Call the meeting order of the Wilmington City Council, like to welcome all those who are with us here this evening, all those who taking an interest. Thank you for taking an interest in your government. At this time, I'd like to call and introduce Sergeant Ron Evans of the Wilmington Police Department. If we'll come forward and please give us our invocation, if everyone was standing, we may standing afterwards for Pledge of Allegiance. Sergeant Evans. Good evening. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you for everything that you have done in our lives, everything that you're doing, and everything that you're going to do. We ask for your protection this evening. We ask that you cradle us in your arms. Hold us close to your bosom. Protect us from the seen and the unseen. Father, tonight we ask that you give this council and their staff wisdom. And they make the preparations to make major decisions for the citizens of Wilmington. And Father, also tonight, we ask that you allow us to keep in our prayers and remember our friends to the South, men, women, children, firefighters, first responders, as they are battling wildfires in North and South Carolina. We thank you for this prayer, and we pray in your son's precious name. Amen. Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Next presentation, I would like to recognize Mr. David Ingram, our sustainability manager, and Mr. Richard Smith, who is the chairman of the Clean Energy Advisory Committee. They're going to be talking to us about our Clean Energy Advisory Committee annual report. Good evening, Mayor. Mayor Pro Tim, City Council members. Thank you very much for this opportunity to come before you tonight to present present the our Clean Energy Advisory Committee's annual report. Our seven person committee right now is very hardworking, very dedicated to the tasks that they've been presented. And I'll present a few words tonight and then hand it over to our chairperson, uh Richard Smith to present the entire report. So just a little background. And those goals again 50% clean energy by 2035, as well as transitioning our fleet of vehicles over to EV or or hybrid as as technology allows. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to our committee chairperson, Richard Smith, who will go over the details of the report with you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good evening. So over the course of 2024, the committee undertook a number of sustainability focus areas for this year, including energy efficiency of the municipal facilities, the beginning of the fleet EV transition over to low emission, zero emission vehicles, sustainability policy for new construction and retrofits on the build on municipal buildings. Focusing on clean energy policy and legislation, and then as well as the EV charging infrastructure for municipal facilities. Those included energy efficiency initiatives, including building equipment repairs and upgrades to both police headquarters and the fire headquarters, uh, LED lighting retrofits at the parks and recs facilities. And that resulted in a reduce reduction in the aggregate energy usage intensity across city facilities. For those that you of you that might not know, EUI is a way to measure uh energy usage per square footage across facilities. So it eliminates you know a higher bill for a larger facility versus a lower bill for a low smaller facility. It gives you a comparison, an even comparison across the board for your entire portfolio. Um we worked on a recommendation for a fleet EV transition study. Um this should help uh in addition to looking at uh EV options, it should also help the city staff uh determine the size of the fleet that's needed, um, whether we need to add or subtract vehicles to the fleet to efficiently carry out city operations. Um in addition to that, um the city staff also are participating in the Piedmont and Coastal NC Clean Communities uh Coalition. That is a new initiative uh that they're excited to be part of partaking in. And then back in December, the city council adopted a sustainable municipal building policy that we helped to recommend the structure for. So I applaud you for your decision to adopt that policy. Additionally, we made recommendations to city staff for the 2024 state and federal legislation agenda for clean energy goals that we'd like to advocate for at the state and federal level.