A plan designed to fight climate change, with a goal of making Kane County carbon neutral by 2050, will go before the Kane County Board for a vote on Tuesday.
The Kane County Climate Action Implementation Plan was released in a draft form to gather public input earlier this year. The plan recently went before the Kane County Board Executive Committee, which sets the agenda for Kane County Board meetings, and was approved in a 11-2 vote, with one abstaining.
“This is a much-needed plan,” said District 4 Kane County Board member Mavis Bates, who is the chair of the board’s Energy and Environmental Committee and a champion of the plan. “It will show the leadership of Kane County.”
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The plan recommends actions intended to reduce the county’s greenhouse gas emissions and increase resilience to the effects of climate change. Across eight categories, the plan lays out individual goals and implementation steps that can be taken over the next 25 years.
The goal of each category, such as the Transportation category’s goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles by roughly 28%, increasing public transit use 190% and registering over 96,000 new electric vehicles, feed into the plan’s overall goal of carbon neutrality for the county by 2050.
According to the plan, a carbon neutral community is one that removes or offsets the same amount of carbon dioxide that it produces. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas and is produced when fossil fuels and other biological substances are burned, among other ways.
The plan will be up for final consideration at the Kane County Board’s June 11 meeting. The plan can be found at palebluedot.llc/kane-climate-action
Voting against the plan at the Executive Committee meeting on Wednesday were Kane County Board members Mark Davoust of District 14 and Michael Kenyon of District 16.
Kenyon said he and others in the agricultural community that he has spoken to are “fearful” of the plan. In a phone call on Thursday, he said his problem was not necessarily with the content of the plan itself, but that he was worried the county may adopt laws that hurt farmers if county leaders continue to follow the plan’s line of thinking.
“One of the things it said was that we could have ‘Meatless Mondays’ or not drink milk,” Kenyon said during the phone call. “Once you get walking in this direction, it doesn’t take much to step over and start requiring farmers to do something that really isn’t in their best interest.”
Davoust said at the meeting that, while he is in favor of the plan, he voted against it because he did not feel like it was ready for final adoption.
“I think this has got a lot of really great ideas and goals in it,” he said. “I’m a ‘no’ today, but I’m looking forward to seeing it again in a refurbished format.”
Kane County Board member Clifford Surges of District 21, who abstained from voting on the plan, had similar concerns to Davoust. He said the plan is ambiguous about whether or not it will create mandates in the future, and that he needed more time to read the plan and make his decision.
In a May 28 meeting of the Kane County Board Committee of the Whole focused primarily on the plan, county officials said the plan will not mandate anything if passed by the board. Instead, it makes recommendations for ways to create incentives or encourage voluntary actions, officials said.
However, Kane County Board member Leslie Juby of District 11 said at the May 28 meeting that the plan recommends “requiring” certain actions be taken, which she said is a “non-starter” for her.
“I’m hearing one thing, and I’m reading something else in the actual plan,” Juby said. “I would love to support this as an inspirational thing for people that want to spend the extra money or want to change lifestyles. I’m having a really hard time with the unfunded mandates.”
Jodie Wollnik, director of the Kane County Water Resources Division, said the plan is not intended to create unfunded mandates, and that if funding was needed, it would likely come from grants.
Included in the plan’s agenda item for Wednesday’s Executive Committee meeting was a statement from county staff saying they have gone through the plan to ensure “that the plan is recommending actions but does not contain language that implies requirements or enforceable activities.
“The intent of the plan is to encourage and support actions on a community basis,” the agenda item reads. “Staff has reviewed the document and made changes where appropriate to ensure the plan reflects the direction from the County Board at the Committee of the Whole meeting.”