A municipal response to climate change

Jeff Green | Jan 10, 2024

As we begin a new year at the Frontenac News, it’s hard to predict what issues will come to the surface over the coming 12 months. There are already signs, however, that 2024 will be the year when climate change issues begin to filter down to municipal politics in our region.
For some of our neighbours, like those in Kingston and in nearby Tay Valley Township, climate change issues have been front and centre for several years already. The knock against municipal climate change policies, is that they can be nothing more than signaling, and that the range of issues related to climate change can only be dealt with at the provincial, national and global levels. But since we are now at the climate change tipping point, mitigation and adaptation policies are quickly becoming day-to-day matters, and that is where municipalities come in.
In North Frontenac, a new strategic plan was adopted this week, and it calls for the establishment of an environmental task force. comprised of councillors, staff and community stakeholders to develop and promote programs to protect the environment.
In South Frontenac, staff came back to council this week with a proposal to enter into a contract with Strategy Corp to develop a climate change action plan. Council rejected a previous proposal in November of last year, partly for cost reasons. The November 2023 contract was for $97,000 and the one they looked at this week is for $59,000. At that time, some councillors and the Mayor also said they were not clear about the purpose of the project. The project that came up for approval this week, looked to the Tay Valley action plan as a model, and this time it was approved.
There is a community group starting up in Storrington District to look at climate action, and the township was also faced with a decision in December over a proposed Battery Energy Storage System (BESS). The project was ultimately rejected, but Council only rejected the proposal because of the rushed nature of the application and some of the unknowns with BESS projects, not out of opposition to the concept.
Local municipalities will be facing climate issues more and more in the years to come, and whether it is a matter of doing their part to create less emissions in their operations, considering new energy proposals like BESS projects, and to determine how to be able to deal with some of the impacts of climate change.
This year we are hoping to provide more coverage of climate change as a local issue in our pages, both in our municipal coverage and other stories that we cover. We will look at what Tay Valley is doing in the coming weeks.
At the Frontenac News, as has become our custom we are using the first editorial of the year to request support from our readers for the paper. As you know, our print edition and websites are all provided to the community free of charge, thanks to the support from our advertisers. A rough costing for delivering each household we send papers to each year, is $35.
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