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Date: 1/10/2023
NORTHAMPTON – During their regular meeting on Jan. 5, the Northampton City Council unanimously approved the creation of the Climate Change Mitigation Stabilization Fund to help advance the city’s climate change initiatives.
Concurrently, the council approved the allocation of $3 million to this fund from their Free Cash account, which will be used to implement changes and address the city’s resilience and regeneration plans for mitigating climate change, including design and strategic planning.
The creation of the fund continues a string of climate change mitigation strategies the city has used over the past half-decade in an attempt to become a net carbon-neutral city by 2050.
Finance Committee meeting
“For me, this climate fund signifies that climate action is a priority, not just for my administration, but as a city priority,” said Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra, during the city’s Finance Committee meeting on Jan. 3. “This stabilization fund is a way of solidifying that city priority.”
The approval from the council now means that the city can continue its pursuit of making all city-owned buildings carbon-neutral by 2030. The city’s Resilience and Regeneration Plan, which was established in 2021, laid out plans for future ways of mitigating climate change throughout the city.
For example, the city celebrated the installation of solar panels on three of the four elementary schools during a ribbon-cutting event at the end of November. In 2019, then-Mayor David Narkewicz spearheaded a project of installing solar on top of the Northampton Senior Center, as well.
“The projects to de-carbonize our buildings… to get to net-zero are extremely expensive,” said Sciarra. “These are big goals that we have, and they will include a lot of expenditures. We want to make sure that we’re planning for these projects and that we are earmarking some funds for these goals.
“We hope that having some available funds positions us well to be ready to take advantage of state or federal grants that we know are absolutely needed for the U.S. to start making real advances in terms of de-carbonizing,” Sciarra continued.
According to Sciarra, the city was able to take up to $10 million in lost revenue from American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds during fiscal year 2022, all of which is available in the city’s general fund. The advantage to having this money is it allows more flexibility for how it can be used and when it can be used.
“We took that amount, which is the maximum amount we could, to allow flexibility for those funds,” said Sciarra. “That is why we are able to use these $3 million of ARPA funds to create the stabilization fund.”
The city’s current financial policy allows them to take a third of the free cash and allocate it equally between Northampton’s three stabilization funds – general, capital and fiscal. The climate mitigation fund is now the fourth, meaning the city will be able to add free cash in this pot during future fiscal years.