Gainesville City Commission adopts Climate Resiliency Plan and RTS Zero Emission Transition Plan
BY JENNIFER CABRERA
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At their January 16 meeting, the Gainesville City Commission approved their first Climate Resiliency Plan and an RTS Zero Emission Transition Plan.
Climate Resiliency Plan
Chief Resilience Officer Dan Zhu presented the City’s first Climate Resiliency Plan, which connects to the City’s Sustainable Development Goals “to transform our world,” shown in the slide below:
- No poverty
- Zero hunger
- Good health and well-being
- Quality education
- Gender equality
- Clean water and sanitation
- Affordable and clean energy
- Decent work and economic growth
- Industry, innovation, and infrastructure
- Reduced inequalities
- Sustainable cities and communities
- Responsible consumption and production
- Climate action
- Life below water
- Life on land
- Peace, justice, and strong institutions
- Partnerships for the goals
Previous actions
In 2018, the City committed to Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 and Zero Waste by 2040; in 2019, the City declared a climate State of Emergency; in 2020, a Joint Water and Climate Policy Board was formed; in 2021, the City joined the United Nations Race to Zero pledge and completed its first greenhouse gas emission inventory.
Mitigation
On the mitigation side, the Climate Resiliency Plan lays out a timeline to get to nearly 100% electric vehicles in 2045, including RTS buses (80% by 2045), RTS light duty vehicles (100% by 2045), and the City’s fleet (100% by 2045). The City also plans to increase its electric vehicle charger availability; there are currently 126 chargers, with an additional 47 funded by a recent grant from the Biden administration.
Continuing on the mitigation side, the City adopted a Zero Waste ordinance in 2018, banned plastic straws and stirrers in 2020, required that single-use plastic accessories be provided by request only in 2022, mandated food waste collection from restaurants and grocery stores in 2023, and began implementing food waste collection at multi-family residential properties in 2024, along with a pilot plan for single-family residential composting.
Adaptation
On the adaptation side, the City plans to create a heat warning system, improve public awareness of the dangers of heat, improve home cooling, and provide community cooling centers.
The Food System Plan’s goal is to provide “healthy bites for all,” reduce food waste, encourage food production on private property, and support local farmers’ markets.
Smart Technology includes smart lighting, smart trash cans, solar-powered lighting, smart benches, and solar-powered pay stations.
Eastman asks staff to work on shifting people to low-emission forms of transportation
Commissioner Bryan Eastman said, “It’s great to have everything together into one central place and for us to be constantly holding ourselves accountable to the benchmarking… and making sure that we are going forward, both in terms of preparing for climate change and doing our part in helping to solve it.”
Eastman added, “We’ve talked about… shifting folks to using RTS more,… shifting people to pedestrian, to bicycling, to low-emission forms of transportation… Is that something else that you guys would be looking at in the future?”
Zhu said that’s not in the current plan due to limited resources, but she plans to include it in the second version of the plan, in three to five years.
Ward asks for more trees to be planted, emphasizes importance of solar power
Mayor Harvey Ward said moving to electric vehicles is “a priority for me.” He also asked how many trees the City plants in a year, and Zhu said it’s an average of about 1,000. Ward said he would like to plant “significantly more than 1,000 a year… That is a challenge, but it is necessary.”
Ward also mentioned the Solar PPA that the GRU Authority terminated on January 15: “Maybe there are good reasons for that. I’m sure that there are ostensibly good reasons… I just drove to Tallahassee the other day… – acres and acres and acres of solar is being installed by ‘crazy woke leftists’ like Duke Energy and Florida Power and Light. Yet here in Gainesville, we’ve just walked away from the idea of utility scale solar, at least for the time being… We ought to be committed to solar in Gainesville… Every megawatt of solar we are using in this community to power our homes and our offices and everything else is fossil fuel we’re not pumping into the environment.”
Additional requests
Eastman said he would like to see more specifics on land use and transportation before the next update of the plan: “How many homes do you want to build here? How do we want to make sure that we have walkable communities?… I wonder if it’s reasonable to… get chapters added in, related to… external and land use and transportation elements… maybe in the next year, year and a half, as opposed to the full three to five years.”
City Manager Cynthia Curry said staff would “take it under consideration.”
Motion and vote
Eastman made a motion to approve the Climate Resiliency Plan and ask staff to come back with updates on additional chapters on land use and transportation, as well as increasing the tree canopy. The motion passed unanimously, with Commissioner Desmon Duncan-Walker absent.
Click here to read the draft Climate Resiliency Plan.
RTS Zero Emission Transition Plan
Jennifer Wheeler, a consultant with 1898 & Co., presented the Regional Transit System (RTS) Zero Emission Transition Plan, which she said is required by the Federal Transit Administration. The consultant’s key findings were that 33 of the City’s buses are “highly electrifiable,” based on their daily mileage and route duration; diesel-electric hybrids can be used on longer routes; Phase 1 of charger expansion can use the existing infrastructure at the RTS Fleet Maintenance Facility to support 14 50kW chargers; and grants will be needed to reduce the capital costs of purchasing battery electric buses “because this is expensive – low- and no-emission buses are expensive – and so having these grants and incentives can really help drive down the capital costs of not only the buses but of adding and deploying charging infrastructure.”
Wheeler said that starting in FY32, 77% of the buses purchased will need to be low- or no-emission because those buses will likely not be replaced before 2045, based on their useful life of 14 years.
She said there are currently four 150kW chargers at the Fleet Maintenance Facility that can be converted to 14 50kW chargers, which would take RTS through about FY2034. Phase 2 would require new infrastructure at the Fleet Maintenance Facility to add 15 more chargers.
Battery electric buses are “significantly more expensive” than diesel buses, according to Wheeler: the total cost of ownership and cost per mile over the life of the bus are 53.5% higher than a diesel bus, with hybrid buses in between the other two types. Wheeler said RTS has four electric buses that are earlier models with lower range, so they travel fewer miles per year than the diesel buses, leading to higher maintenance costs per mile, but those costs go down if buses are driven more miles and would be only 18% higher than diesel “using kind of the upper range of the industry standard maintenance cost per mile for battery electric buses.”
Grants and incentives can make battery electric buses more cost-effective
Wheeler concluded her discussion of costs of the various types of buses by saying, “Just from a vehicle cost perspective, compared to diesel buses, the diesel electric hybrids are about $250,000 more, and the electric buses are about twice as much as the diesel buses. The benefit really comes into play, though, in the operating costs, and that’s where you see the significant savings, when you couple the savings and operating costs with the benefit of grants and incentives, that gets you into a simple payback that’s less than the useful life of the vehicle.”
She added, “As time goes on, technologies are going to become more viable, specifically hydrogen… We don’t recommend that RTS becomes an early adopter of hydrogen right now,… but it’s a technology that has a lot of promise.”
Willits: “We’ve early-adopted a lot”
Commissioner Casey Willits agreed that the City should not be an early adopter on hydrogen buses because “we’ve early-adopted a lot in the City, where it’s a little costly on some things – you know, feed-in-tariff on solar panels and whatnot. I think we can let someone else – I know the federal government is dumping a lot of money into the hydrogen… I like this; I’m glad. This is what the federal government needs for us to continue to get those big grants? [He received an affirmative response]… I would prefer EVs faster and faster and faster, but they’re expensive. We’ve got to do it strategically.”
Motion and vote
Commissioner Cynthia Chestnut made a motion to approve the plan and authorize RTS staff to continue identifying funds to implement the plan. The motion passed unanimously, with Duncan-Walker absent.
“Commissioner Bryan Eastman said, “It’s great to have everything together into one central place and for us to be constantly holding ourselves accountable to the benchmarking…”
He’s talking about centralize governance by the brotherhood and their sovereign military order.
Global warming my ass…it’s freezing outside.
They are so sad and anti-American. And, oh yes, greedy.
Evil is 100% correct.
These poor souls have irrevocable contracts and are scared sh!tless. Most were abused as children too.
More climate crisis cr**.Earth’s climate has ALWAYS changed.
This is laughable. What a joke these clowns are. At least they are entertaining 🤡
They would be if we didn’t pay them so much. They truly believe we are ignorant and stupid. Impressed with themselves.
Most Gainesville voters are. That’s why these types keep getting elected.
These clowns couldn’t organize a successful bake sale, let alone accomplish any of these lofty goals.
If they did have a bake sale, we wouldn’t be able to afford it.
There are no goals. Only pontificating.
How about doing something realistic?
A complete group of laughable idiots
Pie in the sky stuff! And how do they expect to pay for all of this? Grants only go so far. Why don’t these people focus on local issues? Why do we have to be a pillar of light for the world. And I think all commissioners should bike or ride RTS to all their meetings…walk the talk! Big surprise that none of them do! But they want to tell everyone else what they should do…shameful!
The illiteracy and ignorance of the COG Commissioners know no bounds. Hybrid vehicles are the way to go. EV is about a sound as of investment as Biomass and the ecological damage to produce them is not deniable. The Commissioners no longer have money to burn unless they take it away from the citizens. Of course , I heard they will be mandated to dissolve some of their wasteful departments , they will stay the course that led to them being fired from running GRU.
Our children can’t read let alone do math.
These Democrat nut jobs even dream stupidly. I guess they also didn’t learn that Biden and his handlers are out, along with the corruption of the US.
Very ambitious. Can the citizens of Gville afford all this? Of course not….that’s why they need GRU so they can force county residents to chip in on their boondoggles.
Who exactly will be paying for all this?
Socialism on full display.
How about this: We start with fixing the roads.
“I know the federal government is dumping a lot of money into the hydrogen…” Dumping? That’s a revealing word choice.
Don’t forget to insert the word “taxpayer” between “of” and “money”.
Where are they getting these BS climate plans from?
Not from Trump or Desantis…
it’s more UN BS!
Trump dissolved the Paris accord by executive order…there is no mandate from the state of Florida or the federal government. ..didn’t these elected officials take a loyalty oath to uphold the US & state constitution? Why are they taking orders from a foreign government, the UN? Desantis needs to step in and stop municipalities from implementing this idiocy.
They have omitted honesty in government. What resources does Dr. Who need in order for people to be able to walk?
It’s ironic that to get the operating cost of electric buses down, grants and incentives will be necessary.
Oh for the love of God….siiiigh..these incompetent fools. Stick to the governance of your constituency! There are only TWO bullet points they should be focused on:
Clean water and sanitation
Industry, innovation, and infrastructure
That’s it. Period. Full stop. ALL other line items are NOT in their purview.
The GCC must commit to only using public transportation. If it’s not available they must use a bicycle or walk. I also want to know how much money they are personally donating for their carbon footprints. For good health I want them to report at every meeting what their meals were and how they exercised. Be a good example or shut up.
Yeah, they need to hook up a methane meter to Harvey’s big butt. I bet he could cut down on his emissions by eating more responsibly.
As far as benchmarking, that assumes you are evaluating something that actually works. People don’t benchmark broken computers or broken systems that don’t function.
Goals must be specific and measurable. If not, there is no way to know if progress has been made or if they have been achieved. The above list of “Sustainable Development Goals” is therefore not a list of actual goals. It is a list of amorphous and vague statements of ideas they like. Measuring these would be like trying to pick up jello with your hand.
It’s ALL about their own career advancements, getting a consultant job in a DC PAC or “think tank”; or at an NGO non-profit (the word profit” is a dirty word). Following in footsteps of previous ex-politicians. 🌎🤡👿
Zhu is as wackadoo as the rest of the crew. Those goals will not be obtainable in Gainesville as long as the City and County keep minorities oppressed and in servitude. Wonder if she meant “strong nuclear families” with respect to “strong institutions”? Many of us know that the former plays a major role in obtaining that “peace and justice.”
Of special note on the City’s goal of electric vehicles, “Battery electric buses are “significantly more expensive” than diesel buses, according to Wheeler: the total cost of ownership and cost per mile over the life of the bus are 53.5% higher than a diesel bus, with hybrid buses in between the other two types.” So why would any idiot even believe a personal vehicle wouldn’t bear the same costs?
Ward wants more trees which will affect the canopy, which in turn will likely have an impact on any solar panels. The City Commission and our idiot Mayor have as much stupid as the universe has stars.
The liberal lunatics have spoken, may be more advantageous to ignore them – what they’ve been doing hasn’t worked for anyone or anything but their bank accounts.
For those who are curious, here is a discussion about the difference between resilience and resiliency: https://medium.com/nemac-blog/its-resilience-not-resiliency-56c9e2d65792
For those on short time budgets, the answer is that resiliency is the same as resilience, except that the former is more pretentious than the latter. In the context of the Gainesville City Commission, they both seem akin to insanity, i.e., “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” at the tax payer’s expense.
I am catching up on emails/reading Alachua Chronicle after being out of town for the long weekend. I almost thought I had clicked on a Babylon Bee post, and then wondered if Jennifer had taken up writing satire when I first started reading this article… Wow. The magical thinking of our elected local and appointed officials is unreal!
So even though the electric busses cost almost twice as much to own and run, they are going to do it anyway.