The Climate and Energy Action Ad-hoc committee hosted their first of three open houses last Tuesday night. With a welcome by Mayor Stromberg and committee introductions by Councilor Rosenthal, the roughly 200 in attendance visited five stations spread throughout the Historic Armory event room to learn about Ashland specific future climate trends, our current carbon footprint and how that is derived and talk with the committee and project team about the data and the plan development process. Several stations were devoted to soliciting and gathering input and feedback from the participants, which will be shared with the committee and the public in future committee meetings.
Additionally, City staff and the consultants presented a set of slides with an overview of the plan development process and an overview of the research and forecasting done by the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute for likely future local climate impacts. The project team is organizing and summarizing the results of the public input and will be sharing it with the committee at their next regular committee meeting on June 15.
The ad-hoc committee is currently working on finalizing their initial recommendations for the plan’s broad goals and targets, which will be a focus of the project update to Council scheduled for the July 19 Council meeting.