After receiving input from the community, Gunnison City Council on Tuesday reviewed a final draft of the city’s first comprehensive sustainability plan, Gunni CARES 2030.
Within its 2020 strategic plan, the city identified a need for a comprehensive sustainability plan. In response, the city staff hired Jenny Nitzky and Shannon Hessler, two graduate students in the Western Colorado University Master of Environmental Management program, as sustainability interns in April of 2021. They tasked the pair with crafting the plan, and the interns worked with stakeholders throughout the valley to create a document that would address both the changing climate and the specific needs of the Gunnison community. The city is scheduled to adopt the plan at council's April 26 meeting.
The process involved numerous opportunities for residents to voice their own ideas and opinions on the plan. At a sustainability open house in November, the community was invited to explore the areas of energy, waste, water and resiliency and provide recommendations. Staff also made the draft plan available on the city’s website, where it was open for public comment over a two-week period in March. Some of the topics addressed within the feedback were affordable housing and worries about cost increases, particularly in the energy sector.
“Affordable housing is a critical concern for the city of Gunnison, along with ensuring that our community’s vulnerable populations are not disproportionately impacted by climate change, or the policy implementations in this plan,” Nitzky said.
The action plan does address housing and seeks to create a balance, Nitzky said. An “essential next step” is the creation of a Gunnison Resiliency Task Force, a group that would help refine and implement specific policy recommendations made in the document, as well as hiring a sustainability/climate action coordinator.
“We do recognize that there could be some discomfort regarding these actions and we want the task force to be made up of people who consider all of those possibilities,” she continued.
When outlining a path for Gunnison to achieve energy efficiency within the plan, strategy C encouraged the electrification of buildings throughout the city. Two recommended actions included requiring all new residential and commercial buildings and half of remodels to be electric to the extent the city capacity allows by 2030.
Gunnison resident Steve Schechter disagreed with the “drop dead” date for allowing homes to be hooked up to natural gas, calling for a sooner shift into all-electric housing.
“The longer you wait, the worse it's going to get,” Schechter said. “It's going to get bad around here. We already have high housing prices. Now we're going into high food prices and high energy prices, it's going to cripple our working class.”
Council member Mallory Logan asked the interns to be considerate of the reality of the existing housing stock staff has to work with in Gunnison, as well as the amount of money it would cost to upgrade those homes — acknowledging 1,000 or more substandard housing units within the city and the immediate areas.
“We really need to consider what our benchmark actually is, especially with our area median income being so low and having so many substandard housing units,” Logan said. “We're starting at a much lower point than a lot of other communities, so how to manage that and bring those up to par before we shoot for these massive goals.”
Electrifying homes is just one of several strategies outlined in the plan as a way to move the city closer to its goals. Rather than “tying ourselves and committing” to these, the sustainability blueprint will be a way to move it all forward, said Mayor Diego Plata.
“I don't think requiring all these things is going to make housing any more affordable,” Plata said. “But as we work through it, there can be ways to get there.”
“I think the intent is to at least have something to aim for.”
(Bella Biondini can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or bella@gunnisontimes.com.)
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