CAZENOVIA — On Nov. 16, the United Climate Action Network (UCAN) presented its annual Climate Action Leadership Summit at the Cazenovia Public Library.
UCAN is a grassroots organization in New York’s 22nd Congressional District that advocates for environmentally sustainable policies at the local, state, and national levels and engages with businesses, schools, and other local community organizations to advance environmental literacy and sustainable practices. Since 2017, UCAN has brought together a cross-section of local individuals, groups, and governmental bodies in conversation, education, planning, and actions to confront the climate crisis.
About 30 community leaders gathered at the 2024 climate summit to discuss their work on climate-smart projects, learn about other local and New York State initiatives, network, and develop goals for the coming year.
The event was organized by Phil Rose, Mary Bartlett, Geoffrey Navias, Nancy Paolozzi, Jimmy Golub, Anne Saltman, Carmen Druke, and Ethan Gormley.
“We are all concerned about what is going on across the planet and locally, so we have gathered here,” said Rose, who opened the summit. “Just look around; we are not alone. We are working together. . . . What we want to do [today] is say, ‘What do we do next? How do we make change in the coming year that will impact the environment?’”
Keynote speaker
NYS Sen. Rachel May spoke to the group via Zoom about some of the climate-related work being done at the state level.
She said that although she does not know how the recent election results might change things, she believes New York is in a good position to continue working hard to fight the climate crisis by addressing issues within the state’s purview.
“Just coming off a campaign, the biggest complaints we get have to do with NY enacting sweeping policies that really ought to be done at the federal level,” she said. “[For example], it makes it hard for our businesses [in] NY to comply with the rules we are setting if they are not rules that other businesses in other states are having to confront. I get that, but I also feel like NY is one of the largest economies in the world; we should be using the leverage of our economy to jumpstart a lot of technology and innovation and to make sure we are leading and not following, especially given that a lot of states aren’t taking any action at all. So, I remain committed to it, but I will say that politically and economically, it can be really hard to keep pushing within NYS when the environment around us is not on the same timetable we are on.”
May pointed specifically to the issues surrounding the New York State mandate that all new school buses purchased must be zero-emission by 2027, and all school buses operating within the state must be zero-emission by 2035.
“I was enthusiastic about it because I thought, ‘This is a way we take the power of this state and this large economy [and] send the message that we want the innovation, we want the cost to come down, we want the businesses to create these buses in a way they can be used,’” she said. “But we can’t force school districts to break their budgets if the price doesn’t come down or if the cost of the infrastructure [needed to] charge the buses is too high. We are trying to find a middle ground on that while still pushing really hard and still trying to send the message to the industry, ‘This is your job; get [electric] school buses that are affordable, and produce them at scale . . .’”
May added that she is committed to making it much easier in NY to use, charge, and pay for personal electric vehicles.
The senator next discussed her office’s work to make the electrical grid more efficient.
She has a bill to advance grid-enhancing technologies, which maximize electricity transmission across the existing system. Another bill would reduce the time it takes to bring new renewable energy resources onto the grid.
May also sponsors a sprawl prevention act that exempts or limits environmental review under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQR) for the construction of certain new residential units to avoid creating unnecessary housing sprawl.
She explained that if a developer is trying to build an apartment building, the project must undergo an intensive examination under SEQR to ensure that it won’t have negative environmental impacts, such as damaging wetlands or stirring up toxins in the soil.
May expressed her view that while it is good that SEQR aims to protect the environment, the process is excessively lengthy and complex.
“[It includes a lot of issues] that are not negligible but open these projects to lawsuits,” she said. “What you end up with is [local people fighting] these projects, and the result is the projects don’t get built in communities where there is capacity, where there is public transportation — where they ought to get built. Instead, the developers give up and go do sprawl development way out in cornfields somewhere that requires people to do far more driving. They take up a lot of open land, and they are environmentally far worse than what the project would have been if it could have been built in [an already developed area]. . . . This is a tough one because as an environmentalist, I don’t want to weaken our environmental review laws, but I do feel we are not doing the right thing when it comes to approving housing projects at a time when we desperately need to approve housing projects.”
May said she is trying to enlist as many other environmentalists as possible to engage with her bill to help push it through.
Another of the senator’s focuses is native plants and landscapes, which help stabilize soils, prevent flooding, and filter the water that flows into waterways.
She has been working to increase the availability and use of native perennial plant seeds across the state.
May dedicated the remainder of her presentation to NY’s waste reduction efforts.
“Waste doesn’t have any benefits to it; it’s just one big environmental cost,” she said. “You could almost argue that the climate crisis itself is a waste crisis. It’s about waste carbon getting into the atmosphere, waste heat getting into the oceans. Just grappling with the waste we create is absolutely essential to anything that we do moving forward.”
She added that politically, waste reduction is “a bit of a tough sell,” not because people do not understand that waste is bad but because most of the population does not have to deal with the waste at its end of life.
May explained that municipalities are typically pretty good at dealing with waste, and their leaders prioritize its removal.
“New York City is a star in this area; they are really good at getting the waste out of the city,” she said. “[Most] the population of the state and most of the legislators in the state legislature are from NYC, so they don’t see waste as the urgent issue that I think some of us do. In my district, the waste from NYC gets trucked up here to Seneca Meadows Landfill.”
May outlined two approaches to waste reduction in NYS
The first is through extended producer responsibility (EPR), a policy approach that makes producers responsible for their products throughout their entire life cycles, including at the post-consumer stage. The intention is to shift the burden away from municipalities and taxpayers and to incentivize manufacturers to incorporate environmental considerations into their products.
“They take responsibility up front, and they try not to produce such toxic materials, they try to make them in a way that they can be recycled, reused, or recovered in one way or another,” explained May, who later added that her colleague Senator Pete Harckham has a bill for EPR for packaging.
May also advocates for updating and enhancing the state’s 40-year-old bottle bill.
Her Bigger, Better Bottle Bill would raise the deposit from a nickel to a dime to incentivize the return of bottles. It would also expand the list of containers requiring a deposit.
“We need to figure out a way to incentivize every stage of the process to have a reason to care about our being able to collect as many bottles and cans as possible,” she said. “We are working on that, and we are working on tweaking the law for next year to see if we can get it to the point that we have something that works really well. . . . This is going to be a big push this year to try to get the bottle bill [through]. I couldn’t get it last year, partly because the leadership, at a time of inflation, wasn’t interested in raising a deposit that would make people’s grocery bills look higher, which I totally understand. [However,] I’m hoping that maybe moving forward, we will have an opportunity to do that.”
May concluded by saying she hopes to see the Bigger, Better Bottle Bill and the EPR for packaging passed together, and help is needed to push them through.
Climate resources/community partners
Through brief presentations, summit attendees were informed about the climate-related work of several local organizations/community partners.
Rose highlighted the Fenner Renewable Energy Education (FREE) Center at the Fenner Wind Farm, which gives tours and educates visitors about the benefits of renewable energy.
Supervisor Kyle Reger spoke on behalf of the Town of Cazenovia, Supervisor Jim Cunningham represented the Town of Nelson, and Saltman highlighted some of the accomplishments of the Village of Cazenovia and the Cazenovia Area Community Development Association (CACDA).
Led by executive director Lauren Lines, CACDA works to enhance the area’s economic vitality and preserve its rural, historic character. The organization helps secure grants to fund community projects, promote agritourism, and protect agricultural land. With CACDA’s administrative and grant-writing assistance, the Town and Village of Cazenovia and the Town of Nelson are now 1-Star and 2-Star Clean Energy Communities, each qualifying for $60,000 grants through the NYS Energy Research and Development Authority.
Nelson, a Climate Smart Community and Clean Energy Community, plans to use the grant funding to install a solar array at the town office building. Cunningham, who also serves as chairman of the Madison County Board of Supervisors, actively works to protect Nelson’s two lakes and conserve the area’s soil and water resources through conservation planning, design, and implementation.
The Town and Village of Cazenovia are both Bronze Level Climate Smart Communities and Clean Energy Communities. The town plans to use its grant to purchase an electric truck, and the village plans to install electric vehicle charging stations in multiple locations and heat pumps at the police and fire stations and Burton Street Park. It will also purchase an electric off-road utility cart.
Other Cazenovia achievements include transitioning to LED streetlights in the town and village, installing a solar array at the village water plant, subscribing town municipal electric accounts to community solar, embedding a commitment to sustainability into the Town of Cazenovia Comprehensive Plan, and completing a drainage infrastructure project on Ridge Road.
Gormley, a climate justice organizer, spoke about Citizen Action of NY, which works with the statewide coalition NY Renews to organize communities to fully implement NY’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, make corporate polluters pay, and hold utilities accountable.
Emmet Owens discussed how the Cazenovia Lake Association (CLA) works with numerous partners to protect the environmental and recreational sustainability of Cazenovia Lake. The CLA’s contributions include implementing a two-pronged effort to control Eurasian watermilfoil, introducing a boat cleaning station at the Lakeside Park boat launch, identifying and reducing sources of nutrients and sediment entering the lake, and participating in the Citizens Statewide Lake Assessment Program.
Agriculture and Horticulture Resource Educator Maryellen Sheehan described how Cornell Cooperative Extension of Madison County helps farmers, producers, local businesses, landowners, community groups, and county residents to manage and care for the land and understand how local environments are potentially affected by climate change.
Navias recounted how UCAN began eight years ago with weekly meetings at Dave’s Diner. Since then, the organization has held eight energy fairs and five climate summits.
Chuck Tomaselli spoke about his role as the Climate Restoration Alliances Ambassador to Rotary International and his involvement with the Environmental Sustainability Rotary Action Group. He specifically highlighted a global campaign to have Rotary International take on climate restoration as its next global initiative once it has completed its mission of eradicating polio from the planet.
Cazenovia Preservation Foundation (CPF) Executive Director Jen Wong discussed the work of the accredited land trust, which conserves over 3,800 acres of open space, habitat, and agricultural land; considers climate resiliency, biodiversity, and habitat connectivity in its conservation project planning and land stewardship practices; participates in municipal and comprehensive land use planning; provides support for site selection of proposed renewable energy projects; and offers free educational programming on a range of natural history topics.
A glossary of local organizations engaged in environmental work was distributed during the summit and will be available on the UCAN website. The document includes a description and contact information for each organization.
Breakout sessions
During the breakout sessions, participants split into five groups — “Water,” “Large-Scale Renewable Energy Projects,” “Legislation,” “Transportation,” and “Plants, Forests & Land” — to brainstorm potential climate action initiatives and goals for 2025.
Following the work session, the groups reported on their conversations.
“We will take all this information and create a follow-up report, which you guys will all get,” said Bartlett. “We will have a follow-up meeting where we are going to present the report, and then we will decide on two or three things to really focus on for 2025.”
To learn more about UCAN and how to get involved, visit unitedclimateaction.org or email [email protected].
