A commitment to sustainability

In 2018, the City backed up its commitment to climate by creating a new sustainability team. Lauren Jensen is the City’s Sustainability Coordinator. She explains what her role entails:

“We have specific goals that our City has adopted to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions [and] to reduce our energy usage, but it’s really become much bigger than that. Initially our work was heavily focused on our energy use. Now we look at transportation; waste; air quality; we have a local bike sharing program, so micro mobility initiatives; electric vehicles — it’s really become a lot. Pretty much anything that the City does, we have a hand in ensuring that it’s happening sustainably,” she says.

Lauren also works with the City’s new Sustainability and Resiliency Task Force, a group of up to 50 community members helping the City create a vision for the future. The engagement work of the task force has made a powerful impression on Lauren, who says she’s proud to work for a City that is putting such thoughtful emphasis on community engagement.

“What makes me really proud about that is we have these lofty climate goals to achieve, but we hadn’t really thought about equity in their implementation. And so with this process, we’re really giving the community a voice in what our community looks like in the future, and how we adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change,” Lauren explains.