City of Sioux Falls announces Climate Action Plan, starting with adding electric cars

Following 18 months of planning, the City of Sioux Falls announced a climate change plan focused on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and helping the community.

It's called the Sustainability and Climate Action Plan.

City leaders spoke Monday about the plan, which aims to improve water quality, reduce waste, increase recycling and more. After months of surveys in the community, the plan is moving forward for approval to be enacted by the City of Sioux Falls government.

The climate plan encourages businesses and citizens to join in, after 95% of community members said they thought environmental and sustainability issues would affect future residents in the Community Sustainability Survey.

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The goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 45% by 2030, according to the plan.

“We’ve never been bold enough… but now we know how to work backward from that goal,” Mayor Paul TenHaken said.

The city is partly leading the way by adding electric vehicles, but also by understanding how things like food insecurity, flood mitigation or a host of other issues might affect people.

"Vulnerable community members can be disproportionately affected by environmental and sustainability issues,” Holly Meier, the director of sustainability said at the the event. “As we are implementing initiatives... it is very important all community members have access and benefits.”

Meier emphasized that the effort is science-led but takes everyone into consideration, and is open to comment.

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City of Sioux Falls starting with three priorities

Electric cars and cleaner transportation

The plan prioritizes clean transportation, putting everything from city parks to police vehicles into consideration, especially for adding more electric vehicles to its lineup this year.

Protecting water resources

The Big Sioux River and more take priority too.

“We have hundreds of millions of dollars invested just to be near that river,” TenHaken said. He pointed to lack of snow this year, flood mitigation and more as needs to address.

Making sustainability part of the city budget

The plan will be presented to a Monday evening City Council Informational Meetings. After public comment, the plan will release in the late spring.

There are six focus areas

Those are:

• Natural systems

• Community vitality & sustainable living

• Materials management and waste

• Transportation and land use

• Energy and buildings

• Sustainable economy

And the city hopes everyone joins to clean up Sioux Falls.

“We’re going to ask the community to be involved,” TenHaken said.

TenHaken pointed to the new requirement that residents put their trash cans on the curb on collection day as a small change, instead of letting trucks idle while workers bring them from door to curb, as a not un-controversial but still helpful shift.

The public can comment until March 21 at siouxfalls.org/sustainability or call 605-367-8276 to reach Sioux Falls Sustainability.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Sioux Falls announces climate change plan for electric cars and more