A version of this story appears in CityBeat’s April 5 print issue.
Cincinnati’s plan to move the city towards a greener future has undergone a refresh.
On April 3, city leaders announced the completion of the 2023 version of the Green Cincinnati Plan, a comprehensive sustainability plan designed to reduce carbon emissions and make Cincinnati a more environmentally-friendly city.
“For the first time ever, we are committing to carbon neutrality by 2050,” Mayor Aftab Pureval said during the plan’s announcement at the Civic Garden Center in Walnut Hills. “Climate, environmental protection and equity need to be at the heart of everything we do.”
The plan has been updated every five years since it was first introduced in 2008. Cincinnati City Council member Meeka Owens, who is chair of the Green Cincinnati steering committee, told CityBeat during a March interview that the 2023 plan is more ambitious than ever.
“Because the science is always evolving and changing, every five years it gets updated.” Owens told CityBeat. “We now have an aggressive goal of reducing emissions by 50% by 2030.”
According to a draft of the 2023 plan, the city plans to tackle carbon emissions through eight focus areas:
- buildings and energy
- city operations
- community activation
- food
- mobility
- natural environment
- resilience and climate adaptation
- zero waste
Reducing carbon emissions
The primary source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States comes from transportation, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Owens told CityBeat that tackling the way residents get around is obvious.
“The more cars are burning fossil fuels, the more the earth is heating up,” Owens said. “That’s why we need the opportunity to develop a city that’s going to support electric vehicles, meaning that infrastructure is there, meaning that the consumer who is looking to buy an electric vehicle can actually move around the city easily because we’ve created infrastructure to do so.”
Electric vehicles are a strong suggestion to citizens but a requirement for city departments – at least in the future – according to the 2023 plan. A draft of the plan shows that Cincinnati has set a goal of 400 electric vehicles in the city’s fleet by 2028, with 100% of employees having access to sustainable transportation options. That also means electrifying buses, and Owens said the city is working closely with the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA).
“SORTA is also having their internal conversations around electric buses and electrifying their fleet as well. That is a stakeholder that has a huge role to play,” Owens said.
Beyond electric cars and buses, the Green Cincinnati Plan sets a goal for increasing public transit usage by 25% by 2030. The draft said this will only be possible by providing more reliable, convenient public transit options for its riders.
While Owens would love to see more citizens opt for public transportation rather than cars, she said the best solution for drastically reducing carbon emissions is supporting walkable neighborhoods. This, however, is best addressed through city policy on zoning laws, she said.
“It’s about having the conversations about zoning changes that will help us to get there. We need to incentivize the development to be able to produce these types of affordable communities,” Owens said.
Listening to the community
Owens said the 2023 Green Cincinnati Plan is not only more aggressively targeting carbon emissions, it’s also more inclusive than ever before. Out of Cincinnati’s 52 neighborhoods, members of the plan’s steering committee were able to engage with 50 of them – 87% of the city’s zip codes – Owens said.
“Climate change is impacting communities differently. We’ve got the data, we’ve got the resources. It’s giving us a more granular focus on how to make changes,” Owens said. “We are really hyper-focused on communities that we would call front-line communities – those who have historically not been a part of the conversation around climate change and understanding its impacts are the folks that are at the table.”
The effort to gather the community’s feedback on the plan resulted in 4,000 hours of community engagement with more than 4,000 residents. Of those, a total of 1,600 residents participated in 42 public meetings and contributed 3,000 ideas through spring, summer and fall of 2022.
The number of feedback participants reached an all-time high for the 2023 plan, which Owens attributes to a rising concern for local environmental issues and more community partnerships.
“All of the numbers are trending in the upward direction, which means people are learning about the Green Cincinnati Plan and also getting involved more,” Owens said.
Oliver Kroner, director of the city’s Office for Environment and Sustainability, said during the press conference that the 2023 plan is “by the people, for the people.”
“We have 40 different strategies and 130 different actions in this plan,” Kroner said. “We are well underway with our 100 megawatt solar ray that will power our city facilities, it will power the equivalent of 25,000 homes of Cincinnatians.”
Kroner said federal incentives, like the Inflation Reduction Act, will build on the plan’s momentum to more sustainably power buildings in Cincinnati.
“This plan sets the foundation for us to take advantage of the federal incentives to do just that, for businesses for homeowners, for renters to capture federal incentives to acquire the latest tech to electrify their homes.”
Funding the plan
Owens said the responsibility of the Green Cincinnati Plan is to establish the city’s goals and how officials can maximize sustainable options for city operations and citizens’ habits, and not to be the solution-maker for how everything is exactly paid for. This is done by establishing partnerships with stakeholders like building developers and transportation leaders who will allocate their own resources to help make the goals happen, Owens said.
“It really is about the goals and then everyone is playing their part in terms of stakeholders to take on a certain area to make sure those goals are happening,” Owens said. “A large majority of the GCP isn’t necessarily policy-related, it’s not necessarily coming out of City Hall, but it’s really what our other partners are going to be doing.”
One of the areas of the plan in which climate equity does enter the city budget is in the form of Justice40, which ensures that at least 40% of federal spending benefits “priority communities.”
This year’s plan draft said that this becomes more possible with the help of new federal incentives and grants, which will be managed by staff contractors who can do grant tracking, implementation and management.
Another way Owens said the plan seeks to level out access to green technology is with the Green Cincinnati Fund.
The fund, which developed out of the 2018 plan, focuses on the needs of lower-income renters and homeowners to help them lower their energy costs and thus decrease fossil fuel usage. The Green Cincinnati Fund doesn’t come straight from the city budget but is supported by stakeholders who make contributions.
One of the programs supported by the fund include WarmUp Cincy, which supports low-income renters, homeowners and landlords of affordable housing with weatherization for hot and cold months as well as energy-efficient home upgrades. Another priority of the fund is to establish a solar panel program for lower-income homeowners and landlords.
“We often forget the conversation about what you’re spending on your utilities has everything to do with affordability,” Owens said. “Really being able to think in an innovative way about how we’re going to address these things in non-traditional ways, that also means we need folks to contribute to this fund.”
During the April 3 press conference, Owens said council’s Climate Environment and Infrastructure committee will review the finalized 2023 Green Cincinnati plan this week before voting to adopt the resolution.
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This article appears in Mar 29-29, 2023.