Northampton creates new climate department

Hoping to inject climate awareness into all of City Hall’s operations, Northampton is assembling a new department that focuses on climate change and sustainability.

Sixteen years after becoming the first Massachusetts community to hire an energy and sustainability officer, the city is establishing a three-person Climate Action and Project Administration Department. The move coincides with the creation of a stabilization fund to help Northampton make city operations carbon neutral by 2030, and make the entire community net-zero for carbon emissions by 2050.

Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra said she hopes the new department will inspire a culture shift within City Hall, in which all employees understand their roles in addressing climate needs.

“Particularly through capital projects, with every single thing we do, how do we view it through the lens of reaching these goals?” Sciarra said. “And how do I get departments to think creatively about this, or even connect dots they weren’t connecting?”

The new department will create a director position and will take its chief procurement officer and energy and sustainability officer from other departments. Officials said they hope the moves will bring more strategic planning and project management to climate work, and leverage the procurement officer’s interaction with other departments to emphasize climate considerations.

“This department brings three pretty exciting disciplines together,” said Alan Wolf, the mayor’s chief of staff. “It’s strategic climate methodologies as they apply to municipalities, and then project management … and procurement as a tactical tool to achieve policy goals. So all three of those things are kind of new for Northampton that we’re hoping to get from this department.”

Some larger Massachusetts communities have climate-focused departments, and Northampton officials said they looked to Worcester and Syracuse, New York, as models for their new department. Northampton’s move dovetails with Gov. Maura Healey’s creation of the new Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience and the appointment of Melissa Hoffer as the state’s climate chief, the first such state-level cabinet post in the nation.

Northampton has hired a new chief procurement officer, William Coffey, to replace Joe Cook, who retired in February after more than three decades of service. The city is finalizing job descriptions for the department director, as well as for a new energy and sustainability officer. (The previous sustainability officer recently moved on to a new job.) Sciarra said she was hoping to have the full team in place by the start of the fiscal year in July.

The city is also creating a Climate Change Mitigation Stabilization Fund, which the council approved earlier this year. With $3 million in reserves, the fund got its initial infusion from American Rescue Plan Act funds, Sciarra said, and will depend on free cash going forward. The mayor said she hopes the fund will help cover design and feasibility work for big-ticket climate projects, allowing the city to be “shovel ready” for the various state and federal grants it pursues.

Sciarra credited resident engagement in creating the new department. Shortly after she took office in January 2022, the Northampton Climate Emergency Coalition, which consists of climate activists from several local groups, approached her about elevating Northampton’s climate efforts. According to Sciarra, the coalition was also helpful in reaching out to councillors and other stakeholders, and in doing research and legwork to envision a new department.

During a Feb. 2 council meeting, Ward 1 City Councillor Stanley Moulton acknowledged the residents’ involvement in creating the new department.

“It’s really a textbook example, I think, of how a grassroots effort worked,” Moulton said, “to really produce a lot of solid information, reasons for doing this and then build political support for it.”