Green North Adams members at a 2024 citywide trash clean up. Jenny Dunning, third from left, and Barbara May, fourth from left, attended the March 10 City Council meeting to encourage council to start a formal sustainability committee or group.

NORTH ADAMS — Two weeks after City Councilor Andrew Fitch raised the idea of a sustainability commission that would track city goals for energy use and waste reduction, more than a dozen residents showed up at the council’s next meeting to show support for the idea.

Now, city officials are weighing what form that effort should take — and how it could set goals and track progress toward a greener future.

Councilors support forming a commission of some sort — either on an ad-hoc basis or as a formally appointed panel — under the Community Development Committee. Councilor Lisa Blackmer, who floated that idea, also supported forming it as a city commission, and encouraged Green North Adams members, who attended the meeting in support, to join.

Others including Council President Ashley Shade and Councilor Keith Bona proposed creating an ad-hoc committee of residents and officials that meet on an as-needed basis. Such a structure would impose fewer restrictions and can later develop into a full commission, said Shade. The city’s IDEA Commission, or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion group, started that way.

“I think that's the way to go to start this off,” said Shade. “The people getting involved can decide whether or not it needs to be a full commission, the direction it goes, and the players involved.”

Fitch, who raised the idea at the Council’s Feb. 24 meeting, said creating a formal sustainability commission would help hold the city accountable and "push it into the future."

“But my ultimate goal is wanting the city to have a strategy and goals for sustainability and have an action plan to achieve these goals,” he said. “To get there, I think this would be helpful. We would probably not have such a difficult time recruiting because people are very passionate about it.”

Blackmer said a formal commission would help the city obtain grant funding for green initiatives.

”It's one more box to check when we're applying for grants ... I think having a committee shows we take it seriously,” Blackmer said.

Green North Adams member Jenny Dunning said the group should focus on improving the city’s infrastructure resilience, and offered the city’s trash disposal systems as an example. She said the city has “poor systems for collecting and sorting plastics” and that it’s hard to regulate state law compliance with “so many private haulers.”

Keeping the group an informal sustainability group, Dunning added, would be less effective.

“It’s just very hard to keep momentum with an informal group without official standing,” she said. “We’re just not in a position to set goals or track progress, which I think are the key elements of a sustainability initiative.”

Councilor Bryan Sapienza said he’d like a sustainability group to dive into related housing efficiency issues. “You have old boilers, old heating systems, that are wasting all kinds of energy,” he said.

Mayor Jennifer Macksey, who left the decision of formal or informal group to the Council, also asked them to think about if the city needs or can staff another full commission.

“Do we make them official or do we fold some of their work into a city council subcommittee?” she asked. “My biggest concern about forming another committee is we’re having a hard time filling the ones we do have.”

Macksey also said there’s currently no bandwidth to create a sustainability officer position in city government, though one existed in the past through grant funding. “I do feel this is an important topic, and know that in our everyday work we are sensitive to these issues," she said. “But it would be good to have people working on this more regularly.”

The commission wouldn't set regulations, she said, but it would advise her and council, help shape policies and priorities and review proposed projects through a sustainability lens.