A new energy and climate action department is being proposed as part of New Westminster’s 2024 budget.
In a memo to council, staff have put forward a restructuring proposal which would see the city’s electrical department and climate action team integrated and renamed as the department of energy and climate action. Its mandate would be to drive innovation and implement components of council’s strategic plan related to the climate and environment.
Lisa Spitale, the city’s chief administrative officer, has served as a commissioner on the New Westminster Electric Utility Commission for 11 years. She said a “turning point” was when council, through its strategic plan, asked the city to become an energy provider.
“At the same time, the city created a climate action team in 2020. At that time, the focus was policy development strategies,” she said. “We're now at the stage where we need to integrate the two so that we can focus more strategically on implementation.”
Spitale said those actions are the genesis of the recommendation to create a new energy and climate action department, which will activate integrated planning to meet the growing electrical needs results resulting from electrification – embedding community energy conservation, emissions reduction, and electricity demand management programs into the utility department.
According to a staff memo, the establishment of an energy and climate action department represents “a modernization” of the organization’s structure. Staff say it also provides the city with an opportunity to be more innovative in the electric utility and more effective in the implementation of the city’s climate action plan, in response to the City of New Westminster’s 2019 Climate Emergency declaration.
“From a leadership perspective, this is the next step,” Spitale told council at a Nov. 20 workshop. “It is getting us away from planned development, looking at more implementation, and looking at what's strategic to the utility that way, if we really want to accelerate our climate work.”
A memo to council stated the city’s electric utility is currently facing the challenge of meeting the electrical needs of customers in a landscape that includes a low-carbon energy mandates (such as electric mobility and electric heating systems), a housing crisis with new mandated targeted for municipalities, extreme heat impacting livability in existing buildings, and building for climate resiliency and adaptation.
“The current focus of the electrical utility is the efficient and reliable operation of the city’s electrical distribution network,” stated the memo. “In order to effectively respond to the emergent needs of the city, the mandate of the electrical utility needs to be expanded by incorporating innovation, long-range planning, and energy business expertise to its core functions. This will be achieved with the creation of the energy and climate action department.”
The City of New Westminster climate action team, formed in early 2020, is comprised of a manager and two staff. CAT has completed the corporate energy and emissions reduction strategy, the eMobility strategy and the community energy and emissions plan, and is now focused on implementing actions in these strategies in an effort to ensure the City of New Westminster can reach its greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.
According to the memo, a number of staffing needs have been identified for 2024 and 2025, including four new fulltime positons (costing $434,000 plus benefits) in 2024: a new senior climate policy planner; a community climate program coordinator; a climate change adaptation specialist; and an electric vehicle program manager. Three fulltime positions (costing $314,000) are proposed in 2025: an energy utility innovation planner; an eMobility specialist; and an education and awareness coordinator.
Leya Behra, the city’s manager of climate action, said “time efficiency” is one of the benefits to the city of bringing the department/teams together. She said the climate team has been working with the electric utility “constantly” as it’s been bringing in and implementing more of the actual projects and initiatives coming out of the climate action strategies.
“On a weekly basis, there's conversations happening,” she said. “So we are finding there's more and more places where climate team is looking at energy policy related stuff, because it relates to implementing the climate work. The (electric) utility is also looking at the same energy policy items.”
From a climate perspective, there are benefits to planning by having the electric utility and climate staff in the same room, Behra said.
“We could test things in an earlier phase instead of going further down the path and then coming together and talking about it and then going further down the path again,” she said. “So I think there are just general work efficiencies, and we're seeing ourselves collaborating more frequently.”
