City to hire sustainability coordinator
Two-year position will help implement Climate Change Preparedness Plan
The City of Mount Pleasant will soon be adding a new staff member whose core focus will be to spearhead the community’s climate change preparedness. That’s thanks to a 6-1 vote by city commissioners Monday meeting to hire the inaugural sustainability coordinator.
The two-year, full-time position is expected to cost about $42,000 in 2025, but then earn a salary of around $100,000 with benefits factored in, City Manager Aaron Desentz told the board. The new, full-time staffer will be charged with, among other things:
· Coordinating the implementation of and provide periodic updates on the city Climate Change Preparedness Plan.
· Leading efforts to secure a formal designation of the Chippewa River Water Trail by working with project partners and neighboring municipalities.
· Identifying and assessing areas along the river where erosion and restoration efforts are high priority, and working with state and federal agencies, environmental consultants and landowners to implement stabilizing strategies.
· Supporting the development and maintenance of a park inventory.
· Partnering with city staff and local organizations to implement Farmers Market programming that looks at topics like local food access, waste reduction and composting and sustainable transportation and outreach.
If all goes well, the position could be renewed for an extra year, Desentz said.
It’s the sort of work the commission prioritized in 2024, when it approved the climate change plan. The board initially tapped a consultant to get the ball rolling.
“Suffice it to say,” Desentz said, “the relationship with the consultant did not work out.”
Commissioners, by-and-large, however, saw that as a silver lining.
“The growing climate crisis is … one of the chief reasons I got involved in local government and running for office,” Mayor Boomer Wingard said. “How can we break down big issues and tackle them locally?
“Building that in-house infrastructure for ourselves, I do like this direction.”
A study released Nov. 1 of last year found that Mid-Michigan is vulnerable in four areas of climate change: increased heat, increasingly severe storms and associated flooding, and—at the other end of the spectrum—extreme drought.
The board debated the new hire on a day when National Weather Service data showed temperatures here marked the mercury at more than 10 degrees higher than normal.
July is usually the hottest month of the year in Mount Pleasant, with a maximum average temperature of 82.2 degrees and average rainfall of 3.26 inches, data reflect. Monday, the same day the City Commission met, the heat index here maxed out at 98 degrees, and monthly precipitation data had not yet been accumulated.
Now commissioners were feeling the heat.
“We have made a consorted effort to deliver this climate preparedness plan over a period of time,” Vice Mayor Maureen Eke added. “If we’re to sustain this and we’re to achieve a goal, we actually do need to place someone in charge of it. It doesn’t make sense having a climate readiness goal or plan that is not supported, not funded.”
The ideal candidate will have a bachelor’s degree in environmental science, sustainability, urban planning, public administration, natural resources management or a related field, according to the city’s job description.
Commissioner John Zang cast the low dissenting vote. While he said he strongly supports efforts to think local on a global problem, he took issue with the price tag and a job description that he felt was not fully flushed out.
“We’ve been talking about this for a long time, and we know nothing happened,” he said. “Now we’re going to spend $100,000 per year for this, to envision all things climate change. This (the job description) is a hodge-podge.
“We won’t change the world climate totally, but there are things we can do. But somehow it needs to be defined a little bit better to justify spending that money.”
