Earth Month’s a Wrap!

It’s hard to believe it’s May already. With so much progress on the climate and environmental fronts to celebrate, Earth Month flew by. Here are some of the highlights of the City’s work this past April.

• We reached another milestone in our work to build a bus rapid transit (BRT) system in Madison – getting a contract approved for purchasing all electric buses, and approving the siting and configuration of every BRT station.
  
• We hosted Governor Evers on a visit to of our Fleet Division Building – the first and still only LEED Gold fleet building – to celebrate the release of the Wisconsin Clean Energy Plan.
• We are hiring a contractor to design a treatment or filtration system to remove PFAS from Well 15 near the Truax area.
• I facilitated a meeting of 14 mayors from Climate Mayors and C40 with White House officials to discuss ways that funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill can best advance our collective climate and equity ambitions.

• We kicked off the 2022 season of the City of Madison’s solar program, MadiSUN, making solar more accessible to homeowners, businesses and non-profits in our community.
• Thanks to local Girl Scout troops, we experimented with low-carbon concrete projects that will help us reduce the amount of carbon our construction generates.
• We co-hosted the Transportation Innovation Expo to advance the adoption of electric and alternative fuel vehicles into community fleets.
• We celebrated an expansion of our electric bus rapid transit fleet and our electric charging and maintenance infrastructure for buses with Senator Tammy Baldwin.
• We reaffirmed our support of pollinators by taking the Mayor’s Monarch Pledge reaffirming our commitment to pollinator health as a Bee City.
• We co-hosted, along with Dane County, the Sustainability Leaders Collaborative Annual Meeting, where local governments from throughout Dane County share their sustainability achievements and ambitions with each other, so that we can all go further together.
• We were accepted into a technical assistance opportunity along with the University of Wisconsin through the Thriving Earth Exchange to help advance our urban heat island and green infrastructure work.
• We established and announced the City’s first Farmers’ Market Drop-Off Site for food scraps, to support small-scale composting.
  
• We announced the return of our award-winning Master Recycler class for 2022, to improve awareness of what can go in the green bin.
• The Hermsdorff Solar Farm came online, and is now generating clean solar electricity. We purchase the energy directly for our facilities through Madison Gas & Electric’s Renewable Energy Rider program. This brings us up to 74% renewable electricity for City Facilities.
• We announced the beginning of a process to establish more transit-oriented development in Madison, to help support strong use of our major transit lines and further reduce vehicle trips.
• We received a state grant to improve the energy efficiency of the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center.
• We celebrated 50 years of conservation parks.
• Madison Public Libraries and the Library Foundation relaunched the BCycle community pass program.

So much more is underway. We continue to transition our fleet to electric and alternative-fuel vehicles, convert our streetlights to LEDs, work to expand our Green Power solar trainee program, invest in energy efficiency improvements in naturally-occurring affordable housing, identify flooding resilience projects through our watershed mapping and analysis projects, and more. Here in Madison, every day is Earth Day.