Taking a look at climate change

The town of Bancroft is doing its part to combat climate change according to Mayor Paul Jenkins.

Mayor Jenkins made this point during a meeting of the Hastings County Planning committee this week.

Referring to a climate change report before the committee, Jenkins pointed out that the county’s Official Plan includes a number of strategies regarding the climate.

Jenkins pointed out that Bancroft is making use of solar power.

“Some of the things we are doing in the town of Bancroft … we talked about this quite a bit over the last year, quite a bit, and we’re going to actually implement an official plan and a strategy. Some of the things we are doing to date are, you know, we’re in the midst of looking at converting our entire unit to solar.

“We’ve introduced a program for table top electric composters.  It’s amazing.  We’ve done some trials on this … the amount of food waste that it keeps out of the garbage.”

He also noted, “We already have in place the Community Improvement Plan program which is an incremental tax differential program for new development that the county participates in. We’re looking at altering that to have items put in place that will reflect improvements over and above building code to reduce carbon emission.  The building code is a minimum.  It’s a very minimum when you look into it.  So there’s many things to come.”

“And I’m sure in the not too distance future a lot of these things are going to become directives down from the province.  Just asked to put this in here (on the agenda) for everybody to have a look at, potentially, as they move forward to look at strategies that they could implement in their own municipalities.”

The county council representative on the Association of Muncipalities of Ontario, Tweed Mayor Jo-Anne Albert said, “AMO does have a task force working on climate change. So they will have something out soon.”