It’s official: Brookfield has taken a major step toward becoming a more sustainable village.
At its April 8 meeting, the Brookfield village board formally adopted a sustainability plan for the village for the first time. According to the plan’s mission statement, the five-year initiative will guide the board and village staff to support sustainability action as they make decisions on budgets, grants, bids, policies and more.
“The actions presented [in the plan] are financially feasible measures to effectively advance climate change mitigation/adaptation, environmental justice, education, compliance, utilization of sustainability resources, and accountability,” the mission statement reads.
The village’s adoption of the sustainability plan comes just a month after Brookfield’s conservation commission presented a draft of it to trustees during the board’s March 11 committee of the whole meeting.
As a result of recommendations given by trustees during that meeting and during one-on-one meetings afterward, the conservation commission made changes to the draft that are included in the final version the village adopted Monday.
Most of the changes were additions to the lists of village accomplishments included under each of the plan’s nine focus areas, such as the inclusion of Brookfield’s rain barrel program, its lead line inventory visualization, the bicycle lanes on Washington Avenue and the air purifiers in the recreation hall under the village hall. Other changes to the draft included moving specific action items to fall under different goals within a focus area and wording changes or additions to action items.
“I just wanted to thank everyone on the conservation commission for all their hard work and to Trustee [Katie] Kaluzny for championing this effort,” said Trustee Julie Narimatsu at the meeting. “Special thanks to Bridget [Jakubiak] for meeting with me and listening to all my feedback. I saw it all in there and it looks really great.”
Kaluzny is the board’s liaison to the conservation commission while Jakubiak is the commission’s chair.
“At the committee of the whole meeting, I indicated how impressed but not surprised I was at the thoroughness of the report and the amount of work that went into it, and it was no surprise that you listened and you actually made some additional changes,” said Village President Michael Garvey at the meeting. “This is a very, very impressive document, and it’s not just going to be a document that’s going to sit on the shelf. It’s going to kind of be factored into decisions the board makes going forward. This is something the board wanted, and you helped deliver it to us, and we’re going to make sure that your efforts don’t go to waste.”
