By this time next year, Brookfield will be better suited for electric vehicles.
The village announced Dec. 5 it had been selected as one of about 20 municipalities to participate in the third annual cohort of the EV Readiness Program run by ComEd and the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, an organization that encourages teamwork and collaboration among local municipal leaders in the Chicagoland area.
As a member of the program, Brookfield will develop policies intended to enhance the village’s infrastructure for electric vehicles through next summer, at which point the village will be designated an “EV Ready Community.”
“They walk you through the whole process,” said Community Development Director Libby Popovic. “They give you what they call homework, and every other week, we have meetings [for] things that we need to do to get us ready like pick out a site, look at the different EV charging stations … The Mayoral Caucus is really walking us through what are the next steps, and then they give you additional things that you could do within the municipality, different tips on how this should work to make it sustainable.”
The program launched at the start of November, and so far, Popovic said, it’s been going well for the village.
“It’s like having a mentor that’s walking you through it, and there’s two other groups of cohorts before us that we can look at and say, ‘Well, what is Chicago doing?’” she said.
Popovic said the program can also assist municipalities with fleet sustainability — that is, electrifying the village’s fleet of vehicles — but Brookfield isn’t quite ready for that step.
So far, the homework assignments have been “pretty easy,” she said, including joining a newsletter about electric vehicles and looking for potential locations for an electric vehicle charging site, but they’ll get progressively more intense with time.
“Another one of the homeworks was to find out how many people have an [electric vehicle] here within the village, so we’re actually looking at that research now,” she added.
Popovic said Brookfield is “ahead of the curve compared” with other municipalities in the program due to some of the village’s previous work, namely the passage of its sustainability plan in April.
She said part of Brookfield’s reason for joining the program was to put the village’s plan into action.
“The goal is really to meet our policies and our goals in our sustainability plan,” she said. “At some point, we’ll look back at the sustainability plan and say, ‘Do we need to update it?’ because this gives us the nuts and bolts of what we should be doing. There’s a lot of grants that are coming out there, including charging stations, and sustainability is so popular right now. As we’re growing and developing, this is like somebody holding your hand and showing us, ‘This village did it this way. This works. This doesn’t work. Plan accordingly.’”
Another reason Brookfield is ahead of the pack is that village staff, including Popovic, have already been working to make the village a better place for electric vehicles.
“We applied for a grant called the Driving a Cleaner Illinois charging grant. We applied for that in May,” she said. “In July, we received notice that we actually received the grant. I’m waiting for the state certification, because that grant is for the actual charging station.”
Popovic said Brookfield is hoping to keep its focus on going green as staff work to improve the village, like through the redevelopment of the Theater Building on Grand Boulevard.
“We’re just excited, because now, as we’re looking at our comprehensive plan and sustainability plan [and] all the different developments that are coming, as much as we can, we want to bring in some of these green features into the village,” she said. “We’re a village of walking. We’re a village of pedestrian traffic, trains, biking. You can bike from one side of the village to the other, so this just fits right in with exactly everything that we want.”
Other nearby municipalities also have their eyes on the future of electric vehicles. Oak Park owns 13 public electric vehicle charging stations after the village participated in the EV Readiness Program last year and earned a gold designation. River Forest also participated the second cohort and has taken steps to allow charging stations across the village.
