The CleanBC Local Government Climate Action Plan was announced by the Ministry of Environment, and District of Vanderhoof Councillor Brian Frenkel said the money could help in a number of ways.
$76 million is be made available over three years to local governments that invest in projects that align with the CleanBC Roadmap.
“For small communities not having a large budget, budgets go towards a lot of different things, but not really climate action initiatives. These are leverage funds that would help get some of these initiatives done,” said Frenkel.
He added that this is very similar to a previous initiative, which lead to some projects within the community.
“With our money that we got with the first initiative, we bought our first electric car for the District of Vanderhoof. And so that was a great initiative because we probably wouldn’t have done that, but now we’re show the residents in the community that it can be done, we’re using it, those kinds of things.”
Frenkel already had some ideas on what things he’d like to work towards in the community, noting that air quality can be an issue.
“There are that we need to do in our community when it comes under clean energy. Several times in the year our community is the top three worst air qualities in the province. We have road dust, we have industrial emissions, we have a lot of wood burning appliances.”
He added that from an infrastructure approach, looking at ways to better approach road repairs when it came to the growing problem of freeze/thaw cycles is also something he wants to look at.
Small local governments will have webinars available on May 25th and June 1st to learn more about the program.