This story has been updated with corrections on Feb. 26, 2024. 

The Ames Climate Action Plan has been through many phases in the past four years, but in 2024, it entered a phase never seen before: implementation.

In January, the Ames City Council approved “seven initial steps” toward accomplishing the plan’s “six big moves” although it was not a commitment to fund the entire $300 million cost.

Examining the previous steps the city and council have taken may shed light on what Ames can expect, although the ongoing implementation process remains in the development phase, which some project leaders say may take years.

According to Ames city documents from June 13, the following initiatives were seen in anticipation of approving the plan, referred to as the “six big moves:”

• A Climate Action Plan website was created.
• Three public surveys were placed on the city’s website, along with paper copies being available at the Ames Public Library. The surveys focused on target setting, the six big moves and Climate Action Plan barriers to implementation.
• Six public meetings with the Supplemental Input Committee were held.
• Five public workshops with the Ames City Council as the Steering Committee for the project.
• An in-person town hall meeting and a virtual Iowa State student town hall meeting were held.
• Questions related to Climate Action issues were added to the 2022 and 2023 Resident Satisfaction Survey.

The City Council first approved a Community Greenhouse Gas Inventory in 2020, which provided data from which the Climate Action Plan was later built. The inventory aimed to set a carbon reduction target and develop cost-effective strategies to achieve carbon reduction goals.

The City of Ames selected a target of 83% carbon emissions reduction by 2030 at a city council meeting in December 2021. The announcement stated that the proposed goal has Ames achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, and an 83% reduction in emissions from 2016 levels by 2030, which initiated the founding of the city’s Climate Action Plan.

While climate action goals still aim to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050, Susan Gwiasda, public information officer for the city manager’s office, said the city has ratcheted back to form more realistic and feasible plans.

Gwiasda said the new goals now aim for a carbon emission reduction of 70% by 2030, but still net zero by 2050.

“We’ll continue to look for those easy wins, but we’ll also look for the harder things to do,” Gwiasda said. “Like getting off burning natural gas at the power plant. How can we do that responsibly long term, and what’s that transition plan? How can we ask when people build new homes and new structures that they build them in a net zero capacity?”

Ames City Manager Steve Schainker said the speed and length of the implementation process will be determined by the city council each year, as previously reported by the Daily.

Ward 1 Rep. Bronwyn Beatty-Hansen, said the city council served as the “steering group” for the city-hired consultant, Sustainable Solutions Group (SSG), that drafted the plan.

“At [the consulting] stage, in the planning, we were giving the consultant feedback and sort of setting our initial targets for emissions reductions,” Beatty-Hansen said. “And their initial target was pretty aggressive. So [we were] setting the target and then ultimately though, compromising on that target.”

Beatty-Hansen said the city council’s role has shifted to that of implementation.

“The way that has looked now is that [Ames city] staff have taken the Climate Action Plan and they have developed a list of priority initiatives or things to work on, basically, first, and so now we’re working through their list of initiatives,” Beatty-Hansen said.

Ames city employees will look at the bigger picture, Gwiasda said, addressing issues ranging from city departments to residential impact.

“When you look at climate action comprehensively, it’s not just from a city’s perspective,” Gwiasda said. “We’re looking at water, we look at garbage, we look at transportation.”

At a City Council meeting Jan. 12, council members discussed implementing the seven initial steps of the Climate Action Plan. The steps are:

• Increase wind and solar generation as part of electric services renewable energy portfolio
• Waste-to-energy improvements/reducing waste emissions
• Net zero and net zero-ready new construction
• Retrofitting existing buildings
• Retrofit municipal buildings
• Electrify the municipal fleet (non-CyRide)
• Create a mayor’s Climate Action Plan leadership task force

Gwiasda said Ames city staff addressed the six big moves that were identified in the Climate Action Plan and then constructed the seven priority areas around those moves.

“[This included] things like our energy portfolio, and how we can move over to more green energy while still becoming reliable, maintaining our reliability, independence and dependability, because people need electricity,” Gwiasda said.

One difficulty with the proposed initiatives, Gwiasda said, was implementing net-zero buildings.

At a council meeting Jan. 10, Ward 2 Rep. Tim Gartin said the biggest issue facing Ames is a lack of housing and additional costs of development are “counterintuitive to our goal of building affordable housing,” as previously reported by the Daily.

“[It’s hard] to say we’re not going to use natural gas to heat, because that’s how everybody heats their homes right now with natural gas,” Gwiasda said. “And a net zero building would mean only heating with electricity.”

Beatty-Hansen said certain funding, such as utility funds, would cover things that are in the utility category, but in terms of building retrofits, the city does not yet have a designated source of funding. Beatty-Hansen said that would be the work the council has in front of them in upcoming years.

“With things like wind and solar, when we look at that category, those are funded through electric ratepayer fees,” Beatty-Hansen said. “So how much the city charges for electricity, if we were to really increase [installations], ratepayers would share the cost of that installation over time.”

Gwiasda said Ames has 200 local structure solar panel installations but “embracing” solar panels remains an area of growth in Ames’ sustainable energy production. Gwiasda also said Ames residents push both council members and city departments to think about sustainable solutions.

“We’ve been just kind of plugging along doing our own thing, trying to set a lead by example,” Gwiasda said. “But residents came to us and said no, we need a comprehensive plan for the community, and local government needs to lead it to bring everybody together and say here’s where we are, here’s where we need to be.”

The Ames Climate Action Team (ACAT) is made up of volunteers in Ames and Story County and promotes action-centric social justice to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

“We’re an informal group of citizens who happen to care about the climate and what’s happening with climate, and we have been trying to really understand what the city can do in this,” Lee Anne Willson said.

Willson, a founding member of ACAT and co-host of the KHOI radio program Climate Matters in Ames, said recently, the ACAT’s focus has shifted to helping support the city’s climate action planning efforts in the coming years.

“What are the problems that need to be overcome for the city to make forward strides?” Willson said. “And one of the things that the group started doing even before I joined it was to encourage the city to develop a Climate Action Plan, and so that was a long process [that took] several years.”