Peabody was officially awarded its designation of being a Green Community at a seminar Friday November 22 when state officials gifted the city a plaque and street sign commemorating the honor.
An official designation as a Green Community was granted by the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER) in April on Earth Day, making Peabody a part of the 294 other cities and towns in the state with the same title.
This will allow the city to apply for grant funds totalling nearly $663,000 to go towards clean energy and energy efficiency initiatives.
Before getting the designation of Green Community, the city first needed to meet certain requirements set out by the state, like collecting the baseline energy usage of the city’s buildings and implementing stretch codes.
According to Director of Community Development and Planning Office Curt Bellavance, a stretch code upgrades building codes to make them more strict in how they promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. An example of this is wiring homes and commercial properties to allow for an electric vehicle charging port.After working with DOER to smooth some details out, Peabody was officially granted the title of a Green Community on Earth Day of this year, along with Leyden, Newbury, and Gosnold. Now, 91% of Massachusetts cities and towns have this designation.
An important project that has already been planned and is currently being executed is weatherizing important buildings such as Peabody Town Hall to increase its energy efficiency.
“We took a big chunk of the money and put it towards weatherization. So improving doors, windows, doing some weather stripping,” said Bellavance. “For example, the windows at city hall are probably about 40 years old. They’re going to be replacing a lot of the mechanics of those windows so they’ll be functioning better and be more efficient.
With 29 city buildings along with structures like sewer and water pump stations, Belavance says that there are around 17 different projects mainly centered around weatherization that they’re aiming to have completed by the next month to 45 days.
To complete these initial projects, Peabody was awarded $271,560. Once these are done, the next round of grant applications will be next fall.
With the achievement of becoming a Green Community, the city has taken an important step in the Net Zero by 2050 initiative taken with help from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC).
“They selected three communities, we were one of them and they put together the Net Zero plan for us,” said Bellavance. “One of the action items for that was being designated as a Green Community.”
As climate scientists warn of the extreme impact on the Earth’s ecosystems that climate change will have if no action is taken by governments worldwide, these material gains made by Peabody to become more environmentally friendly are important indicators that the city is ready to do its part for the health of this planet.
Now with official support from the state, residents can be sure that the green initiatives will only become more plentiful in the coming years.
