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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2026-04-28-SLC-min.pdfSustainable Lexington Committee Minutes of Meeting of April 28, 2026 A meeting of the Sustainable Lexington Committee (SLC) was held on Zoom. A quorum was present throughout. Members Present: Cindy Arens (chair), Todd Rhodes (vice chair), Andy Joynt, Dan Voss, Kavitha Venkatesan, Celis Brisbin, Kavita Ravi Members Absent: Lin Jensen, Rick Reibstein Staff Present: Maggie Peard Other Attendees: Ricki Pappo, Mark Sandeen, Joe Pato (SB Liaison) ————————————— SUMMARY OF VOTES: No votes were taken. ————————————— The meeting was called to order at approximately 6:02 pm Previous Meeting minutes: The minutes of February 12, February 24, March 24 and March 26, 2026 meetings were approved as written. New Business Plastic turf health issues: Susan Chapnick, MS and Sarah Evens, PhD gave presentations at the April 21 Lexington Board of Health meeting on the adverse health effects of plastic turf and poured in place playground surfaces, including PFAS and microplastics. SustainabLY Maggie said that they created a website about their MassEnergize challenge portfolio regarding increasing public transit use including MBTA and LExpress. MassEnergize is announcing the challenge winners at an event on May 1. Sustainability and Resilience Officer Updates BEUD The deadline for reporting is May 31st. Notifications have gone out to building owners, including instructions on reporting. Maggie ran a training session on how to report, but not many attendees as many already know how. Still using the BEAM platform from Clearly Energy, helpful to building owners, includes energy data for portfolios and what they can do to be in compliance. Sent out building energy score cards. EPA Portfolio Manager database application, for reporting building energy use, is still funded and running. Mark said that Maggie is doing a great job; state compliance is 40%, ours is 85%. Town Meeting Articles Article 23 was passed. Article 31 got stalled for technical difficulties, and will be taken up at the next Town Meeting session. Town trash bin survey responses are up to 1000. Not too many new questions. Baseline service was the most common question. Then multiple size bins. Kavitha suggested providing bin samples at Town Meeting. Joe suggested that we allocate bags/bins by household size. Todd raised the concern of how to pick up extra bags, but Cindy explained that many towns do it. Mark suggested having an extra bin instead of a bag. Kavitha suggested quoting DEP; many towns have dealt with all the corner cases and emphasizing that reducing waste reduces costs despite exceptions. Article 7 not yet taken up. Tufts Neighborhood Electrification project Final draft report from students is due on 4/30. The report will have lots of data, including a cool heatmap of resident electrification interest. Data has been corroborated with utility data. There is a spreadsheet analysis of 25 dead-end street segments from the gas utility (National Grid). Students were able to work with National Grid on different gas pipeline retirement scenarios, however the utility is not prepared to move forward with neighborhood electrification. The Newton Garland Rd pipeline retirement plan group would be good to reach out to. MassCEC has a Cost Reduction Lab grant to reduce costs of electrification. Companies are looking for pilot partners, Lexington could be one of them. Municipal Vulnerability Plan/Hazard Mitigation Plan Will share the draft Hazard Mitigation Plan and the MVP 2.0 priorities. Community outreach continues. High School Project Update Joe: New estimates came in for Design Development (DD), some elements went up and some went down, but the total did not change. Still on track for cost and time. SBC voted to accept the estimates and move to construction documents. Cindy: Need breakouts for cost of red-list free items and exposure risk. May ask for a joint PBC-SLC meeting. Mark: DD budget was fully compliant with the IBDCP. Red list will be on a Total Value Design opportunity. May help to have an offline meeting since PBC meetings don't accommodate nuance. Want to set a threshold of cost savings that triggers a review. The design team is still indicating a recommendation to scale back solar to reduce construction costs without providing analysis for increased operational costs. State Legislation “Save MassSave” two-pager Housing Energy Affordability Fact Sheet Letter to Senate A state climate bill has passed the House and is now being looked at in the Senate. The House bill included good things, but included cutting MassSave’s budget by $1bn. This will not only increase utility costs but cut tens of thousands of jobs in the process. Senate advocacy will be needed in order to remove those detrimental cuts to MassSave. Resilient Lexington Buildings and Energy section review Need to review every 5 years. Metrics are generally good. The first goal of implementing fossil fuel free for new construction (BE 1.1.A) is going well as is BE 2.1.A, identifying town sites for adding solar and planning to add. Electrified households are hard to track. Celis: Look at the property card. Cindy: But it is not accurate. Utilities report aggregate data for Lexington. Solar installations can be tracked via state SMART and REC data. However, it’s slow to be updated. Households signed up for community solar are easy to track. Good idea to focus next on BE 2.1.C, re-start a Solarize campaign and include battery storage. Network Geothermal may come back as a possibility depending on how HEET Framingham project goes. We should also consider a bylaw requiring solar for new commercial construction like Watertown has. Talked about adding Building Performance Standards, but might watch how the state building energy reporting goes. We could also pursue a Lexington specific community solar, could the Lexington community benefit from Town solar projects. Kavitha: Need to document pathways to 100% electrification. Next meeting: May 26 The meeting adjourned at 8:14pm.