Citing redundancy, City of Missoula dissolves energy and climate team

Martin Kidston

(Missoula Current) The Missoula City Council on Monday voted to dissolve the city’s volunteer Climate and Energy Team in order to free up staff time and give the city’s climate experts more time to work on local solutions.

In place of the volunteer climate team, the city will work with the Local Policy Lab to create a taskforce that can be assigned singular projects that propel the city’s climate goals.

Doing so will free up city staff to work on other issues such as housing, and give local experts more time to address climate, said Ann Geiger, the city’s manager of strategic projects.

“The Energy and Climate Team is currently redundant to the city’s full-time staff and takes time away from city staff pursuing targeted climate work, in which city staff members are the experts,” said Geiger. “The city’s climate team will be creating task forces in the future, regardless of whether or not the ECT is disbanded.”

“A victim of its own success”

The decision to dissolve the Energy and Climate Team is the first under a directive by Mayor Andrea Davis to review the city’s volunteer boards and commissions and assess their purpose and continued necessity.

The climate team was formed in the early 2000s when the city had no climate experts on staff and few plans to address climate change. But through the climate team’s advocacy, the city now has a climate department with several full-time staff members dedicated to the issue.

Missoula also has adopted several climate-related goals around 100% clean electricity, zero waste and carbon neutrality. Maintaining a volunteer committee to chase the same goals emerged as a redundancy, supporters said.

“The expense of having staff on hand for this purpose is an important consideration. This is an opportunity for us to move forward and to eliminate what we no longer need,” said council member Bob Campbell. “Any chance we have to reduce bureaucracy or redundancy in local government, I’m all in favor of that.”

Time Spent

City administrators spend roughly 20 hours a week staffing various boards and commissions across the city, taking time away from other work. Freeing staff members for other work could save the city money, and it comes cheaper than hiring another employee.

Supporters also said that the Climate and Energy Team’s own members said they struggled to identify a consistent scope of work and had trouble following through on plans and goals. Replacing the team with a task force – one assigned a specific project – represents a step toward efficiency, supporters said.

“It came to light that there’s a lot of staff time that goes into this particular committee, and it’s redundant,” said council member Jennifer Savage. “We now have staff doing what this committee set out to do 20 years ago. Disbanding this committee doesn’t mean the city is abandoning climate work by any stretch. It actually frees up our dedicated climate staff to do more work in this area.”

While other volunteer committees are also under review, the decision to dissolve the Energy and Climate wasn’t unanimously supported. Among the opponents, council member Daniel Carlino said the volunteer committee doesn’t have any competing interests, unlike city staff or the city’s legislative lobbyist.

“We need a citizen advisory group to point out things that council and city staff aren’t able to because we have competing interest and we’re trying to make everyone in town happy,” said Carlino. “Climate science is so far from where we are right now. We can’t make everyone happy and follow climate science. We need a group of citizens to tell us what to do with climate science. To take that away is a huge mistake.”