Mansfield’s plans for becoming more sustainable

MANSFIELD — The Town of Mans­field is push­ing for a high­er lev­el of sus­tain­abil­i­ty that will pro­vide the town with envi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fits, accord­ing to May­or Anto­nia Moran.

One way Mans­field is cur­rent­ly work­ing toward becom­ing more sus­tain­able is by plan­ning to add EV charg­ing sta­tions to every pub­lic park­ing lot in town, accord­ing to Moran.

Addi­tion­al­ly, the town built a new net-zero ener­gy ele­men­tary school, mean­ing the school uses as much elec­tric­i­ty as it produces.

These two projects can be linked to what May­or Moran described as Mans­field­’s con­tin­u­ous efforts to lim­it waste and cre­ate its own elec­tric­i­ty to help reduce the town’s car­bon footprint.

These improve­ments will also help Mansfield’s efforts earn “gold cer­ti­fi­ca­tion” from Sus­tain­able CT, a vol­un­tary cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram that eval­u­ates the town’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Cur­rent­ly, there are 131 reg­is­tered com­mu­ni­ties in this pro­gram, accord­ing to Sus­tain­able CT.

Towns that work towards and achieve Sus­tain­able CT’s gold stan­dard should reap both envi­ron­men­tal and eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits, accord­ing to Sus­tain­able CT.

The town of Mans­field first became cer­ti­fied by Sus­tain­able CT in 2019, earn­ing the sil­ver cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. They renewed in 2022, mak­ing sil­ver again, which at the time was the high­est pos­si­ble cer­ti­fi­ca­tion a town could receive. 

Vir­ginia Wal­ton, a staff mem­ber for Mansfield’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty com­mit­tee and the eval­u­a­tor of Mans­field for Sus­tain­able CT, says cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is vital to the town because “It’s about reputation.”

“There is a lit­tle bit of peer pres­sure. We want to be one of the towns that is part of Sus­tain­able CT. It is like a lit­tle feath­er in the town’s cap to be con­sid­ered a sil­ver town,” Wal­ton said. 

Accord­ing to Sus­tain­able CT, Mans­field is one of  26 sil­ver-cer­ti­fied com­mu­ni­ties across the state.

Now, though, the town wants to upgrade from the sil­ver cer­ti­fi­ca­tion to the new high­est stan­dard, the gold cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, says Walton.

Mans­field will apply for this cer­ti­fi­ca­tion when their cur­rent one expires in 2025—giving the town two more years to pre­pare, in which they need to make sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments to achieve their goal, accord­ing to Walton.

Sus­tain­able CT grades each town using a point sys­tem. In 2022, Mans­field earned a total of 500 points, which was at the time 100 points clear of the sil­ver thresh­old. How­ev­er, the gold cer­ti­fi­ca­tion’s cur­rent thresh­old is 750 points, accord­ing to Sus­tain­able CT.

Accord­ing to Wal­ton, if the town can get to more than five loca­tions with EV charg­ing sta­tions by 2025, that will earn the town ten addi­tion­al points.

“It’s a real­ly high bar, the gold cer­ti­fi­ca­tion,” said Wal­ton. “We need to be Cli­mate Lead­ers. This means that our infra­struc­ture needs to take into account ener­gy use.”

In sim­pler terms, “Cli­mate Lead­ers” is a des­ig­na­tion giv­en to munic­i­pal­i­ties that are reduc­ing harm­ful green­house gas emis­sions while also prepar­ing their com­mu­ni­ty for the impacts of cli­mate change, all while sav­ing mon­ey, improv­ing pub­lic health, and build­ing com­mu­ni­ty, accord­ing to Sus­tain­able CT.

Wal­ton explained that achiev­ing this des­ig­na­tion is an extreme­ly hard chal­lenge for the town because “Every­thing plays into green­house gas emis­sions, even how we live our lives,” which makes reduc­ing the town’s usage challenging.

The Town of Mans­field is also part of C‑PACE. This financ­ing pro­gram helps com­mer­cial, indus­tri­al, non-prof­it, and mul­ti-fam­i­ly prop­er­ty own­ers get afford­able, long-term financ­ing for green ener­gy upgrades to their build­ings, accord­ing to the Town of Mansfield.

Despite all this, Wal­ton men­tioned that the town needs help find­ing ways to reach its goal of gold certification.

“We are talk­ing to var­i­ous com­mit­tees and boards now to say, “Is there any­thing with­in the sus­tain­able CT menu of options that you are cur­rent­ly work­ing on that you could con­sid­er doing a write-up about for the gold cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in two years,” Wal­ton said.

Wal­ton also men­tioned that one of the ben­e­fits of being a mem­ber of the Sus­tain­able CT com­mu­ni­ty is learn­ing and shar­ing infor­ma­tion with oth­er towns.

“If a town wants to find out about school com­post­ing, there is infor­ma­tion on [Sus­tain­able CT] about [our] town’s school com­post­ing,” Wal­ton said, “It’s pure learn­ing and pure shar­ing, which is a real bonus.”