After observing extremes in local weather patterns, Dane County Executive Joe Parisi plans to allocate nearly $1 million of the 2014 county budget proposal to address issues stemming from climate change.
Parisi said he will propose $981,000 for alleviating problems associated with changes in weather attributed to climate change to the Dane County Board of Supervisors as part of the county budget Tuesday.
“In the last couple of years we’ve experienced some extremes in weather from warm winters, blizzards, flooding in the spring and hotter summers,” Parisi said. “What the climate scientists tell us is that this weather is indicative of what weather is to come in the next decades due to climate change.”
Parisi said the money would go toward a number of different items, including efforts to unite park rangers with law enforcement officials.
Some of the money would be used to purchase vehicles for park rangers with radios on the same frequency as law enforcement officials, Parisi said. The budget also provides money for technology that gives ranger vehicles more mobility, enabling them to rescue people stuck in flooding or snow, he added.
“We want to do everything we can to make sure our folks can get to people when they’re in trouble,” Parisi said.
He also said the budget would address the “other side of climate change” with $1.5 million for energy efficiency upgrades and $2.3 million to purchase nine snowplows that run on natural gas.
Parisi said Dane County would be one of the first counties in the country to run snowplows on bio-gas that has been converted into the compressed natural gas Bio-CNG. The county already uses CNG to run county vehicles, he said.
“On the other side of the climate change issue, we also continue our investment to reduce greenhouse emissions,” Parisi said. “It’s important to not only address the results of climate change, but also to do our part to prevent it and reduce greenhouse gasses.”
Parisi said he has been working with town officials on the proposal for addressing climate change for more than a year.
Parisi convened a special task force last year called the Climate Change Action Task Force. The task force, he said, consisted of county department heads and will work to assess the needs of their departments in consideration of how climate is predicted to change in the coming years.
County Supervisor Robin Schmidt, District 24, said she applauds Parisi’s efforts to address climate change in the county, considering the recent extreme changes in weather.
“I think that Joe Parisi has really taken a leadership role in trying to deal with the impacts that we are seeing every year as a result of climate change,” Schmidt said. “Most dramatically for Monona and Madison is the significant rainfalls we’ve seen in which we have a very rapid response time in lake Monona that leads to flooding.”
Schmidt said she thinks the county board would support a proposal that minimizes the impact of climate change, but said it is too early to know whether or not the proposal will pass.
Parisi will introduce the county budget Tuesday, after which it will go to the Board of Supervisors.
