SUCCESS! Climate Emergency Declared at Town Meeting!

Article 58, “Climate Emergency Declaration” passed last night as the final article of the 2022 Sudbury Town Meeting.

This was the culmination of more than a year of hard work and hard struggle by Sustainable Sudbury’s CED team: Alex Vai, Debbie Wolozin, Leslie Lowe, Marie Royea, Melissa Gough, Bruce Porter and Tom Yelton.

Thank you to all who showed up to vote last night and to those who stood up to speak in favor. Special thanks to the LSRHS Enviro club members who supported us and stood up in front of Town Meeting and made a powerful statement.

Thank you to all who hosted yard signs to help us get the word out (we will pick them all up today).

Thanks to Town officials and committees who supported this including the Energy and Sustainability Committee, the Commission on Disability, the Conservation Commission, and Select Board members Janie Dretler, Charlie Russo, and especially Jen Roberts who got us started by asking us what we were doing on Climate Change and continually demonstrated her strong support for Climate Action.

Thanks to State Rep. Carmine Gentile and State Sen. Jamie Eldridge who got us $100K state seed money for the Sustainability Director position and supported the CED.

Thanks to Rami Alwan, Mark Sevier, and other members of the Energy and Sustainability Committee for contributing $30K seed money from the ESC for the SD position.

Thanks to our Wayland friends who passed their CED last year and gave us great advice, especially Michael Delman and Kaat Vander Straeten.

Thanks to the organizations who publicly supported article 58: the Sudbury League of Women Voters, the Sudbury Democratic Town Committee, the Environmental Club of LSRHS, and First Parish of Sudbury.

Thanks to the Sudbury League of Women Voters for cosponsoring the online forum on article 58.

And finally thanks to our opponents who kept us on our toes and made us strengthen our message. We are truly all in this fight together — whether you believe it or not! As Ben Franklin said, We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

This is just the beginning. We now all need to keep the pressure on so that we get an experienced, qualified and effective Sustainability Director and create an effective Climate Action Plan.