The Town of Chapel Hill in collaboration with 97.9 The Hill WCHL & Chapelboro.com present “Our Town: Stories of Chapel Hill.” Each month you’ll hear from the people at the heart of your local government who are learning, serving, and working together to build a community where people thrive. This Earth Month, Sammy Bauer and John Richardson tell the story of sustainability in Chapel Hill.
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Sammy Bauer: I work in the Public Works department doing a lot of stormwater education. I am so passionate about stormwater education because our bodies are made up of 70% water, and we get our drinking water from Morgan Creek. So we quite literally are our waterways. I don’t mean that figuratively. So when we protect our waterways, we are protecting ourselves and our communities and our entire future. John Richardson: I work on climate change issues, so our team is responsible for implementing the town’s climate action plan. Our goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. This work is important to me because I care a lot about the environment, and I also care a lot about public service. My mom was a volunteer locally in Durham and that was a big influence on me and my dad was a scientist at a local college and that was another impact on me.
A project that I’m excited for the community to know more about is that one of the ways that we can reduce our emissions through our own town operations is by maximizing the amount of solar that we put on our town facilities and battery storage to help support that work. And so we’re in the middle of a process where we are looking at all of our big facilities and trying to figure out how much solar we can put on those rooftops over the next five to 10 years. And putting solar on these rooftops will help us lower our carbon footprint, which is a big part of reaching our goal.
Bauer: One program that I love is our volunteer water quality monitors. They are called the “Stream Team.” And we have 10 teams that go all across Chapel Hill, and they are monitoring the health of our creeks and streams. The stream team is important because we get to enhance and celebrate the expertise of our community. They know so much about our waterways.
Richardson: One way that Sammy and I work together is around resiliency and flood monitoring.
Bauer: Where are the flood risks in town? How can people figure that out? How can we respond to and protect ourselves from flooding as much as possible?
Bolin Creek via sustainchapelhill.org
Richardson: And so a project that we have collaborated on recently includes putting out more water sensors that measure the heights of our creeks and the amount of rain that we’re getting in Chapel Hill so that we can get early warning information that we can then share with other staff whose job it is to respond to situations where we have flooding and people need help.
Bauer: We are excited to add more stream gauges because they can give us critical lead time and protect people from rising flood waters, 30 minutes or up to an hour. Every minute counts when we’re dealing with flooding situations. And we are really excited to have this information.
One thing that folks can do at home to make a big difference for our waterways is to help reduce the amount of fertilizers that are flowing down storm drains and going into our creeks. So that looks like your yard trimmings, loose leaf piles, and grass clippings. We really need to keep those out of the street because guess what happens when it rains? It’s just going to get flushed straight into our creeks. And that is part of why we start seeing algal blooms in Jordan Lake. We are contributing to it.
Richardson: One thing that the Town of Chapel Hill is doing that people can also do at home is composting. We’ve set up some composting at Town Hall, Fire Station One, and also the Chapel Hill Public Library. The goal there is to reduce organics waste, which is about half of the waste stream that goes to the landfill. And if you can compost at home by starting a bin, if you want to work with a service that will come and collect the compost and take it to another location. There’s lots of different ways to compost, but this is an easy one that everyone can do.
Bauer: We all have a part to play and it can feel like our own homes, our own behaviors are really insignificant, especially in the face of these huge problems. But the reality is we are not alone. We’re part of a community. So when we all work together to do a thousand tiny things every single day, what a massive impact that has for our waterways and then also for the rest of our community. Healthy waterways are fundamental to our existence. We do not have a community without healthy waterways. What we do today matters. And I am hopeful that if we keep continuing this type of work as a community, we can build the future that we really all deserve, which in part, to me looks like healthy stream ecosystems that supply healthy drinking water sources that are safe to play in. And I’m excited to keep building that.
Richardson: My hope for the future is that this work continues to help us create a community that realizes the vision of being a sustainable one. Meaning you have choices about how you move around. You have a clean environment from your water to your air, to your soil, and that it’s a community you want to stay in for those reasons.
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