Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan says the city is making progress in transitioning to renewable energy sources and reducing emissions, with a focus on addressing climate change.
Sheehan marked Earth Day Friday at City Hall. The third-term Democrat highlighted the city's initiative to plant 2025 trees by 2025, which has already been accomplished, two years early.
“We will continue to plant trees but we do not do this work alone," said Sheehan. "We are grateful for partners like Governor Hochul and the Department of Environmental Conservation for providing the city with the grants that allow us to accelerate our tree plantings. Our tree inventory planting includes another 120 new trees in Arbor Hill.”
Sheehan said as of January, all of city operations’ electricity comes from renewable sources. Albany has switched more than 10,000 streetlights to LED's. She added that the city is spending $11 million to install EV chargers and electrify its vehicle fleet over the next five years, noting that more than 43,000 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions have been saved to date.
Sheehan lauded the Beaver Creek Clean River Project, which she says became an environmental justice project under the leadership of Water Commissioner Joe Coffey. “We knew that we were going to have to create a way of ensuring that we were no longer just discharging untreated sewage into the Hudson River. And there was a relatively easy way of doing that. By creating the facility down near the river to do that. But in looking at the importance of environmental justice and environmental equity, Mr. Coffey and his team came up with an incredibly innovative approach to addressing the discharges, in order to addressing a decade's long quality of life issue, where raw sewage in summertime would percolate up in the upper area by Lincoln Park,” Sheehan said.
Coffey hails the Beaver Creek project as "the most impactful environmental endeavor by the city's water department in decades." Expected to begin operating next month, it has the capacity to screen and disinfect up to 300 million gallons annually of sewage overflow from the Beaver Creek line, a major contributor to pollution in the Hudson, while also mitigating flooding risks.
"It is the Albany rural communities, Troy, Watervliet, Cohoes, Green Island out there working with us, to really work together to clean up the Hudson River," said Coffey. "And I think that we'll begin to see some real positive outcomes from this project."
Coffey says the facility will offer wetland outdoor classrooms.
Sheehan, who is leaving office after her current term in 2025, said it’s vital to create a culture of sustainability across all city departments and pointed out that projects from LED streetlights to renewable energy milestones help Albany continue its journey toward a greener future.
