Charleston County formalizes Resilience and Sustainability division; committee elects vice chair

Charleston County’s newly formed Resilience and Sustainability Division introduced its staff and mission and moved to formalize advisory committee leadership at a meeting where members approved past minutes and selected a vice chair.

The county’s resilience and sustainability manager, Molly Cajano, said the division will “guide and coordinate a countywide approach to resilience” by aligning mitigation, adaptation and sustainability efforts across departments and external partners. She described the new team as a three-person group focused on resilience planning, hazard mitigation and energy efficiency.

Cajano said the division will “collaborate with the partners who are already doing all this work” and serve as a convener to coordinate county planning, mitigation and recovery efforts. Walt Smalls, deputy county administrator for general services, confirmed the unit sits under his office and noted the county’s long-term commitment: he said he has worked for the county “almost for every 25 years.”

Committee business included approval of the meeting minutes from Feb. 27, 2024. A motion to approve the minutes carried with a standard voice vote; the transcript does not record the mover or second or a roll-call tally.

During officer selection, a committee member volunteered to continue in a chair role and the group approved that volunteer continuation by voice vote; the transcript does not identify a formal mover, seconder, or recorded tally for that vote. Nina Miller, who identified herself as a planner with the Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments (BCD-COG), volunteered to serve as vice chair; the committee approved her volunteer appointment by voice vote.

Members discussed revisiting the committee’s rules and procedures to reflect a shift from advising on plan development to advising on the more detailed “how” of implementation. Molly Cajano and staff committed to compiling the 53 Climate Action Plan strategies into an annotated list for the committee to review and to schedule an additional meeting in late April for more detailed discussion prior to budget decisions.

The meeting closed with a motion to adjourn that was approved by voice vote.

The committee set quarterly meeting dates and also agreed to hold interim, task-focused meetings so members could advise on specific strategies before the county’s budget process advanced.

Ending: The advisory group’s next steps are to catalog the 53 Climate Action Plan strategies, identify which partner or department is leading each, and bring budget and funding recommendations back to the committee at a late-April session and subsequent quarterly meetings.