Larimer County reviews environmental-justice impact assessment to guide Climate Smart Future Ready actions

Larimer County commissioners on Feb. 4 reviewed an Environmental Justice Impact Assessment intended to guide the county's Climate Smart Future Ready plan and help prioritize climate mitigation strategies in communities the state identifies as disproportionately impacted.

The assessment, presented by David Varjas, a professor of environmental epidemiology at Colorado State University, summarized six weeks of community engagement, an analysis that compared seven mitigation strategies and recommendations for where in the county to begin implementation.

Varjas said the assessment's purpose was to "evaluate where are those strategies, what are the evidence that support those strategies, what are the factors related to environmental justice that will be impact that could be increased or reduced in injustices, and also integrate the community feedback." He told the commissioners the objective was to "generate recommendations to maximize the benefits and minimize any risk, always with a lens of environmental justice."

The assessment examined seven strategies drawn from the county's Climate Smart Future Ready plan: (1) building energy efficiency and codes, (2) incentives, education and workforce training, (3) renewable energy expansion (solar and wind), (4) increased electric mobility, (5) improved pooled/public transportation across the county, (6) active transportation (walking and wheeling infrastructure), and (7) a —5-minute/10-minute community approach to bring parks and stores closer to homes. Using a combination of evidence, expert judgment and community weighting, the team scored and ranked those strategies for benefits, risks and equity impacts.

Community engagement ran from September to mid-October and included in-person workshops in Fort Collins, Loveland and Estes Park, online workshops in English and Spanish, bilingual surveys and tabling events. Presenters said about 380 people provided feedback, primarily via the online survey. The project team said they deliberately prioritized in-person outreach in census block groups identified by a state mapping tool as having higher potential environmental injustice to ensure disproportionate impacts were heard.

Survey respondents and the scoring process ranked improved pooled/public transportation highest overall, followed by incentives/education/training and renewable energy expansion. Active transportation, proximity to destinations (the 10'/15-minute approach), building energy standards and electric mobility followed. Varjas said the ranking was robust to sensitivity testing, including re-weighting for equity, benefits and risks, and repeated-runs of the model.

Michael Truitt, of Carbon Neutral Group and a member of Larimer County's Climate Action Group, described workforce and delivery constraints for weatherization and HVAC work. He said the federally funded Weatherization Assistance Program historically does 80 to 100 mobile-home energy retrofits per year, with Inflation Reduction Act funding increasing capacity but staffing remaining a bottleneck. "The big bottleneck was staffing," Truitt said, and he urged more funding for qualified instructors and expanded HVAC training capacity at Front Range Community College to grow the local workforce.

Presenters discussed geographic prioritization. Using the state's definition of disproportionately impacted communities and a federal Environmental Justice "40" mapping metric, the assessment identified 59 census block groups meeting the state's criteria (approximately 20% of the county population). The team highlighted two census block groups (northern Fort Collins and central Loveland) that meet a more restrictive environmental-screening definition and suggested those could be starting priorities if implementation resources are limited.

The presenters and commissioners stressed equity nuances: recommendations include ensuring renter access to incentives, language accessibility, tailoring measures for rural and seasonal communities (Estes Park was cited for its tourist-season population swings) and designing walking/wheeling infrastructure to be accessible to people who use wheelchairs. Commissioners also asked that the assessment's recommendations be translated into actionable items for the county's Climate Smart Future Ready action teams.

No formal actions or votes were taken during the work session. Presenters said the assessment and its scorecards are intended as tools for the county's action teams and will be provided to the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board and the various implementation teams for follow-up.

Commissioners thanked the presenters and noted next steps include integrating the assessment into action-team planning and considering additional related areas (for example, water-use and built-environment code questions) in future work.