Councilwoman Pledges to Gain Sustainable Certification

The borough’s newly formed environmental and beautification committee is in the initial stages of getting Fort Lee certified as a sustainable community under a program for municipalities in New Jersey that want to go green, save money and take steps to sustain their quality of life over the long term.  

Councilwoman Ila Kasofsky, council liaison to the environmental and beautification committee, is taking the lead on the initiative and said Fort Lee has already registered with Sustainable Jersey, which qualifies the borough for certain sustainable small grant programs.

But the real goal of the group is to become certified.

“One of the goals of the committee is developing a plan to become certified,” Kasofsky said. “It’s a certification program for municipalities in New Jersey that want to go green, save money and sustain the quality of life.”

Sustainable Jersey identifies concrete actions that municipalities can take to become "certified" and be considered leaders as sustainable communities, provides guidance and tools to enable communities to make progress on each action, provides access to grants and identifies existing and new funding opportunities for municipalities to make progress toward such actions, according to its website.

“I am so excited about this project, I can’t begin to tell you—what it would mean is that we’d be eligible for grants,” Kasofsky said. “I’ve been to a few of these seminars where they show you landfills, where the plastic bags just never deteriorate, or the cups, or the clothing, it just makes you so upset. So of course I would like to help with these landfills and save the environment.”

In order to become certified—and Sustainable Jersey has two levels of certification, bronze and silver—communities have to complete “actions” from an extensive list for which they earn points. Some items are mandatory, such as the formation of “green teams,” some are priorities, such as conducting energy audits of municipal facilities, and all earn a certain number of points.

The bronze level of certification requires the establishment of a mandatory “green team,” something Fort Lee has already accomplished, implementation of two out of six “priority actions” and a total of 150 points.

The silver level requires the “green team,” three out of six priorities and a total of 350 points.

“I think the bottom line is when people save money—and I think that’s the first motivation for some people—but I think that if we could do something to keep the water and the air clean for our kids and reduce greenhouse gases, it makes sense,” Kasofsky said. “I feel I’m contributing to the environment. And I know that if we could get this community-wide participation, especially through the kids, we would do our share to protect the environment, minimize the greenhouse gas emissions, and we’re going to get some money from the New Jersey because they have it.”

Small project grants range from $1,000 to $25,000 and support local sustainability initiatives. Walmart Walmart has funded the grants program for the past two years, bringing their total contribution to $420,000. But certified communities can also compete for much larger project-specific grants through the NJ Board of Public Utilities, The Association of NJ Environmental Commissions, the Environmental Protection Agency and more.

The Fort Lee group, which is an amalgamation of the beautification and environmental committees—the new “green team”—and even has three high school students brought along by a teaches, who’s a member, has only met once so far to discuss their plan of action. During that meeting they heard from Fred Profeta, Deputy Mayor for the Environment in Maplewood, a co-founder of Sustainable Jersey in 2006 along with the New Jersey League of Municipalities.

Kasofsky said their next meeting will include a tally of how many points the borough may have already accumulated through last year’s free energy audit, some hybrid cars being driven in the borough and solar panels on some buildings. The next step will be to determine where to focus their efforts and how to tally more points and complete and prioritize further actions.

“There’s so much we can do, but the committee is going to try to pick one or two projects to really focus on,” she said. “You have to take actions that will work in our type of town. Certain things don’t always work in Fort Lee that would work in the farmlands of New Jersey.”