The 2025 action plan aims to address the impacts a changing environment will have on Rifle by looking at issues such as citywide emissions and demographics, most vulnerable to different climate impacts. Clean Energy Program associate Christina Matzl with CLEER says that there was a lot of community interest will preparing the plan.
"We had some pretty passionate stakeholders who were very interested and the city provided, the city staff specifically provided a lot of input into making the goals very specific. So from our perspective, there seems to be some targeted interest. We did some surveys throughout the community trying to get community input on some of the issues that we were seeing with the data. You know, not with the data, but in the information that was available, trying to get people's input on it. Rifle is fairly diverse. And so there's a lot of different opinions, but I think people see the impacts when they're very close like this summer with the fires. I think that brought a lot of this very much to the front of people's minds."
Matzl says that having the plan is a necessary step for the City of Rifle in applying for future grants.
"Ideally in their mind that initially is going to support the wastewater treatment plan and some upgrades that that needs and upgrades throughout the community. But most of the action steps are really guidelines and best practices that people throughout the community can take and do themselves. So the idea with this. Being out there and that the city has adopted it is that it's a trustworthy source for what somebody who's interested in climate or just in saving money that they have a key place to reference."
She says the goal of the energy plan is to help the city develop strategies and action steps towards meeting goals concerning the built environment, water use, transportation issues, and municipal energy use savings.
"So built environment really focuses on saving energy, water conservation, and the energy savings is for residential and commercial buildings, transportation looks at multimodal options. So like the PAT system and supporting that, as well as encouraging biking and walking throughout the community, and access to EV charging. There was a lot of talk about at least eliminating barriers that there might be for people to add it, or businesses to add it to their location. And then the municipal operations really looked at the actual city facilities, wastewater treatment plant, solid waste, composting potential, and then what the city does with their specific buildings. So it kind of tied in with those built environment energy savings too.
The stakeholders found economic development really important for the community and trying to attract more, more employment opportunities for here. So those strategies and action steps kind of focus on supporting CMC and supporting outdoor workers when there are environmental issues."
The annual energy bill for the City of Rifle in 2023 was roughly $13 million split evenly between residential accounts and commercial and municipal accounts. Rifle primarily gets its energy from Xcel, which currently generates around 43% of its energy from renewable sources.
