In three years, when the Bennett-Hemenway Elementary School in Natick is outfitted with air conditioning and staff and students will no longer wilt on the hottest days, it will be thanks to two things: a $2 million grant from the US Department of Energy, and Jillian Wilson Martin.
Wilson Martin is the sustainability director for Natick, one of dozens employed by cities and towns across the state. They don’t always do the most exciting work. Increasingly, the job description includes hours of writing grant applications, trying to get a piece of the billions of federal dollars for climate and infrastructure projects pushed by the Biden administration.
But the payoff can be huge.
“You guys. I literally almost passed out when I found out,” Wilson Martin wrote last summer in a joy-filled newsletter announcing the Energy Department grant, as well as a separate $250,000 grant from the state aimed at helping communities adapt to climate impacts. “Those hand cramps paid off!”
Along with the air conditioning, the school in Natick will be rewired to run totally on electricity. It’s a retrofit that’s both better for the comfort of students and teachers inside, and better for the fight against climate change.
Having an in-house sustainability officer can greatly enhance a community’s odds of winning major grants for local, climate-friendly improvements, including solar panels that lower electric bills, new electric vehicle chargers, and energy efficiency upgrades that save money while slashing greenhouse gas emissions.
But more often than not, it’s wealthy cities and towns that have such positions, creating a disparity between which communities apply for and win grant money, and therefore make progress on slashing emissions while providing community benefits paid for by Washington.
It’s no secret among policy makers and advocates that these positions can quickly pay for themselves. Yet across Massachusetts, more than two-thirds of municipalities that have staff dedicated to sustainability initiatives have median household incomes above the statewide figure, according to a Globe analysis. The other third is largely major cities, including Boston and Chelsea, some of which receive grant funds to help support dedicated positions.
“We don’t want to see disparities,” said Julie Curti, director of clean energy at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, where she leads a team that helps communities increase clean energy.
The positions are “truly critical to moving climate work at the local level,” Curti said, making them especially important in “environmental justice communities,” where the population on average is low-income, and has a high percentage of people of color and/or a sizable number of households who do not speak English very well, if at all.
The barrier, advocates and officials said, is that communities with lower median income and fewer municipal staff may be reluctant to invest in sustainability when other needs seem more pressing. The average salary with benefits for a sustainability director is between $80,000 and $100,000, according to one former sustainability officer who said she and her peers often shared salary information.
“For better or worse, sustainability is still often seen as a nice-to-have, versus something that is of critical importance to municipalities,” said Wilson Martin.
Various philanthropic and community organizations, as well as state agencies, are helping communities learn how to apply for grants. In some places, small communities are banding together to try for grant funds or jointly hire a sustainability director.
The state will soon help fund the positions, using money from a new $2 million federal grant to help smaller communities pay for energy-efficiency projects or an energy manager.
“It’s important to have the dedicated roles within sustainability and climate, just because there is so much in this space,” said Mia Mansfield, the state’s assistant secretary for resilience. “It’s about thinking in new ways, or involving new partners, or looking at new funding sources.”
This isn’t the first time the state has offered funding for the positions.
During the administration of governor Deval Patrick, in the wake of the passage of the 2008 Green Communities Act, a two-year grant from the state helped roughly 20 communities hire a sustainability manager, said Joanne Bissetta, director of the Green Communities Division within the state’s Energy Department. The idea was to offer the seed funds to get the position off the ground, then let the community take over.
Decades later, the majority of those positions still exist, she said.
Martha Grover, now the manager of building decarbonization in the state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, was one of those early hires, and spent more than 20 years as the sustainability manager in Melrose. She started as a part-time, no-benefits hire, but quickly proved how she could save the town money while making progress on combating climate change. Over the years, she helped collect millions of dollars in grants and incentive funds, she said.
“You’re decreasing the utility operating budget, or at least preventing it from increasing, and also then investing in long-term projects that mitigate climate or that provide resilience for the city,” Grover said. “I never came across anything like this in city government that has the same return on investment as these positions do.”
That’s a message Grover and others, including Wilson Martin, have tried to spread across the state, to help convince communities to create positions. But it doesn’t always take.
Alex Hasha, a data scientist who lives in Milton, volunteers with the community group Sustainable Milton and sits on the town’s Climate Action Planning Committee. They do as much as they can, he said, but “none of us feels like we have the experience or the bandwidth to do what really needs to be done.”
Their attempts at getting Milton to hire a full-time staff person have fallen short. The town administrator seemed supportive, Hasha said, but also hit him with the cold hard facts: sustainability officers aren’t a top priority. “We need more firemen, policemen, more staff for the Council on Aging — there’s just several also-important town functions that have been waiting in line longer,” Hasha said.
That town administrator, Nicholas Milano, said he’s open to creating the position, but “our ability to invest in services that we would like to have are often challenged by the financial realities facing our town.”
Still, Hasha said he hopes to find a way to gain support for the position. “I’m a mathematician. I don’t know how to get budget stuff through Town Hall,” he said. “I guess I’ll learn.”
But some communities are breaking the mold. That’s true in Greenfield, a midsized city in northwestern Massachusetts with sections classified as environmental justice communities. When Carole Collins was hired there as an energy and sustainability coordinator in 2010 with funding from the state, she had to create the position from the ground up.
Her first project — switching street lights to energy-saving LED bulbs — was an immediate win. “It essentially cost the town very little and the payback was so swift — it was like a 70 percent drop in energy usage,” Collins said. Since then, she has leaned on the idea from the United Nations that eradicating poverty is a way to tackle the climate crisis, and has made sure the improvements she’s making don’t cost the city.
“The last time I tracked it, for every dollar the city spent, we were able to get $5.23 in benefits,” she said.
Collins is among the many longtime sustainability directors who take their message on the road, trying to help other communities understand the benefits of their position. Wilson Martin, in Natick, does, too.
“Communities have to be willing to make the upfront investment to get this kind of payback,” Wilson Martin said. “There’s this penny wise and pound foolish kind of thing. And I think that’s really a very true statement about deciding to spend money on a sustainability staff person, because really, I haven’t seen where it doesn’t yield dividends.”
And, she points out, it yields dividends for the planet, too.
Sabrina Shankman can be reached at sabrina.shankman@globe.com.