Sunrise Ithaca held a community meeting on Feb. 3 to discuss Justice 50, a proposal intended to discuss the Ithaca Green New Deal’s stated commitment to climate justice and equity.
The meeting aimed to inform the public about the bill and crowdsource ideas on its implementation. Authored by Rebecca Evans, Ithaca’s director of sustainability, Justice 50 builds upon the 2019 Ithaca Green New Deal, whose primary commitment is to reach community-wide carbon neutrality by 2030.
The 2019 deal also aims to reduce emissions from City vehicles by 50 percent by 2025, and share benefits equitably to address historic inequalities regarding the disproportionate impact of environmental issues on disadvantaged communities.
Justice 50 would also set aside 10 percent of overall capital funding for participatory budgeting, a process in which all Ithaca residents 16 years or older would be able to propose and vote on projects for funding, regardless of immigration status.
Modeled after the Justice 40 initiative, which proposed that 40 percent of all benefits generated by federal environmental investments go to disadvantaged communities, Justice 50 would direct 50 percent of the City’s sustainability funding to Climate Justice Communities, which are determined based on median income, home ownership, unemployment benefits and other social factors.
While the City passed a definition of Climate Justice Communities in 2022, the City has stalled in implementing more specific environmental justice goals, according to Siobhan Hull ’24, coordinator of Climate Justice Cornell and a member of Sunrise Ithaca. The Feb. 3 meeting sought to educate the community about Justice 50 to push for better environmental justice policies in Ithaca.
“[What] we’re hoping to get out of this community meeting is to make clear to the Ithaca city government that Justice 50 needs to be a priority, [and] we’re hoping to answer people’s questions about it and also incorporate some of their feedback into how we communicate with the City,” Hull said.
At the meeting, community members discussed how Justice 50 connects to their own lives.
One attendee, Monika Mehta expressed concern over individuals’ carbon footprints stemming from an over-reliance on cars due to a lack of reliable public transportation in Ithaca, mentioning that many of her daughter’s friends in Cayuga Heights or northeast of Ithaca have struggled to regularly access public transportation.
“There is no bus that can get them to where they might need to go in an accessible way,” Mehta said. “Within Ithaca as well, it seems that the transportation is structured in a way that favors very few.”
Another attendee, Leila Wilmers, a postdoctoral associate in the department of sociology, noted that the recent requirement of flood insurance for homeowners and buildings in Federal Emergency Management Agency-designated areas may be contributing to rising housing prices.
Other community members like Ace Dufresne, leader of Sunrise Ithaca, pointed to electrification, the process of retrofitting homes to run on electricity rather than fossil fuels, as another cause of rising prices.
“Without rent-control policies of some sort in place, … electrification does pose a significant threat to the rental population, which is most of Ithaca,” Dufresne said.
Many other community members described these climate-related quality-of-life issues as systemic and felt that the city has not effectively progressed on them. One resident, Anne Rhodes, was skeptical about how much influence Ithaca citizens have in the decision-making process.
“How much input does this city really want from us? How much power is the City really willing to give us?” Rhodes said.
While Dufresne felt confident that some version of Justice 50 would be passed, he expressed concern over how soon this would happen and whether the impact of the bill would be reduced.
“I can also imagine that [participatory budgeting] gets a lot of pushback from [the] Common Council,” Dufresne said, noting the inclusion of older teens and Ithaca residents of all legal statuses in the process.
Hull also expressed concern about the participatory budgeting component of the bill, worrying that the 10 percent number would “get knocked down a little bit.”
Mayor Robert Cantelmo grad, did not respond in time to The Sun’s request for comment about the proposal.
Despite many participants’ lack of faith in the City, discussing experiences as a community at the Sunrise Ithaca meeting created a sense of power.
“I think it’s important to have conversations where you do have a connection, … because there’s an ongoing relationship there that actually can be deeper than what’s here,” Rhodes said. “Those conversations are also likely to have more of a spin-off into action.”
But Rhodes and other attendees also criticized the meeting as inaccessible for some Ithaca residents.
“You can’t hold a public meeting and expect disadvantaged community members to show up,” Rhodes said. “You have to go to where they already are.”
Both organizers and activists, however, saw the meeting as productive overall.
“I feel like we came away with a lot of good feedback and thoughts about Justice 50 that we can bring to [the] Common Council,” Dufresne said after the meeting. “I felt like the people who were there, even if there weren’t as many as last time, were quite engaged.”
Silochanie Miller ’26 is a Sun Contributor and can be reached at [email protected].