Community Resilience Partnership
Climate Change Vulnerability and Resilience Assessment
This fall, the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future (GOPIF) awarded the Town a Community Action Grant of $50,000 to conduct a Climate Change Vulnerability and Resilience Assessment (a climate vulnerability assessment or CVA, for short). We do not have much local information about climate hazards facing the town, the impacts of those hazards, and the community’s vulnerability to those impacts. To begin planning and taking action on climate change impacts, we need to better understand what those impacts will be and how they could affect the community. The CVA can help us with this understanding.
The CVA will take two years to complete. We expect project kickoff will be in early 2024. The project will be guided by a Working Group and supported by a consultant (see RFP information below) and University of New Hampshire Sustainability Fellow for summer 2024.
Request for Proposals/Qualifications for Consulting Services: Community Resilience Projects
This RFP/RFQ is published (as of December 20, 2023) and has a deadline of February 8, 2024, at 5:00pm. The RFP/RFQ is linked to in the Attachments list below. It has two parts:
- Climate Change Vulnerability and Resilience Assessment – Request for Proposals
- Infrastructure Adaptation Engineering Services – Request for Qualifications
Amendment 1 (January 29, 2024) - Responses to Questions Received - is linked to in the attachments list below.
Community Resilience Partnership Enrollment
The Town of Eliot is taking steps to plan for and take action on climate change in order to increase the resilience of the community. As part of those efforts, the Town has enrolled in the Community Resilience Partnership (CRP), a program of the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future (GOPIF). Joining the CRP makes us eligible for funding to implement our priority climate resilience efforts. This enrollment effort was led by the Southern Maine Planning and Development Commission (SMPDC) in conjunction with the Eliot Conservation Commission and the Town of Eliot Planning office. SMPDC's assistance was funded by a CRP Service Provider grant from GOPIF.
Self-Assessment Work Session
The first step of enrolling in the Partnership is for Eliot to complete a pair of self-assessments to evaluate existing progress and future needs regarding climate resilience. The Town held a work session with local stakeholders on August 3, 2022, to review the first self-assessment. The stakeholder input is summarized in the document linked below. You can also watch a video of the work session here.
Climate Change Community Workshop
The Climate Change Community Workshop was held on Tuesday, October 25th, 2022 at Green Acre. There were an estimated 18 attendees along with staff from the Town and SMPDC. The attendees reviewed, discussed, and voted to prioritize climate change community resilience actions from the Action List. Attendees broke into four small groups to review and discuss the actions, which were listed on four flipchart sheets. At the end of the session, attendees placed stickers next to their top priority actions. A document with notes from the small group discussions and tabulated votes for each action is linked to below. SMPDC's introductory presentation slides are also linked to below.
Municipal Resolution
On December 15, 2022, the Eliot Select Board voted to approve a municipal resolution committing the Town of Eliot to joining the CRP. The resolution is in the links below.
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