DALTON, Mass. — The Green Committee has voted to use the Metropolitan Area Planning Council Greenhouse Gas Inventory Platform. 

 

At its August meeting, the board was presented with three options: ClearPath, an MAPC model, and an in-house Excel model. 

 

After reviewing each platform, the committee selected the MAPC model because of its consistency and comparability with the state, user-friendliness, and sources included.

 

The platform is completely free and was built by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Massachusetts, said Cisco Tomasino, BlueStrike climate and events manager.

 

Since it was built in Massachusetts for Massachusetts, it is the most popular model used by many towns in the state, he said. 

 

Committee Chair David Wasielewski said MAPC is his initial preference as it will allow the town to compare its data with other towns. 

 

The state can "more or less control that kind of information" and the town has to keep monitoring the, Wasielewski said. The committee unanimously agreed 

 

"I thought the MAPC was a user-friendly format, too. I had no problem understanding it," Committee member Laurie Martinelli added. 

 

The ClearPath platform is the most premium model that is used across the country by towns, cities, counties, but is also the only one of the options that cost money, at $1,200 per year, Tomasino said. 

 

It is an online platform and has nice graphics, he said. 

 

The final option would have been for BlueStrike's own in-house Excel model, which is internally developed and very customizable. 

 

In other news: 

 

The committee directed BlueStrike to provide ranking of the survey questions to shorten it and make it less complex. 

 

Committee members expressed concerns regarding the surveys length and wanted to narrow it down to encourage participation from residents. 

 

"This is the sort of survey where, in the commercial world, you would offer to pay people to take," committee member Todd Logan said. 

 

"This is not something people voluntarily take, or if they do, they do the first page, the second page, and then they lose interest." 

 

Tomasino from will rank the questions by importance, categorizing them as vital, helpful but not vital, or unimportant, and will follow up with the committee by Friday. 

 

The committee wants to have the survey done by its Oct. 13 education event, and plans to finalize the survey questions at their next meeting in 2 weeks

 

The committee also mentioned the possibility having the survey online to improve accessibility but were concerned with receiving spam from people from other areas. 

 

"Certainly, we could ask for a street address for a numerical representation. Obviously, that sort of brings up other sort of transparency issues." said Rich Swanson, Blue Strike Climate and Energy Director.

 

"[Tomasino] had an interesting idea, though, that we can also compare identical responses so that if, for example, we see 10 identical responses across all questions that would certainly raise a flag. We can talk about how to deal with outliers like that."