Monday’s Wakefield Town Council meeting felt like karma. And you know what they say about karma.

On Monday, the Town Council pulled the plug on the “Decarbonization Roadmap.” Creating the Roadmap was key step in the process of joining the state’s “Climate Leader Communities” program.

To appreciate why this is so delicious, return with me, if you will, to April 8, 2024.

Among the items slated for discussion at the April 8 Town Council meeting was one listed simply as “Climate Leaders,” which then-Town Councilor Julie Smith-Galvin had asked Chairman Jonathan Chines to place on the agenda.

At the time, Smith-Galvin was also a member of the Environmental Sustainability Committee, where the idea of Wakefield joining a state program called “Climate Leader Communities” had been percolating. The program calls for participating towns to commit to all sorts of insane and costly “Net Zero” climate measures like purchasing only electric vehicles and heating all municipal buildings with electricity. In return, the town would be eligible for state grants to undertake even more loony and expensive climate measures. What a deal.

Smith-Galvin and her ESC accomplices wanted the Town Council to apply for a technical assistance grant to create the required Decarbonization Roadmap in order to be designated a Climate Leader Community. They waited until days before the application deadline to spring their request on the Town Council and the public. For added opacity, the agenda item was listed simply as “Climate Leaders.”

Their strategy worked. The Town Council voted to apply for the technical assistance grant to create a Decarbonization Roadmap for Wakefield over the objections of Councilors Ed Dombroski and Mike McLane.

Enter open government watchdog Scot McCauley. He didn’t think the agenda item “Climate Leaders” was specific enough to alert the public to what the board was up to. So, he filed an Open Meeting Law Complaint with the Attorney General’s Office.

The Attorney General agreed, ruling that the Town Council had indeed violated the Open Meeting Law with its vote on April 8.

“We generally consider a topic to be sufficiently specific when a reasonable member of the public could read the topic and understand the anticipated nature of the public body’s discussion,” the AG’s decision stated.

“The topic as posted provided no information as to what ‘Climate Leaders’ referred to, let alone the nature of the Council’s discussion,” the Attorney General’s decision continued. “The meeting notice did not even reference the Climate Leader Communities program by its correct name nor otherwise indicate that ‘Climate Leaders’ referred to a state program to which the Council would consider applying, as opposed to, for example, an opportunity to recognize influential climate advocates or a discussion of the local climate. Therefore, the Council violated the Open Meeting Law by posting an insufficiently specific notice for its April 8 meeting.”

Fast-forward almost a year. When the town finally received the consultant’s much-anticipated draft “Wakefield Municipal Decarbonization Roadmap,” it was comically slipshod. The footers at the bottom of all 60-plus pages identified it as the “Decarbonization Roadmap for Amherst.” This geographic confusion also seeped into the main body of the document, as the writers often seemed uncertain as to whether they were in Wakefield or Amherst or Stockbridge. The document spoke of something called “the Galvin High School.” DPW Director Joseph Conway was listed as “Joe Wakefield.”

But the document also spelled out in stark terms the number of mandates and expectations that Wakefield would be required to fulfill with zero regard for the cost to local taxpayers.

Town Council Chairman Michael McLane pointed out that any grants coming from the state through the Climate Leader Communities program wouldn’t come close to covering the costs of enacting the measures outlined in the Decarbonization Roadmap.

Councilor Ed Dombroski made a motion to scrap the Decarbonization Roadmap and a majority of the board agreed, freeing the town from this boondoggle, at least until the climate extremists retake control of the Town Council.

Knowing that people would object if they knew what was involved, the proponents tried to sneak this radical project past the public and the Town Council last April. They almost succeeded, but were undone by the Open Meeting Law and their fellow-travelers’ sloppy Decarbonization Roadmap.

Now, that’s what I call environmental justice.