Community Profile

Pledge Status

Complete

Pledge Date

Friday, December 1, 2023

Program Year

2024

Achievement

Leadership Circle

2024

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Action Item Report

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City of Greenfield

Greenfield, WI

Michael Neitzke

Mayor

Pledge Summary

The City of Greenfield, WI serves a community of nearly 40,000 residents in the greater Milwaukee Area. Mayor Neitzke, along with other city leaders, acknowledges the importance of monarchs and other pollinators to local agriculture, ecosystems and economies. Greenfield is committed to maintaining a pollinator-friendly community by engaging with residents to build more native habitats and installing perennial and native gardens on public lands.

Community Spotlight

Action Items Committed for 2024

Communications and Convening

  • Engage with developers, planners, landscape architects, and other community leaders and organizers engaged in planning processes to identify opportunities to create monarch habitat.
  • Engage with gardening leaders and partners (e.g., Master Naturalists, Master Gardeners, Nature Centers, Native Plant Society Chapters , other long-standing and influential community leaders) to support monarch butterfly conservation.
  • Engage with city parks and recreation, public works, sustainability, and other relevant staff to identify opportunities to revise and maintain mowing programs and milkweed / native nectar plant planting programs.

Program and Demonstration Gardens

  • Display educational signage at monarch gardens and pollinator habitat.
  • Launch, expand, or continue an invasive species removal program that will support the re-establishment of native habitat for monarch butterflies and other pollinators.
  • Launch or maintain an outdoor education program(s) (e.g., at schools, after-school programs, community centers and groups) that builds awareness and creates habitat by engaging students, educators, and the community in planting native milkweed and pollinator-friendly native nectar plants (i.e., National Wildlife Federation’s Schoolyard Habitats program and Monarch Mission curriculum).
  • Plant milkweed and pollinator-friendly native nectar plants along roadsides, medians, or public rights-of-way.
  • Facilitate or support a milkweed seed collection and propagation effort.
  • Host or support a native seed or plant sale, giveaway or swap.

Systems Change

  • Reduce or eliminate the use of herbicides, pesticides, or other chemicals that are harmful to monarchs and pollinators and urban wildlife.
  • Launch, expand, or continue an effort to change municipal planting ordinances and practices to include more native milkweed and native nectar producing plants at city properties.
  • Increase the percentage of native plants, shrubs and trees that must be used in city landscaping ordinances and encourage use of milkweed, where appropriate.
  • Change weed or mowing ordinances to allow for native prairie and plant habitats.
  • Remove milkweed from the list of noxious plants in city weed / landscaping ordinances (if applicable).