Community Profile

Pledge Status

Complete

Pledge Date

Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Program Year

2025

Achievement

Leadership Circle

2025

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Action Item Report

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City of Watertown

Watertown, MA

George Proakis

City Manager

Pledge Summary

Watertown is a city in the greater Boston area with a population of just over 35,000. Our community, though highly urbanized, boasts important natural resources, from protected open space along the Charles River to our growing number of pocket parks and community gardens. City Manager George Proakis has committed to protecting and promoting pollinator species such as the monarch butterfly by signing the Mayors’ Monarch Pledge and looks forward to engaging residents, businesses, and neighborhood groups on the importance of providing pollinator habitat throughout the city.

Community Spotlight

Action Items Committed for 2025

Communications and Convening

  • Launch or maintain a public communication effort to encourage residents to plant monarch gardens at their homes or in their neighborhoods. (If you have community members who speak a language other than English, we encourage you to also communicate in that language; Champion Pledges must communicate in that language.)
  • Engage with community garden groups and urge them to plant native milkweeds and nectar-producing plants.
  • 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 developers, planners, landscape architects, and other community leaders and organizers engaged in planning processes to identify opportunities to create monarch habitat.
  • Create a community-driven educational conservation strategy, initiative, or practice that focuses on and benefits local, underserved residents.

Program and Demonstration Gardens

  • Plant milkweed and pollinator-friendly native nectar plants along roadsides, medians, or public rights-of-way.
  • Initiate or support community science (or citizen science) efforts that help monitor monarch migration and health.
  • Add or maintain native milkweed and nectar-producing plants in gardens in the community.
  • Launch, expand, or continue an invasive species removal program that will support the re-establishment of native habitat for monarch butterflies and other pollinators.
  • Display educational signage at monarch gardens and pollinator habitat.

Systems Change

  • Increase the percentage of native plants, shrubs and trees that must be used in city landscaping ordinances and encourage use of milkweed, where appropriate.
  • 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.
  • 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 one or more ordinances to reduce light pollution to benefit urban wildlife.