A climate shake-up is jolting one of the most progressive cities in Mass.

THE MAYOR OF an affluent, liberal Boston suburb that has in recent years raced to reach the top of the climate policy mantle is shaking up his city’s approach to the issue.

The question is whether, in the end, it’s more of a mundane municipal reorganization or a sign of retreat in Newton, one of the state’s most climate-forward communities.

Marc Laredo, who assumed office as mayor of Newton earlier this year, unveiled a series of personnel and organizational moves in an email to city officials sent on August 13 and obtained by CommonWealth Beacon.

The most jarring among them: The firing of Ann Berwick, who has worked as the city’s co-director of climate and sustainability for the past 10 years and previously served as the state’s undersecretary for energy and chair of the Department of Public Utilities, and the broader decision to shift the city’s climate division from the mayor’s office to the Department of Public Works.

The moves, which have not previously been reported, are already generating a swirl of controversy among some in city government. And they’re a window into how the current volatile landscape around climate and energy policy is seeping into local decision making around how a municipal government should best marshal its limited resources to both fight and adapt to a warming world.

Laredo defends the changes as ones that support his goal to “break down silos” in city government and that will ultimately “enhance” Newton’s climate efforts.

“I do not want anyone to come away from this thinking that we are lessening in our commitment to sustainability. In fact, I think it’s quite the contrary,” he said in an interview. “We are increasing our commitment to sustainability throughout the city because we are going to deliver even more than we have been, and I expect that Newton will continue to be a leader in these efforts.”

City Councilor Susan Albright doesn’t think the changes reflect an increased commitment to the issues and said the moves suggest the administration may be undercutting Newton’s more ambitious climate policies.

“Let’s put it this way: It reads like a lack of understanding of the complexities of the issue,” she told CommonWealth Beacon.

Albright, who serves on the council’s public facilities committee, said the restructuring deserves public scrutiny. She said she plans to bring up the changes and staffing needs for the city’s climate work in an upcoming council meeting and will ask Laredo or someone from his staff to appear to answer questions about the reorganization.

At least some of the intrigue stems from the surprise nature of Laredo’s decision to let go of Berwick, who is widely respected among advocates and the utilities alike and has been a major player in the state’s climate policy.

Laredo wrote in the email that Berwick is going to be “transitioning from her position,” seemingly insinuating an agreed upon departure or retirement — a characterization that she disputes.

“There was no mutual decision. It was not my choice to leave,” Berwick said in a short statement, in which she also wished the team “great success.”

Laredo praised Berwick as someone who will leave an “immense” legacy and said she “did a great job,” but that the restructuring is simply a “rethink” of how to best deliver services to residents.

Laredo wrote in the August 13 email that a key challenge to the city’s progress on climate is that “we have not had a single organizational structure that brings these areas together into a coordinated sustainability program.” Citing climate resilience, stormwater management, and waste reduction efforts as key areas aligning with DPW’s work, he said climate policy will now be overseen by a new deputy commissioner of sustainability and administration.

Laredo wrote that his “vision” is to establish a unified sustainability and materials management division within DPW. One arm of that division would be the climate and energy branch that Berwick currently co-leads.

Caroline Weiss, currently the city’s climate action coordinator, will become the director of climate and energy, while Sam Nighman, Berwick’s co-director, will move into a new role as director of organizational performance, according to Laredo’s email.

The mayor’s announcement follows the elimination of the city’s sustainability director in its public schools system earlier this year amid a budget crunch, leaving much of that work to the team now led by Weiss. Laredo, who has tried to carve out somewhat of a moderate lane, has also reshaped leadership in the city’s planning department, nominating a new director after the former director and deputy director left earlier this year.

It’s a fraught time for climate politics and those looking to pursue a green transition as the Trump administration has rapidly pulled support at the federal level for clean technologies like offshore wind, solar, and electric vehicles. Meanwhile, Gov. Maura Healey is trying to pull off a balancing act amid soaring utility bills as she attempts to lower energy costs for Bay Staters by touting an “all of the above” agenda that embraces clean energy technologies but makes clear that natural gas is still a vital a part of the state’s energy mix.

Newton had positioned itself at the vanguard of climate action, taking aggressive steps to rein in greenhouse gas emissions across its energy, building, and transportation sectors.

The wealthy city of 90,000 people, with the state’s seventh-highest per capita income, is aiming to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

To do so, Newton officials signed a landmark agreement earlier this year with Eversource and National Grid, the state’s two largest utilities, to coordinate an ambitious transition off natural gas for heating homes.

Berwick, buoyed by her past work dealing with the utilities, was instrumental in reaching that accord, and she and her team were just getting into its implementation phase. Albright said her departure could, as someone with “experience and gravitas in the field that National Grid and Eversource could feel very good about working with,” throw a wrench in the work executing on that agreement, especially since DPW isn’t a particularly natural fit for hammering out a broad transition off gas.

Newton is also one of just a handful of communities to adopt stringent green building code standards, and is one of 10 in Massachusetts to pledge to go “fossil fuel free” by banning gas and oil hookups in new construction and major renovations to existing buildings.

Plus, on top of aggressive deployments of solar energy and electric vehicle charging stations, the city’s local electricity program has in the past offered residents power that’s produced with a higher rate of renewable energy sources.

Laredo insists that the changes do not mark any kind of retreat from that record and said that even amid all the concrete climate gains the city has made, he wants to see more results and thinks the new restructuring will yield them — a position that’s puzzling to some inside city government.

“Planning is very good and advocacy is very important,” he said. “But if you don’t then implement, if you don’t have deliverables, if you don’t actually get things done, the planning, in some ways, becomes meaningless. You’ve got to act, and this way we’re going to do both.”

“I don’t think anything was lacking in the current team at all,” Laredo said when asked about Newton’s status as a state leader in addressing climate issues with the city’s existing personnel and structure, adding that the new organization is “simply a way of improving” the city’s ability to both engage in planning and implementation “seamlessly.”

As for tangible targets for the new structure, he said, “It’s a little too early for me to set specific goals,” but he added that stormwater management is a significant area of concern, there are “greater efforts” to come on trash, recycling, and composting, and he wants to keep pushing to electrify and ween off fossil fuels.

Others involved in the city’s climate efforts aren’t sure Laredo’s changes will be particularly harmful.

“I’m willing to trust the mayor,” said Jon Slote, vice chair of the Newton Energy Commission.

But Albright said she still hasn’t been given a convincing answer from Laredo or his team regarding why the reorganization is necessary or why DPW is a better home for sustainability-focused work than where it currently lives in the mayor’s office.

What might seem like a fairly innocuous city government rejiggering could trigger blowback in a community of vocal climate activism, if residents with strong views on the issue smell a trace of backtracking.

“It was a big shock to me,” Albright said. “I called the mayor’s office and I said I really want to talk about this, and they assured me that this was the right thing to do, and that since it’s been announced, lots of people have called to congratulate us. I frankly don’t know who those people would have been because everyone I talked to was also shocked.”