Resource Conservation Advisory Board Agenda and Packet 2010 04 21

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Resource Conservation Advisory Board Minutes-March 17, 2010 Page 2 of 4 Mary Ann - some things people want to involve the city with and some we want to involve the citizens with. Annie: Both are really important. City Council may let us know what they'd like to see us do. Dave handles facilities. Ken Mason handles Fleet. Utility plants (water and wastewater treatment managed by individual managers. Maybe create a baseline for city buildings that could be every building or operations management part of public works could be LEED certified for operation and management group. LEED objectives are already set and could help guide us. Robin. The County did a sustainable energy plan, does go through and set specific goals and identify most bang for the buck in residential, city. Might provide us with a framework for starting to set priorities. Boulder County Consortium of Cities Sustainable Energy Plan. Tool for setting our priorities. Robin will forward their document to us. Everybody read through it for the next meeting. Robin will send link to Annie to put in minutes. Tom Phair: there are two areas: the city facilities and the community. The community is definitely the bigger consumer of energy. County Group is pushing for a county wide building program so that all cities within the county would have a consistent program. Andy: we have learned a lot from the green buildng programs that are already out there. Louisville has a great opportunity to do something comprehensive and better focusing on the envelope of the building rather than specifics. 2009 codes are about 18% different (more energy efficient) from 2003. The city made a big jump. LEED is just an award system that awards you at different levels. He believes that a green building program will really only be worthy if we look at an above-code program. Green Building Guild introduced another set of rules, similar to green points and LEED for homes. Mark thinks we should look at the GBG plan. It is offered by ICC. Andy offered to loan his book to Mark. Coordination between national home building ass'n and ICC. Mark: Boulder set up their program to adjust to 25% improvement over code. Andy: That's an example of an above-code program. We are the only city in the county using the 2009 codes. IX. FUNDING AND GRANTS It was suggested that we work funding and grants concurrently with goals setting. Andy mentioned Energy Star and recovery act. Robyn suggested another program. Mary Ann - should we start right now so that we can get some funding for things we want to do. Mark: We should try to find sources of funding that we could pass along to city council. Funding andlor rebate programs should be in a public website for the public. Arno, we would put a link on the city website to the recent GEO rebates for energy efficient appliances. If you are interested in rebates here's the place to get more information. Funds will probably get used up very quickly. Andy: if we're chasing grants to develop our mission that's not efficient. We need to come up with a simple statement, e.g., reduce energy use of all city buildings by 10% within next 2 years. We want to be X% better than code. Then we figure out how to make that happen. Mark: We could draft a proposed ordinance and send it to the planning department, then planning commission, and it could then go to council. Each step of the way, we had somebody from LRCAB along to answer questions. That's a process we can follow. Robyn: We don't want grants to dictate our goals, but we don't want to ignore the fact that grant money is available now and may soon go away. There may be opportunities that we want to bring to the city councilor at least publicize to the citizens. She'd like to bring Mona in to talk about that. Not something we should ignore. Arno: how can we make the citizens aware of these opportunities as fast as possible. Water bills would be a good vehicle to disseminate this information. Maybe we should do it on both the City website and the water bills. The City may be going to email. Arno: How about using the Louisville Times to make people aware of opportunities? Mark: Based on past experience, the Louisville Times is not a good option. The Daily Camera has an 80% readership. Arno: Community Bulletin is currently only available in print. Should be PDF'd and put on website. Citizens should get slowly accustomed to the electronic version. Could go either free electronically or pay for hard copies. Many citizens get their bills electronically. City web page, newsletter, and water bill. We have multiple venues to place the information that we get. Mary Ann: Do we need a single contact on the board to manage information that comes from our