City Council Study Session Agenda and Packet 2009 04 28

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One former member of LRCAB, Ms Mona Newton, currently works for Governor Ritter's Energy Office (GEO). She has come to a couple of our recent public meetings and has informed us she has passed along information about funding options available through the GEO to city staff members. We plan to maintain contact with Ms Newton to stay informed about future funding opportunities from the GEO for our city's needs to implement a Green-Build Program. And we will work to assist in efforts to define the program, along with consultants and groups such as Transition Louisville and LCCI. We do urge that any Green-Build Program adopted by Louisville match as closely as possible the programs already in place in Boulder and Longmont ("Green-Points" Program), and Boulder County ("Build-Smart" Program). During our initial meetings to discuss this topic a few years ago, the prevailing message we heard from developers and contractors was for us to keep some consistency with neighboring communities and not implement completely different standards and criteria. Builders do not want to have to face completely different standards each time they go from one city to the next within our area. We believe dismissing existing local-area green-build programs, in favor of looking for some other out-of-state organizational structure or standards likely will mean more work for staff here and result in push-back from affected builders here. We still believe the adoption of a Green-Build Program will offer Louisville's City Government the best options to provide City residents with above-standard energy-efficient homes and commercial structures, beginning immediately and extending into the foreseeable future. We believe the local-control framework of such a program will allow our city staff members responsible for defining and administering the program to make changes to meet changing building technology and practices and adapt to evolving long-term resource-conservation goals. And if the following subjects are not covered in the 2009 I ECC, we plan to propose the City adopt an ordinance amending our building codes, to provide for: 1. Jobsite recycling of selected materials; 2. No new installation of incandescent lighting; 3. Inclusion of Energy-Star rated appliances, water heaters, and HVAC equipment in new structures; 4. Inclusion of 'chases' in new structures, to allow passage of service lines for roof- mounted solar panels of all types. NEXT: Last year our staff liaison, Tom Phare, secured a grant from Boulder County's High- Efficiency Lighting Program to allow us to continue our 2007 program to sell Compact- Fluorescent Light (CFL) Bulbs to city residents at a significant discount, at various public events. Our continuation of this program allowed our residents to get energy-efficient CFL bulbs at reduced costs, to replace their much-less-efficient incandescent bulbs. And it seems to have achieved the goal of providing them with the incentive to buy more such energy-efficient light bulbs; by the end of last summer, most of the residents coming by our sales table were commenting that they had made the full switch to CFL bulbs. 6