CitiesGoGreen - October 2008 - (Page 25) town, even much smaller than Fayetteville, or the largest city or university can still utilize this tool. How much money have you been able to save the city so far? I started my job in May 2007, and all of our utilities expenses were looked at on an annual basis, so instead of going from May to May, I decided to look at it from January to December. There are a couple of different ways you can approach it to see how much we saved. We have utility cost data for the city going all the way back to 1995, when we paid It’s not rocket science. There are a lot of common sense things you can do, if you just think about it, and that’s what we did last year. We really put some thought into how to reduce our costs, how things were being operated and managed, and how we could make simple changes, and we had great success. You don’t have a budget, yourself, to allocate toward sustainability projects, so presumably that means that you have to work within the existing budgets of each of your departments. That’s correct. One of the things that Mayor Coody and Susan Thomas, our The most important thing is that you hire someone public information who is truly interested in sustainability issues. officer, did when I first came on board How has the public responded to your about $700,000 a year on utility costs. was set up a sustainability team for me to For the past 11 years (up to 2006), we position? work with composed of members from averaged about a 9% annual increase in each of our major departments. Anytime I It’s been overwhelmingly positive. I those costs, all the way up to about $1.85 want to get something done, I go through mentioned that I’ve been asked to speak million in 2006. If we had continued that the people on that team. to many groups; I can’t even begin to 9% increase, we would have gone to a list them all. I talk about the initiatives, It requires a lot of collaboration, and in little over $2 million for utility costs in but I also talk about the ideology behind addition, what I propose has to be a solid them, the importance of it, how sustain2007. We actually ended up paying $1.7 project. If I go to our Parks Department, million, so that’s about a $300,000 differability is developed and what it means. for example, and say, hey, we need to People have been very receptive. The ence, which is substantial. With 11 years install LED parking lot lights because of cost savings part of it gets some people worth of data, that’s a definite trend, so I these benefits, they are going to want to intrigued, but also being able to do the see the bottom line. Obviously LED parkfeel like that’s a pretty strong number. ing lot lights are more expensive up front, right thing on a daily basis makes people If you want to look at pure dollars, we but if I can show them that there will be feel good, and that makes them interhad budgeted $1.875 million for our a two-year payback for lights that will ested in the topic. utilities last year, even though we were projected to go to $2 million, and we still came in about $180,000 less than that our budget. And if you want to just look Mayor Dan Coody and friends opening another neighborhood park, at how much we’ve reduced compared one of 60 parks in Fayetteville. to 2006, we achieved about a $150,000 reduction. So no matter how you look at it, it was pretty substantial. It certainly covered my salary (editor’s note: Coleman’s salary is $87,000 annually). One of the most important factors in getting those results was simply making energy efficiency a focus with the city employees, and lot of my part in that was just talking to them about things that they could do, like relying more on daylight in their offices. A lot of people have really good natural lighting, and they were still turning on their lights coming in every day, which just didn’t make any sense. We also began using existing control systems in some of our major buildings, and installing programmable thermostats in others, to turn down the heating or raise the temperature of the air conditioning outside of office hours. October 2008 last 10 to 15 years, bringing substantial savings over that period of time, they’ll be more likely to come on board and dedicate some of their funding to that project. And I don’t just talk cost issues, I’m always talking about our carbon footprint as well. There’s a great awareness in Fayetteville generally of environmental issues, and that translates to a lot of our city staff as well. Talking about cost savings translates better to some people than talking about carbon footprint, but there are a lot of city employees who are very motivated by environmental benefits and the idea of doing the right thing. And when you can save money and do the right thing for your local environment or globally at the same time, that’s very motivating. 25 http://citiesgogreen.com
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