Get this meeting of the Environmental Committee underway. We do have... I'm sorry. We have one principal item on the agenda this morning, And that's the Empower Lexington report, and Susan Bush will provide that report. She has substantial backup this morning from members of the committee. And Susan, I think it would be a good idea to introduce your support team because they've done a considerable amount of work on this over, I think, a fairly long period of time and should be recognized. Thank you, Chairman Blues. I agree we have several people here today. All of you all know Tom Webb. Obviously, Tom chaired the meetings and provided the administrative support and facilitated the plan preparation over this past two and a half years. Kelly Breeding with Fayette County Schools participated. Dick Shore, Scott Smith, Mark York. What are you doing here, Mark? No. Amy Soner with Pride participated. Jim Embry. We actually had 75 people from across the community have participated in this plan preparation, which I think makes this a very unique plan for Lexington. It's our very first energy efficiency plan for a community-wide approach, and it's prepared by the community. And the fact that they spent a considerable amount of time and effort working on this plan speaks to how important this topic is in our community. So I really thank them and for all their effort and continued effort on this. I know it's been, from reading the draft report, it's extremely thorough, and it obviously took some considerable amount of time to do it. When did you start meeting on this? In earnest, I think it was June of 2009 was the first meetings that we started, and they met faithfully, and the meetings were not short. They were two and three hours long. Well, very good. We certainly appreciate the effort, and we look forward to this presentation. Well, thank you. As I said before, this is Lexington's very first community-wide energy efficiency plan, and we certainly appreciate the opportunity to give you a briefing on that. For a little background, the council authorized this plan, and participation in this back in 2008 for us to participate in the voluntary program called Cities for Climate Protection. Under this program, communities develop a local plan, and that's the key. It is a local plan to lower our energy use and therefore our greenhouse gas emissions. It was a multi-year effort, as we just discussed, And everybody from many segments of our community participated in this Empower Lexington plan. Some key points. Again, to reiterate, it is a plan to guide us to make our community as a whole more energy efficient. It sets a target to reduce our energy use by 1% annually. And it's very important to note this is a voluntary plan. It does not contain mandates or restrictions, because a lot of what we're going to be doing is changing personal behavior and personal choices, and it's important that it be a voluntary plan. It identifies opportunities for reducing our energy use, and it's designed to be a flexible living document. We don't want it to be a dusty plan that sits on a shelf. We want it to evolve over the years as we implement it. It was developed through consensus. which is time-consuming, but it's also a superior product, which I think we have. It focuses on managing our precious resources wisely and then building partnerships across our community to implement the plan. The plan contains 27 recommendations, and these recommendations were developed by the stakeholders. There are five areas that you'll see there. We call them sectors of our community. These sectors are the important sectors that needed to be addressed in order to make a meaningful reduction in our energy consumption. Why is this plan necessary? And I really think this chart says it all. For the decade of the 90s, our utility rates for electricity stayed fairly flat. But as you can see, that's changing rapidly. And I don't think anybody here thinks it's going to go down. I think we're going to see increased cost and increased demand. So we need to conserve where we can. Some other facts and figures that shows time is right and that I think we can make a difference is Kentucky's ranked sixth nationally in terms of our residential electricity consumption per capita. So we use a lot of electricity here. We're also ranked ninth in money spent per capita on electricity, which means everybody knows our electrical rates are fairly low compared nationally. So we are using a lot of electricity, and we are spending a lot of our income on electrical. Also, I don't think I have to tell anybody about what retail gasoline prices are doing these days. I'd be happy if it was $350 right now, frankly. Clearly that's going up and that will continue to rise as demand goes up. And our community on the whole, just to show you the impact of this, spent $11 million just in landfill disposal fees in 2010. So I think we can make some strides here. Again, I think it's very important that everyone understands that we had a diverse group of stakeholders. I believe you all were provided a copy of the plan. There's two or three pages that list all the representatives and organizations that participated in this. Again, we had close to 75, plus a lot of city staff were involved in helping pull this together. The plan that we are following is a five-step plan, and it's similar to a business improvement model you may be familiar with. We're clearly in the step three right now. You're looking at the plan that has been developed. But I want to go through each of these steps very quickly for you to let you know this plan is only a part of a larger process that we've embarked on. We had to establish a baseline. You can't establish where you want to go unless you know where you are. And so we were able to calculate our usage and our emissions based on 2007 data. There's nothing magic about 2007. other than that data was available for that year and was the most current we could come up with. As you can see there, there's a considerable use of kilowatt hours, as well as petroleum and natural gas in our community. So that serves as our baseline. We calculated our greenhouse emissions from this based on energy use. And based on that calculation, we generate about 6.5 million metric tons of what they call CO2 equivalent or greenhouse gases. Just for comparative purposes, the government represents about 2% of that total. So the purpose of putting that in there, this can't just be a government plan. It has to be a community-wide plan because the government certainly cannot impact the majority of that. Here is our emissions by sector, and this is where these sectors become important, and these are unique to each community. As you can see, our commercial sector is our largest sector, followed by residential. And then our industrial is actually one of the lowest, and waste is the lowest. But in some communities, that industrial sector is quite a bit larger. So that's why you need to do this, is to see the composition of your community so you can develop a plan that actually addresses how your community is made up. Now that we have the baseline set, they set a target for reduction. The committee came up with a 1% year in the proposed plan, 1% per year reduction. And here's some of the reasons. It was important that, one, the goals be achievable and significant, and that we have some early successes with immediate impact. That's fairly easy, obviously, to communicate. We propose to track it on a per capita basis and an absolute basis. We're going to look at this through a couple of different lenses, and that will allow us to look at the offset for growth in the community. And then we're going to use our energy use for 2011 as the benchmark for this tracking. Now on to step three, which is the plan preparation. The first thing they did was look at many other communities that were similar in size and character to our community to see what they had done in their plans. And then they established the five subteams for each of the five key sectors, which are the residential, commercial, industrial, and those five sectors we talked about. Each sub-team identified one primary overarching goal to support what they wanted to do in that sector that was important for energy reduction. Then the recommendations were developed beyond that to achieve that goal. And I'm just going to go over the goals. You have the full plan, but the residential sector goal is to provide our residents with the resources, knowledge needed, so they can live more sustainably, save energy, and always save money. When you're reaching out and touching an entire community residentially, you need to make sure that they have the tools to make the wise decisions if they're inclined to do so. The residential sector has developed specific recommendations that support this goal. Our industrial, commercial, and institutional sector came up with this goal, to promote energy efficiency, and again provide businesses and organizations with the knowledge and tools needed to save energy and money. And there are efforts already underway to do that, because we live in a very competitive business world, and it's good business to be able to reduce your overhead, and utilities are one of those things that we're working with businesses to do. and need to continue as a community. Our land-use, food, and agricultural sector had a goal of preserving and enhancing land and bluegrass soils, which is basically a plan to preserve our green spaces and promote our agricultural activities. And I think you'll find some of those recommendations very interesting because we do live in a unique environment with our bluegrass. Our transportation sector goal is certainly a key player, and we need to provide efficient, interconnected transportation system that improves quality of life, saves our citizens time and money, and moves people and goods with less energy. And involved in that is a good trail system and pedestrian-friendly streets. And we also have public transportation opportunities. And I think they gave a lot of good thought to this, and I think their recommendations are right spot on. And then our waste sector goal. People say, well, why do you have a waste sector there? Well, landfills, when you landfill waste, waste is a resource, and we need to view it as a resource and stop landfilling it, which is expensive and creates a tremendous amount of greenhouse gases. But Lexington should pursue a zero-waste vision. Now, we've talked about that before, but this is the first time I've seen it actually memorialized in writing as part of our plan. And again, we've made some inroads towards that goal, and we'll continue to work in that direction. Public input. We solicited a lot of public input once we had the draft plan. It was put online. We also had two public meetings, one at the Lyric and one out on Red Mile Place at the Agricultural Center. and we had a lot of people at the second one, not as many as we would have liked at the first one. But we did receive comments from the community on the plan, generally favorable, and we did respond to those comments and actually made changes to the plan, which I think enhanced it as a result of public comment. And there's the lyric where we had it set up for November when we had our first public meeting. now I said we're at phase three but the next steps looking forward is we are going to ask the council for a resolution supporting the plan but we wanted to meet with this committee first and and let you know what this plan had in it and then the responsibilities for implementation are recommendation specific in other words you don't treat transportation necessarily like you residential and we don't have hard deadlines in there because this isn't a one-and-done type of plan this will be a progressive plan where you will make headway in it and you will revise the plan as you go and then we're going to measure our progress once the plan is adopted by the council we will review our progress every two years and it's my understanding the group of volunteers that have worked so hard in putting this plan together intend to continue meeting, and they will share information and will help in this process. We'll also share, obviously, our progress with the public and the council. And every five years, we're actually going to quantify our community-wide energy use and emissions. And that is something that our Division of Environmental Policy will actually do, and so we can see where we are. And again, we'll be looking at it per capita and as a whole. Obviously, we'll revise the plan as needed. A plan is a good first step, and that's what this is. It is not perfect, but it is important that we have begun a community-wide dialogue on our energy and natural resource use here. It provides us a path forward to becoming energy-aware and efficient and a more sustainable community. I think it also puts Lexington in a proactive stance versus a reactive stance. It will have both environmental as well as significant economic benefit for our community. And if anyone is interested to view it online, I think the committee members actually have a copy, but anyone can go to our website and review the full plan online. and we welcome any of your questions and again i may call on some of my backup depending on the specific nature of your question well thank you very much committee members if you have questions please log in and we'll we'll go from there council member martin thank you chair thank you susan this topic always strikes folks as something warm and fuzzy that only tree huggers and liberals would love. But I really appreciate the hard work on this, and I support the council's movement on this. We as a country are using a vast amount of energy from other places, and if we don't use our own energy, we're going to not be in the business that we've been in all these years. I think President Obama has made this a leading thing on his agenda, and I think past presidents have done that. But we have to, as a city, also look to the future, because I have a 99 Jeep Cherokee that just guzzles gas like you're pouring it out the window. And it's been breaking down, so I have to figure out, you know, I've been looking for a car, and I may just sit on my Jeep for a while. Because car manufacturers are starting to understand that it's going to get worse, and we're going to be looking at $8 gas in not the too distant future. And the technologies, the Chevy Volt is just a little miracle car, and it can drive 105, 110 miles per gallon. But for those who are looking for something a little nicer, Volvo is coming out with almost an identical type of thing in 2015 where it can drive 30 miles in pure electric mode. It will be able to, in hybrid mode, get 50 miles per gallon. and in sport mode it can put both those two together and go zero to 60 in about seven seconds and so the world is changing and our cars are changing and i think we in the city have to change in the budget discussions i brought up you know what are we in the city going to do as far as infrastructure for vehicles that use kentucky energy and i have a an electric moped i bought when I sprained my ankle in campaign season that runs on Kentucky coal. It does. It comes out of the outlet back here, Kentucky coal does. And so I appreciate that it does. That's where we get our electricity. And so I appreciate the efforts of this group, and I really hope that the city and particularly the city government can help prepare us for a world in which we're going to have vastly less energy and it's going to be vastly more expensive than it is today. And we will not be a competitive city nor a competitive country if we aren't able to make our own energy here in Lexington. So I appreciate it, and thanks to the members of the committee. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Hanson. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Susan, for your presentation. And I love the concept. I think we all should do our part and we should educate, I think, is the key to just about anything. I like this program because it is volunteer. But, you know, because people do not like things shoved down their throat. They like to see how they're going to benefit from it. I have to be honest, I haven't read the plan. I will get it printed off of the... We've piqued your interest, haven't we? Yes. But the implementation of it, I think, is going to be the key. I was at a Community Action Council board meeting last night, And I found it interesting that government gives funds to keep the lights on for folks that are in trouble, or at risk of having utilities disconnected. And many times that's because their heat bills are extremely high. They contribute a little money for weatherization, which to me would be much more important if you could go into someone's home, educate them on how they could save energy, do an assessment of their home, and correct things like that. So I kind of felt like the federal government was a little backward. I don't want anyone to be without lights and gas or heat, but to go on just continuing to assist with paying bills and not really targeting the real issue, I think a lot of times it would just make more sense. And I think that is what this plan could possibly help with. So that's Michael. Just to let you know, we already do have a service for people in our community that want to know more, because it can be confusing navigating the different – there are various programs that can provide assistance. But we have our community energy advisor that we have a contract through our DOE grant that Pride does, and they can provide a lot of this information for people. So I encourage residents, if they want to know more about how to weatherproof their home and what needs to be done, that service is in our community now. And just to give you an example, I'll give you a quick one of energy efficiency. As you said, a lot of people view it as just the environmental community, but it's good business as well. Apparently, I didn't realize this, but apparently owning apartment buildings is a fairly competitive business in town, and there was one that retrofitted its entire units to make them energy efficient, which ended up saving the residents over $800 a year in utility fees. Well, that took an uncompetitive apartment complex and made it a very competitive apartment complex. And that's just an example where it's good business to do that sort of thing as well. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Lane. Thank you, Chairman. Welcome to our meeting today. I had a question on, I think it's page number seven. Pull that back up. It's in reference to Kentucky ranked sixth nationally in terms of residential electricity consumption per capita. and I was just curious, do we have information on other sources of utilities like natural gas, petroleum, or propane that we could sort of look at all the four major sources of residential heating? We do, and the plan does contain some of that information. I think we're about middle of the pack on natural gas usage, if I call, but the actual plan has more information. We just pulled out some highlights. Well, the reason I ask is that we have the lowest electrical power cost probably in the country, or we're ranking the bottom two or three as the lowest cost provider. So there is, in the construction of housing, there's a tendency to put in, like, electric hot water heaters versus gas and things like that. That would boost our electrical use because it's less expensive. But I'd like if those data are available. Maybe you could make a copy of that for us. I'd like to review that. Sure. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Council Member Lane. Council Member Cain. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Susan, and everybody who worked on this. I started on this task force as a citizen before I got elected and was actually able to participate more as a citizen. and then after I got elected, I got other meetings tended to conflict. But I appreciate the full report. Just a couple of comments and maybe a couple of questions. The first is I believe that the final plan was not sent to Council. Did Council members receive the full plan? I think it would be helpful just to. You did not receive a copy of the full plan. We have the draft. The only thing I could find was a draft that was sent to Council before the first of the year. Did I miss it? I'll tell you what. We'll make sure we'll send it to you again. Great. And then on the implementation, I think it would be helpful for Council to hear just a little bit more, if you would, about what the people who participated in the plan are actually, in the development of the plan, are willing to do or have said they will do so that we have a better idea of what implementation will really look like. Tom, do you want to speak? Council members, thank you. As far as implementation goes, I think it would probably be more of a fluid approach because it's going to vary by recommendation by resource available. What the team is committed to is to stay together and work on implementation, but there will be some times the government will actually be the implementing body for some of these recommendations. There will be other times it may be a business organization or a nonprofit. So it's really, we don't have all the answers as far as implementation goes at this time, but any big decisions would come through the council process as far as obligations of funds. Of course, our division will work on environmental issues as we go to include energy, but we don't have everything worked out to the finest level of detail as far as implementation yet. Does that help in answer the question? Yes, it does. I also had a question about monitoring, and I don't know whether it's you or Susan to respond, But in the slide it says progress renewed every two years. Correct. Seems reasonable to me. But could you explain why the quantification of the energy-wide use and emissions would only be developed every five years? Sure. It's primarily a matter of resources. It takes a significant or fair amount of time for our staff to do that. And we thought a five-year snapshot would be good enough, sufficient enough for this issue. We could do it more often. It's just a matter of resources. It's just a matter of committing resources. Okay. So I understand the resource issues. I guess I have a concern that basically given the urgency of the issue and the concern that if we don't begin to make a significant impact quickly, that the longer we delay, the harder it will be, that it would be useful for, I guess, for me individually and perhaps for council to have a system set up so that that energy use could be tracked and we would get a report at least every two years so that we can see what the trend is. five years seems just too long to me. And if the resources allowed, we wouldn't be happy to do that because we want to see how we trend also. So it's not a reluctance to do it. It's just a matter of finding the resources to do that. Okay. Well, perhaps we can have more of a conversation about that as we get into budget season. Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. If there are no other committee members who have questions now, I do have a few. First of all, about the potential for budgetary impact for FY13 and on. In the full report, there's an emphasis on the need to do some serious educating and marketing. And in fact, you say, without the education component for the Empower Lexington plan, there will be little hope of community-wide success. An aggressive marketing effort can highlight the benefits of energy efficiency, which translates not only to reduced energy consumption, but real cost savings and so on. So is there a plan to go forward now with marketing, with education, with getting this work substantially out? From the government's perspective, we already have several initiatives underway. Okay. Obviously, the work that Bluegrass Pride is doing for us with regard to the energy advisor, We also have a competition between businesses going on right now to see who can, and it involves more than just energy. It involves, obviously, recycling and other types of resource management. We have that going on. Bluegrass Pride, we work very closely with them, as you can tell, on a lot of these projects, is getting ready to host a seminar that we do annually, which is for businesses and small businesses in the community. That's coming up in March 15th, I believe, which is an opportunity for citizens and businesses to further educate themselves. We also maintain a very robust website that has a lot of information that people can access at their leisure. We also host a GreenQuest software that anybody can log in and monitor their energy use so you can track your progress as you make energy improvements in your own home. And those things are online and available now. And we will continue to partner with people as we go through this, but those are just some examples of things that we're doing right now because public education is an important component. I found it pretty interesting in the report that I think it says across the state about 20 percent of energy used is by households. But in Lexington, it's 40 percent. Every community is a little different. Well, that's a huge difference. What accounts for our being so much above average, so to speak? Well, one, we don't have a lot of energy-intensive industry here within the city that would make up a larger sector of that. And, you know, the electricity here is fairly cheap, and so people have deferred to, as he said, electric water heaters, electric furnaces, and that sort of thing over the years. So that has all contributed to a fairly high rate of residential use. Plus, we're not using it very efficiently. A lot of our homes could significantly reduce the energy consumption and the utility bill with some weatherization. So that's probably a pretty enticing target, right? It is a significant target, absolutely. And I think we can make a lot of progress there. Yes, yes. I'm hoping we can move in that direction. One other question. How far away in your estimation are we from mandatory recycling? Mandatory recycling? Yeah, and what are the steps that are going to be needed to get to that point? Well, on mandatory recycling, I think one of the things we need to make sure of, first of all, is that everybody has, you know, the city provides waste management services for only a portion of the city. Private haulers provide it for the rest of the city. So one of the things it seems prudent to do is make sure that recycling is available to everyone to begin with. And if it's available, I personally am a strong believer in public education and showing people why recycling benefits them and is a wise thing to do. That is a discussion that's yet to be had, Councilmember Blues, as far as what form a mandatory system would look like and if that would be effective and appropriate. But certainly it would be helpful if everyone had access to it. Well, thank you very much. Does any other member of the committee have questions? And if not, again, many folks in the audience have been involved in this, and those of you who have been on the team, if any of you want to comment on this report and on your efforts, we'd be glad to have you do so. A modest bunch. Yes, sir. if you could state your name again. Kelly Breeding with Fayette County Schools. And just in reference to what Susan was talking about, one thing that I can't help but say, and I know everybody knows about it, is that in the school system now and have been for five years, we've been using programs for the young children to teach them recycling and do all of that. In fact, they're the ones that was able to encourage us as adults in the school system to be totally recycling as much as possible. The point I want to make, too, in the energy usage, we have a program called E-Square Use, which is being now implemented for a full year. This is going to second year. What we're doing there is we're teaching the kids through putting that teaching into their curriculum. so that math and science and all these other areas are filled with energy and environmental management and sustainability. And so what I'm trying to get to is that one good thing we've got coming down the pike, we're going to have a new set of eyes and ears when these kids get into high school and get out into the world that we don't have. It's going to be natural to them, just like my grandkids taught me to use a seatbelt. It's the same process. we're a little harder to educate. They're easy to educate and understand and will carry it farther in their lives. So that's a good thing. Thank you. Well, we appreciate that effort. And, excuse me, as always, the younger generation is the one that's going to lead us into the future, and we're going to be depending on them. But that doesn't really excuse us to sit back and wait. And this is such an important initiative. We all appreciate what you have done so far and what you will continue to do. And we'll look forward to the bringing forward of this resolution to be discussed in full council. I think that's important but once we get beyond the paper then we really have to get down to work committee members if there are no further comments on on this we do have our next agenda item which is items referred to committee so are there Are there any additions or proposed deletions from items referred? Question to adjourn. What? Let's wait on that. We do have, I think, a member of the public who would like to speak. Thank you. Mr. Cucci, did you want to address the committee? Yes, sir. This is the time to do it. You'd be most welcome. Edward Cushy, Welcome and you have three minutes. Edward Cushy, Good afternoon. Thank you. My name is Edward Cushy. I am from 2089 Brissiles Road. I am here because I am a citizen concerned about clean water. Thank you for allowing me to speak. In reference to today's subject, Empower Lexington, saving money was mentioned several times. However, what kind of new fees and taxes will be invented by the LFUCG for taxpayers to pay for this program? At your last meeting, which was mainly about the water quality management fee, which is supposed to be about clean water, lakes, and streams, I asked, holding a copy of the front page of a recent Sunday Herald-Leader, about the many exemptions given to the property in the article from their many pollution-causing ERUs. No one in the LFUCG has yet to answer. Across Bowman's Mill Road from this property is another that visibly has many ERUs in many ways. This property also has all summer, every summer, nearly every day, large groups of cows that can be seen standing in the middle of and defecating and urinating directly into and polluting South Elkhorn Creek, which flows for miles thereafter throughout Fayette County. Also, across Parker's Mill Road from the property in the article, just outside New Circle Road, is another property that also visibly has many ERUs in many ways. Many acres of tobacco were grown there last year. All summer long, a large truck with a large spray tank could be seen regularly moving around and fumigating with chemicals, which will run off into and pollute the Wolf Run Creek watershed. Live Green Lexington, the EPA, and others have proven that all these things causing polluted stormwater runoff are extremely toxic to lakes, streams, and more. Why then, in the water quality management fee, which is supposed to be about clean water, are these properties exempted from all but one of their pollution-causing ERUs? Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Coaching. Council Member Gordon, you had a question. Thank you, Chair. It was simply to ask, you said that a resolution would be coming forward. is that coming out of this committee? Do you want a resolution, or what's the next step? I assume that the resolution would come from the Department of Environmental Quality. I think the thought would be for us to bring a resolution forward for Council to consider on supporting the plan for the full Council to consider. or so. Our next meeting is on the next meeting of the committee is March 13. If you might bring it back to the committee, we can discuss it briefly, and there could well be a motion to move it to the full council after that meeting. It would be fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Hanson. Thank you, Chair. I would just ask to make sure that we get a copy of the plan, the latest draft, or I'd like to review it and have a considerable amount of time to review it. We'll get that to you as soon as I get back to my office. We'll send you a PDF file. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Council Member Crosby, if you want to bring back. Move and second it. All in favor, say aye. And we are adjourned and we'll meet again on March 13th. Thank you all for being here. Oh, the shark, baby.