YEEC to address the York Selectmen
At the December 8 Selectmen’s meeting, Eric Hopkins and Hanna Mitchell will be presenting information on the ICLEI membership and formally asking for the town to join the association. A $600 membership fee is required to join ICLEI. (See previous post, What is ICLEI?)
Among other things, the membership will give us the software necessary to do a Greenhouse Gas (GHG) inventory of municipal operations. It will also help us identify “low hanging fruit” where energy/cost savings can be made.
We will be recommending a steering committee be appointed that oversees the GHG inventory – there are a number of members from the York Energy Efficiency Committee willing to serve on this committee. ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability offers some guidelines on who should comprise the committee, which we will present in more detail at the meeting. (For information on measuring a municipality’s emissions, see the ICLEI emissions inventory factsheet [PDF document].)
Hanna Mitchell – who formerly championed the LEED certification measure last spring – is back in York until February. She has indicated her willingness to work on the GHG inventory as a volunteer and could start work as soon as the membership is approved and we get access to the software.
If the selectmen agree to join the association and start the process, we’d ask that the selectmen or town manager issue some sort of statement asking for department heads across the municipality to cooperate with requests for billing records, etc. – to whatever extent is reasonable.
While we will still try to estimate 1990 GHG levels in York since establishing a baseline is part of the U.S. Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement, this will not be our primary focus. The primary focus will be to set up a process where starting in 2008 and going forward, the town annually measures its greenhouse emissions and energy use.
Anyone with suggestions or questions is encouraged to contact YEEC using the email address in the left column.
