County looks to meet environmental goals

Green Team assigned to the task

Sharpening the focus on its internal operations is one way the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners is hoping to meet the environmental goals it had set for itself in the Strategic Plan and Energy Action Plan.

Both plans set goals for the entire county, but neither focuses specifically on the county government’s operations.
The Strategic Plan is meant to provide incremental goals for the county departments to help progress toward a long-term objective. Several of those objectives are aimed at increasing efficiency and reducing the amount of emissions produced by county operations.
The Energy Action Plan is a policy statement also aimed at reducing consumption throughout the county.
The solution to the lack of focus on county operations was the Green Team, a group of 10 county employees, each from a different department, whose task was to look at county operations and devise a way to change the status quo and bring the government closer to meeting its own goals.
 The group was formed in March of this year and in May, after seeing the Energy Action Plan, County manager Matthew Birnie asked the group to look at the pieces of the Energy Action Plan and make similar recommendations to the Board of County Commissioners on ways to improve operations.
The Green Team’s “Proposal to the Board of County Commissioners for the Implementation of the Gunnison County Energy Action Plan” was presented to the commissioners at a work session on Tuesday, July 21.
“[The people on the Energy Action Plan Advisory Group] came up with a great list of actions that were not directly related to county operations, but were looking at it through the eyes of the unincorporated county resident,” said assistant county finance director Ben Cowan, who led the Green Team in developing the plan.
Birnie told the commissioners, “What [the plan] does not do is address those things outside the county’s operational sphere.”
The Green Team’s plan, like the Energy Action Plan, dissects the county operations into four groups: Buildings; Transportation; Waste; and Policy, Finance and Education. Only it makes the task easier to tackle by offering suggestions about the highest priority operations.
“All I was looking for from this was to get a sense of what staff would recommend for implementation of the [energy] action plan and see what the difference would be,” Birnie said.
The first section of the Green Team plan which deals with ways the county can bring its buildings closer to the efficiency goals stated in the Strategic and Energy Action plan, recommends that the county pursue programs for energy audits and retrofits for the public.
 Those programs would be run in conjunction with a revolving loan fund, which would provide money to people for upgrades that would be paid back with the cost savings on utility bills, “programs such as ClimateSmart in Boulder County,” according to the plan.
The only specific mention of improving the efficiency in the operation of county buildings is under the last heading in the plan: Policy, Finance and Education.
It says, “Continue working toward attainment of the 10 percent efficiency increase in county buildings via performance contracting and modification of employee behavior.”
The Green Team’s recommendations under the “Transportation” heading in the plan deals with public transportation and ways the county can assist in the logistics of the Rural Transportation Authority, the other half deals with the efficiency of county fleet vehicles.
The plan also focuses on government waste, specifically the paper variety. It recommends the county take steps to require staff use printers capable of double-sided printing and others to move toward “paperless government.”
Finally, the section on Policy, Finance and Education talks about finding grants and other opportunities for the county through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. That money would fund projects or start a revolving loan fund for the public.
One of the headings relating to education is Lead by Example, which recommends highlighting the county’s success in meeting its goals, continuing in partnerships with organizations dedicated to the efficiency goal, and supporting the educational efforts of those organizations and other ways of encouraging the public to follow suit.
The plan also includes a list under the same heading for things the county should not do to increase its efficiencies, either because they are hard to enforce or too expensive to undertake.
Some of those recommendations relate to the county’s recycling policy and other regulatory actions that the Green Team thinks would be a waste of resources.
“We think that a lot of the recommendations that we shouldn’t do may work in the future and they may work now, but focusing your energy in a few areas will be a better method than trying to do everything all at once,” Cowan said.
The plan presented to commissioners Tuesday was just the first step in identifying ways to decrease the consumption of county operations, Birnie said. A later version would delve into recommended action and possible regulations
The commissioners agreed to revisit the Green Team’s plan at their meeting on
August 4.