Oh, Mercy Mercy Me

So I, like most of Amer­ica, have spent a fair amount of time think­ing about the Trayvon Mar­tin sit­u­a­tion.  Some of you may be won­der­ing what that could pos­si­bly have to do with a sus­tain­abil­ity blog.  Truth be told, one can eas­ily make the case that safety and equal­ity can and should be top­ics of impor­tance within sus­tain­abil­ity more broadly.  How­ever, I thought this blog could rec­og­nize the oppor­tu­nity that is being pro­vided by the tragedy of the killing of Trayvon Mar­tin, the oppor­tu­nity to talk about race in Amer­ica and for the pur­poses of this blog post, apply it to the envi­ron­men­tal “movement.”

I do not approach this topic lightly, like all con­ver­sa­tions about race, it is full of risk and makes me uncom­fort­able but I believe as some­one I have as much respect for as is humanly pos­si­ble said “Want­ing to talk about race as long as it doesn’t make us feel too uncom­fort­able means not really being will­ing to have an hon­est con­ver­sa­tion of any sub­stan­tial depth. “  So here we go …

Envi­ron­men­tal­ism and the “main­stream” envi­ron­men­tal move­ment has been and is still com­prised of mostly white and mostly upper mid­dle to upper class indi­vid­u­als.  To any­one who has attended an envi­ron­men­tal meet­ing of any sort pretty much any­where in the coun­try, this will not come as a sur­prise.   Much of the rea­son­ing for this comes from our his­tory, our ori­gins.  The roots of the move­ment emerge with folks like Teddy Roo­sevelt, John Muir, and Gif­ford Pin­chot.  To over­sim­plify, upper class white peo­ple who were look­ing to pre­serve their “play­grounds”.  This is not to under­cut the impor­tance of what they did, land con­ser­va­tion at that period of indus­trial growth was indeed rad­i­cal and we as a coun­try are bet­ter off because they did what they did.

The orga­ni­za­tions that emerged before the ‘60s includ­ing Sierra Club (1892), National Wildlife Fed­er­a­tion (1936), National Parks & Con­ser­va­tion Asso­ci­a­tion (1919), Izaak Wal­ton League (1922), and Defend­ers of Wildlife (1947) did not focus in any way on health issues and had nearly exclu­sively all white mem­ber­ship, lead­er­ship, and staff.  Again, this is not to belit­tle the amaz­ing work of each of these orga­ni­za­tions.  Rather, this cre­ated an issue whereby the lack of diver­sity in the indi­vid­u­als who made up the move­ment and even the gen­eral inter­est of pro­tect­ing the “envi­ron­ment” became a self-selecting cycle essen­tially ensur­ing that the pipeline for indi­vid­u­als to get involved remained exclusive.

The 1960’s saw the pri­or­i­ties of the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment shift from wilder­ness pro­tec­tion to clean water, clean air, and pro­tec­tion against haz­ardous and toxic sub­stances.  Focus became much more health related and less recre­ation and con­ser­va­tion related.  In some ways this could have been an oppor­tu­nity for the move­ment to diver­sify as the issue became more uni­ver­sally rel­e­vant.  Unfor­tu­nately, it did not hap­pen this way and in actu­al­ity two “move­ments” emerged – the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment and the envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice move­ment with sep­a­rate mem­bers, lead­ers, and organizations.

“Grass­roots groups chal­lenge the “business-as-usual” envi­ron­men­tal­ism that is gen­er­ally prac­ticed by the more priv­i­leged wildlife-and conservation-oriented groups. The focus of activists of color and their con­stituents reflects their life expe­ri­ences of social, eco­nomic, and polit­i­cal dis­en­fran­chise­ment.”  -Dr. Robert Bullard

So, what do we do with this his­tory and con­text? In Howard County we have had an exist­ing but rel­a­tively small envi­ron­men­tal “move­ment” (for lack of a bet­ter term). Over the last few years it has really begun to flour­ish and grow but not with the diver­sity that is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Howard County. The above con­text tells us why but also tells us how we might change that.  Part of the chal­lenge lies in the dis­cus­sion of the envi­ron­men­tal issues we cham­pion and how we frame those issues.

It is also about break­ing the cycle of par­al­lel efforts, and imple­ment­ing a more uni­ver­sal approach.   Unfor­tu­nately, too often  we try and diver­sify by meet­ing with other lead­ers and orga­ni­za­tions and explain­ing to them why our issue is impor­tant to their peo­ple and then chal­leng­ing them to do some­thing about bring­ing folks to our orga­ni­za­tions. But wait, to lis­ten is to engage, right?  Then we need to upend the par­a­digm and do more lis­ten­ing, focus on how we could bet­ter talk about issues, and maybe even fig­ure out how we can bring our resources to bear on issues that feel out­side of our usual wheel­house. After all, we are a sus­tain­abil­ity move­ment now that cov­ers all three bot­tom lines.

JD Feld­mark

This past Tues­day, the League of Women Vot­ers, the Envi­ron­men­tal Sus­tain­abil­ity Board and the Howard County Cit­i­zens Asso­ci­a­tion held a forum on storm water.  The recent floods from Trop­i­cal Storm Lee high­lighted to the com­mu­nity what many of us have known for quite some time:  how we man­age and con­trol our stormwa­ter is a seri­ous issue that has seri­ous con­se­quences for our com­mu­nity and for the Chesa­peake Bay.  We have just hired a stormwa­ter man­ager to spear­head the pro­gram and he will be join­ing the blog rolls when he gets here.

In the mean­time I know it is hard to read a pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion off the web with­out the pre­sen­ter let alone four but if you are inter­ested in the topic read­ing the below pre­sen­ta­tions will give you a decent place to start.  Unfor­tu­nately, pow­er­points are also pretty hefty in size even after being con­verted to pdf so some of the pre­sen­ta­tions are cut into pieces.

Thank you to the spon­sors of the event for bring­ing up a topic we will be spend­ing A LOT of time talk­ing about in the months and years ahead.

jd feld­mark

Mark Souther­land,  Prin­ci­pal Ecol­o­gist, Ver­sar, Inc. and ESB Member

mark souther­land slow the flow 1

mark souther­land slow the flow 2

mark souther­land slow the flow 3

Eve­lyn Tom­lin, Chief, Bureau of Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices, Depart­ment of Pub­lic Works

eve­lyn tom­lin slow the flow 1

eve­lyn tom­lin slow the flow 2

Joshua Feld­mark

josh feld­mark slow the flow

John McCoy, Colum­bia Asso­ci­a­tion Water­shed Manager

john mccoy slow the flow 1

john mccoy slow the flow 2

john mccoy slow the flow 3

john mccoy slow the flow 4

john mccoy slow the flow 5

john mccoy slow the flow 6

john mccoy slow the flow 7

john mccoy slow the flow 8

World – meet the Robin­son Nature Cen­ter.  I warn the staff, when writ­ing these posts not to be too cheerlead-y.  This blog is a bit more about going behind the scenes and talk­ing about what you don’t find in our newslet­ters and press releases.  How­ever, this facil­ity is just too jaw-droppingly amaz­ing to not sound like a cheer­leader.  A cou­ple of weeks ago, we were giv­ing a tour to state envi­ron­men­tal lead­ers of the mostly fin­ished build­ing and after a ½ hour or so of all of us (all grown-ups) run­ning around the place like chil­dren one par­tic­i­pant put it so aptly when she said “this place is mag­i­cal”.  It truly is.  Words can­not pos­si­bly describe it and if any of you know me at all, you know that I am not the type to get whipped up into a frothy excite­ment about … well … much of any­thing.  I’m going to take a small amount of time to explain the place but PLEASE don’t take my word for it.  Come to the grand open­ing on Sat­ur­day (Sept 10).  There will be an open­ing cer­e­mony at 9 a.m., guided activ­i­ties and walks from 11–1 and it will be open for look­ing around until 3 p.m.    There’s not a ton of park­ing there right now, so they have set up over­flow shut­tle buses from Atholton H.S. start­ing at 8 a.m.   Bring your kids if you have them but as my few expe­ri­ences have told me, this is a great place for adults as well.

Let me start with the his­tory.  This par­cel of land was the home of James and Anne Robin­son.  Though I never had the plea­sure of meet­ing either of them, Mrs. Robin­son was, in her time an amaz­ing woman and her mem­ory lives on with mem­o­ries and even her own leg­ends.  The land sits on the Mid­dle Patux­ent near the old Grist Mill and off of Cedar Lane right next to the Rt. 32 inter­change.  This piece of land was of extra­or­di­nary value, espe­cially to devel­op­ers in a fast grow­ing Howard County.  As leg­end has it, Annie would sit on her porch through the day and into evenings lis­ten­ing to the sounds of nature and kept a broom with her on the porch to chase away the MANY devel­op­ers com­ing to make offers.  In the end, she sold the land to Howard County for $2 mil­lion (a frac­tion of its assessed value) and then donated $1 mil­lion to the cre­ation of a Foun­da­tion whose mis­sion is to the sup­port a nature cen­ter on the Robin­son land.
Back to the Cen­ter itself.  This mag­i­cal place was designed with two pur­poses — to demon­strate a model green build­ing and to pro­vide envi­ron­men­tal edu­ca­tion in a fun and inter­ac­tive way.

Pur­su­ing LEED-Platinum cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, Robin­son Nature Cen­ter shows an abun­dance of avail­able green tech­nolo­gies from geot­her­mal wells, to porous asphalt park­ing lot, to a green roof, cork floors and com­pressed sun­flower seed desks.  Home­own­ers, res­i­dents, busi­ness own­ers, builders and devel­op­ers can all learn what is pos­si­ble when you want to build and live green.

The magic though, comes from the exhibits and the expe­ri­ence.  From the open­ing dis­play on the Chesa­peake Bay, to the rich his­tory of the area to the awe inspir­ing hand painted “life of the for­est” dis­play there is so much to learn here.  We have a small demon­stra­tion back­yard to show folks how easy it is to live sus­tain­ably and even pro­vide habi­tat in a back­yard as small as a an aver­age town­house back­yard.  We also have a plan­e­tar­ium that is beyond words.  With today’s tech­nol­ogy the plan­e­tar­ium has the abil­ity to not only show the night sky (at any time, from any place entered into the sys­tem) but to trans­port you through­out space.

Like I said, words just don’t do it jus­tice but hope­fully I have man­aged to con­vey my excite­ment and the excite­ment felt by every­one who has worked on this project.  Please, just check it out, I promise you that you will laugh, you will cry, and it is WAYYYYY bet­ter than Cats.

JD Feld­mark

As you may remem­ber, last year we pub­lished a Howard County Cli­mate Action Plan which, among other things, had a com­pre­hen­sive green­house gas inven­tory which mea­sured the green­house gas emis­sions for our entire com­mu­nity.  The inven­tory showed that the gas and elec­tric­ity res­i­dents use to power and heat/cool their homes cre­ates 1.1 mil­lion CO2e.  Co2e is car­bon diox­ide equiv­a­lent.  There are six green­house gasses each with a mea­sur­able effect.  For con­sis­tency, we con­vert all of their effects into the equiv­a­lent co2 effect.  For exam­ple, every met­ric ton of methane has a 25 met­ric ton co2 equiv­a­lent.  That num­ber is over 25% of the County’s over­all “car­bon foot­print.”
With this in mind we cre­ated a free energy audit pro­gram for Howard County res­i­dents.  I will start with a bit on why and what we hope to accom­plish then the logis­tics of how one applies and how we will select “win­ners”.    So the first and most obvi­ous rea­son we cre­ated this pro­gram is because almost every home wastes energy.  Out-dated appli­ances, no weather strip­ping, insuf­fi­cient insu­la­tion, leaky win­dows, the list is lit­er­ally end­less and we all have some­thing.  The biggest bar­rier to home­own­ers mak­ing deci­sions to improve effi­ciency is knowl­edge.  When one learns where the inef­fi­cien­cies are in his/her home and how quickly one he/she can “earn back” the money invested in upgrades many peo­ple go ahead and make the upgrades.  This will improve the monthly expense for liv­ing here, improve com­fort, and reduce the County’s foot­print.
More impor­tantly to us, how­ever, is that we will be doing close to 1,700 audits through­out Howard County.  When we are done we will have a com­pre­hen­sive cross sec­tion of every type of home in Howard County (more on how we will be mak­ing sure of that in a moment).  So we will be able to develop fact­sheets and in the future you could say to us:
“I live in a town­house in Elkridge built in the 90’s” and we could say “we did 30 audits of homes like yours and the top three things they could do were x,y, and z.  It cost about x and they got a y return on their investment.”

We will be select­ing “win­ners” through a lot­tery sys­tem but please don’t get too caught up in the word lot­tery.  We will be tak­ing a “strat­i­fied sam­ple”.  As peo­ple apply, their homes will be put into “buck­ets” (excuse the tech­ni­cal term).  Buck­ets will con­sist of homes from like geog­ra­phy first (ele­men­tary school dis­trict) age of home, type of home, build­ing mate­r­ial, and size of home.  We already have the sta­tis­tics on what the entirety of the hous­ing stock is for Howard County and we will pick ran­domly (com­puter gen­er­ated ran­dom num­bers to guar­an­tee “ran­dom­ness”) a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple for every bucket. One last thing, par­tic­i­pants must agree to some con­di­tions.  First and fore­most, you must under­stand that the County owns the audit report.  You, of course, will get the report and hope­fully imple­ment the find­ings, but it is our inten­tion to use the reports for edu­ca­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties and while we will pro­tect your spe­cific name and address, we will likely be let­ting your neigh­bors know what the audi­tors found.  Sec­ondly, once you are selected, you have 48 hours to get energy data for the last 12 months in your home.  This is rel­a­tively easy to do – if you are in BGE’s area just go to their web­site, get an online account and you can get the energy data to enter into our sys­tem. To those of you apply­ing for an audit … good luck.  The audits are free; it could save you money and help the envi­ron­ment.  To find out about apply­ing, here’s the link.

JD Feld­mark

A cou­ple of weeks ago the Sus­tain­abil­ity Board and the Office of Envi­ron­men­tal Sus­tain­abil­ity released our annual report.  I am sure you have all had a chance to read through it, but just in case I’m think­ing I will spend a cou­ple of posts high­light­ing par­tic­u­lar pieces that I think are of note.  Let me start with what is, pos­si­bly, the most basic ques­tion: “Why would two sep­a­rate groups sub­mit one report?”

Well, if you would have read the report like I asked you would have seen this para­graph in my intro­duc­tion letter:

“We are doing so because the mis­sions of the Office and the Sus­tain­abil­ity Board are closely inter­twined.  Both are work­ing every day to cre­ate a cul­ture of sus­tain­abil­ity through­out Howard County and focus all areas of County gov­ern­ment on the many facets of sus­tain­abil­ity.  Com­bin­ing the two reports gives the clear­est vision of the work of both institutions,which while sep­a­rate enti­ties, are part of the same whole.”

At the end, it comes down to silo bust­ing.  To quote myself again (man am I vain) “Though not meant to dis­par­age any of our exist­ing gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies, the knock on gov­ern­ment is so often about the large bureau­cratic silos that com­pete with each other and make progress so difficult.”

If two gov­ern­ment enti­ties like the Envi­ron­men­tal Sus­tain­abil­ity Board and the Office of Envi­ron­men­tal Sus­tain­abil­ity can’t embrace our over­lap­ping mis­sions and work col­lec­tively, what pos­si­ble hope would our office have in col­lab­o­ra­tion and unity with Pub­lic Works, Plan­ning and Zon­ing or Purchasing?

When you get a chance, go ahead and check out the report and let us know what you think.

JD Feld­mark

When we first cre­ated the office of envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­ity the charge was to cre­ate a cul­ture of sus­tain­abil­ity through­out Howard County.  That con­tin­ues to be our charge and two things became imme­di­ately clear.  The first is that there were many orga­ni­za­tions, insti­tu­tions, and indi­vid­u­als who were already doing this work and that they needed to be thanked, encour­aged, and sup­ported.  The thank­ing piece of it is another blog (one I promise to write) but this post is focused on the sec­ond issue:  the largest of the com­mu­nity insti­tu­tions would need to buy in to mak­ing us a sus­tain­able com­mu­nity for us to achieve success.

This post is to declare that the largest insti­tu­tions have stepped up to the plate and deserve recog­ni­tion. I gen­er­ally loathe just spit­ting out a bunch of links and say go get ‘em, but in an attempt to keep this things below my stan­dard 800 word opus’s occa­sion­ally, I do that below.

The Libraries – I don’t have a link that talks about their work but they have begun mak­ing the libraries sig­nif­i­cantly more energy effi­cient, one of the branches (East Colum­bia) cur­rently has and two more are get­ting solar power. (Click HERE to learn about the solar project and watch the energy col­lec­tion live.) The library also has a demon­stra­tion rain gar­den and stay tuned for infor­ma­tion on a prod­uct they will be loan­ing that will help you make your home more efficient.

The Hos­pi­tal – Howard County Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal just recently com­pleted and opened a build­ing that not only achieved LEED Sil­ver cer­ti­fi­ca­tion but was spe­cially rec­og­nized by the Green Build­ing Coun­cil as “Pio­neer­ing Sus­tain­abil­ity in a Med­ical Facility.

The School sys­tem – 35 Howard County Schools have been offi­cially cer­ti­fied as “green schools” which is nearly half of all of the schools in our County.

Howard Com­mu­nity Col­lege – Fac­ulty, staff, and stu­dents have embraced sus­tain­abil­ity and begun to inte­grate it into oper­a­tions, behav­ior, and cur­ricu­lum.  Also, of course, they are our part­ners in GreenFest

The Colum­bia Asso­ci­a­tion – CA has really, of late, focused in on the sus­tain­abil­ity issues of energy use, stormwa­ter man­age­ment, and open space man­age­ment as well as the gen­eral oper­a­tions of their ameni­ties and facilities.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to all these groups for their suc­cesses.  It’s been great  to see these projects evolve over the past few years, and I think I can speak for all of us at Office of Envi­ron­men­tal Sus­tain­abil­ity that it has been an honor to be your partner.

Green jobs, Green econ­omy, triple bot­tom line – on some level these have become empty buzz­words in the quest to “go green”.  Jobs, of course, can be a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for many pol­icy deci­sions.  The cre­ation of envi­ron­men­tally friendly poli­cies cer­tainly can cre­ate jobs and help sup­port a green sec­tor of busi­nesses.  The real­ity is that truly sus­tain­ing (pun intended) this sec­tor takes a delib­er­ate approach that incor­po­rates more than just policy.

Many juris­dic­tions, Howard County included, are mak­ing real efforts to jump start and sup­port this fledg­ling sec­tor of the busi­ness world.  Before I get into Howard County’s efforts in this arena though, let me give some def­i­n­i­tions and history.

Green Sec­tor Busi­ness – a green sec­tor busi­ness is a com­pany that pro­vides a good or ser­vice that helps, in some way, to pro­tect our nat­ural resources.  As opposed to a “reg­u­lar” busi­ness that has made a con­certed effort to go green.  So, a solar instal­la­tion com­pany is a green sec­tor busi­ness regard­less of their inter­nal sus­tain­abil­ity prac­tices while a Dr.’s office is not, regard­less of how much they recy­cle and use high effi­ciency lighting.

Stan­dard eco­nomic devel­op­ment has some basic, time-tested for­mu­las and approaches for exist­ing and thriv­ing sec­tors.  The for­mula is sig­nif­i­cantly trick­ier for a fledg­ling sec­tor like this one.  The com­mon debate about how to sup­port the green sec­tor often boils down to strategy/approach.  More often that not, while the dis­cus­sion pur­ports to be about the green sec­tor gen­er­ally, it tends to revolve around energy specif­i­cally, and while Howard County’s ini­tia­tive is broader, the strate­gic options remain the same.  In my mind, the two com­pet­ing approaches boil down to “Apollo project” vs. “Sil­i­con Valley.”

Apollo Project – Based on the after­math of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s famous speech: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to orga­nize and mea­sure the best of our ener­gies and skills…”  We all know what hap­pened after­wards.  With abun­dant fed­eral sup­port, the best of Amer­i­can inge­nu­ity and sci­ence cre­ated the infra­struc­ture and tech­nol­ogy needed to achieve the goal.  As a happy by-product, a broad based indus­try was given the means to thrive and thou­sands of jobs were cre­ated.  Of course, this is an over-simplification, but bear with me as this is a blog and I only have about 1,000 words.

Sil­i­con Val­ley – Sil­i­con Val­ley has been a tech­nol­ogy cen­ter since early in the 20th cen­tury.  The area has been on the cut­ting edge from radio, to TV, sil­i­con tran­sis­tors, through to soft­ware advances and inter­net tech­nolo­gies.  As opposed to the Apollo model, Sil­i­con Val­ley was never fueled by a cen­tral­ized force.  Instead, with the assis­tance of a nearby major research insti­tu­tion (Stan­ford) Sil­i­con Valley’s engines for progress were small start-ups in incu­ba­tors and even garages.  Gov­ern­ment played an, at best minor role in the con­tin­ued suc­cess of Sil­i­con Val­ley, though the local, state, and fed­eral gov­ern­ments did play some role in fund­ing and sup­port­ing these start-ups.  Again, this is a gross over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion but will do for the pur­poses of strate­gic think­ing.
With all of that back­ground, you might think I would now unveil the clear path Howard County is pur­su­ing to cre­ate a thriv­ing green sec­tor.  Well … you are wrong, because at the end of the day, the role of a local gov­ern­ment is likely lim­ited AND we already have the foun­da­tions of the sec­tor.  While a model in this case is prob­a­bly some com­bi­na­tion of the two strate­gies, we in gov­ern­ment decided to ask the folks who know far bet­ter than us.  Two years ago, the County formed the Howard County Green Build­ing Coun­cil (HoCo GBC) www.livegreenhoward.com/gbc.  This coun­cil is made up of the true lead­ers of Howard County’s green sec­tor.  The HoCo GBC is now an IRS rec­og­nized 501©6 and has a Board with every facet of our green sec­tor rep­re­sented – from renew­able energy to energy effi­ciency, from elec­tron­ics recy­cling to bio­log­i­cal ser­vice con­sult­ing, archi­tects, lawyers, and green retail.  This group is plot­ting the course for their own suc­cess and instruct­ing us in gov­ern­ment in the role we can and should play.

If you are a green sec­tor busi­ness, I highly encour­age you to inquire with them as to how you can help.  If you are another Howard County busi­ness or a cit­i­zen inter­ested in see­ing a vibrant green sec­tor, you too have a role to play.  Check in on the website.Attend their events.   I encour­age you to sup­port them, and even become an indi­vid­ual mem­ber of the Coun­cil to show your sup­port for what they are try­ing to do.    There it is — the pitch you all knew was com­ing – and thus my post is complete.

Jd Feld­mark

This post will likely end up a bit wonkier than our usual posts but I thought it might be worth­while to explain exactly what the Office of Envi­ron­men­tal Sus­tain­abil­ity is and tell its “ori­gin story”.  In the early months of 2007 newly elected County Exec­u­tive Ulman put together a Com­mis­sion on the Envi­ron­ment and Sus­tain­abil­ity to make rec­om­men­da­tions on, among other things, the tran­si­tion team’s rec­om­men­da­tion that the County cre­ate a Depart­ment of the Environment.

The Com­mis­sion worked through three alter­na­tives.  The first was to do noth­ing (or sim­ply bol­ster exist­ing envi­ron­men­tally focused areas).  This was fairly quickly deter­mined to be not the right course of action.  Not hav­ing a group ded­i­cated specif­i­cally to the pro­tec­tion of the envi­ron­ment was seen as a clear defi­ciency in our orga­ni­za­tional struc­ture.  Most of the sur­round­ing juris­dic­tions and in fact most of the juris­dic­tion like Howard County nation­wide have a Depart­ment of the Envi­ron­ment or some sim­i­lar struc­ture.  The exist­ing struc­ture also had a sin­gle envi­ron­men­tal coor­di­na­tor (at the time – me) who worked out of the Executive’s office, served as a pub­lic con­tact, staffed the Com­mis­sion and worked on a hodge­podge of envi­ron­men­tal projects. The Com­mis­sion did not like this because it relied too heav­ily on the Coor­di­na­tor and on the aggres­sive com­mit­ment of the County Exec­u­tive. They believed the coor­di­na­tor would not be able to estab­lish roots within the County gov­ern­ment and might be phased out by later administrations.

The sec­ond alter­na­tive was to cre­ate a full fledged Depart­ment of the Envi­ron­ment.  This would entail a gov­ern­ment re-organization, likely tak­ing Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices from Pub­lic Works, Resource Con­ser­va­tion from Plan­ning & Zon­ing, and Nat­ural Resource Man­age­ment from Recre­ation & Parks, and Envi­ron­men­tal Health from the Health Depart­ment.  There were sev­eral plusses and minuses to this option but the Com­mis­sion felt strongly that this would be a poor choice for Howard County.  First neg­a­tive is cost.  Despite the fact that many of the pro­gram staff mem­bers would come from exist­ing depart­ments, this sce­nario is costly because it assumes the addi­tion of more pro­gram staff as well as sep­a­rate admin­is­tra­tive, legal, and logis­ti­cal costs.

The Com­mis­sion, in doing their research, found that gov­ern­ment reor­ga­ni­za­tions rarely work as intended, often cre­ate mass staff depar­tures, and recre­ate and even add to gov­ern­ment inef­fi­cien­cies. Addi­tion­ally, the new Depart­ment would be unlikely to quickly com­pete for resources with other well estab­lished, large gov­ern­ment depart­ments. Finally, mak­ing the envi­ron­ment one “team” in a bureau­cratic com­pe­ti­tion seemed unwise, when the true core goal was/is to inte­grate an envi­ron­men­tal ethic through­out all of government.

That leads us to the deci­sion they did rec­om­mend and was in fact adopted (though imple­men­ta­tion is ongo­ing).  Let me go right to the source to explain the ori­gins of the Office.  “This office is mod­eled on exist­ing offices in County gov­ern­ment, most notably, the Bud­get Office and the Office of Law. While both of those offices have rel­a­tively small staffs, they wield high lev­els of author­ity within all depart­ments in the gov­ern­ment. The Office of Envi­ron­men­tal Sus­tain­abil­ity would join these offices on the Exec­u­tive floor of the County Office Build­ing, with the County Exec­u­tive and Admin­is­tra­tion. The Office would be closely asso­ci­ated with the County Exec­u­tive and would pro­vide over­sight on, and facil­i­ta­tion of, oper­a­tions in the County Depart­ments.”  The Direc­tor is a Cab­i­net level posi­tion and the office and the Office is charged with five roles within gov­ern­ment:  pol­icy devel­op­ment, edu­ca­tion and out­reach, energy man­age­ment, finan­cial man­age­ment, and envi­ron­men­tal com­pli­ance.  At full strength, the office would have around a half a dozen employees.

This is a rel­a­tively new but not unheard of model for gov­ern­ment envi­ron­ment and sus­tain­abil­ity work.  A small office with strong access and author­ity with­out the “bur­den” of day to day man­age­ment is able to bet­ter work with all of gov­ern­ment (and the quasi/no gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies) to bring about a broader cul­ture of sus­tain­abil­ity.  Though not meant to dis­par­age any of our exist­ing gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies, the knock on gov­ern­ment is so often about the large bureau­cratic silos that com­pete with each other and make progress so dif­fi­cult.  This model is an earnest attempt to do things dif­fer­ently.  It may even be a skosh gov­ern­ment 2.0 but that’s alto­gether too wonky to even dis­cuss.  Now 2 years plus into the model and with the begin­ning assem­bling of a staff, the jury is still out.  How­ever, if our accom­plish­ments since the cre­ation of the office are our “mea­sur­ing stick” – things seem to be work­ing.  Of course, I am the Direc­tor so I would say that wouldn’t I?

JD Feld­mark

PS  The attached photo is of one of the orga­ni­za­tional charts devel­oped for the rec­om­men­da­tion of the cre­ation of the office.  I know it’s not any­where near a typ­i­cal org chart and is a lit­tle hard to fol­low (not typ­i­cal and hard to fol­low — kinda like its Direc­tor).  The light green is the Office and the dark green are the many divi­sions inside gov­ern­ment and groups out­side gov­ern­ment that the office is tasked with work­ing with to accom­plish our goals.

The con­cept of an energy man­ager is elu­sive to most peo­ple.  Orga­ni­za­tions are exposed to the risks and oppor­tu­ni­ties of energy use sim­ply by open­ing their doors in the morn­ing.  For starters, it is NOT sim­ply chas­ing after peo­ple to get them to turn lights off.  Energy rep­re­sents value that can be con­sumed, saved, invested, and used to cre­ate new value. Like any form of wealth, energy should be shel­tered from risk.  If you think of energy as wealth, you think of fuels and power as forms of cur­rency.  Energy can be man­aged using the same plan­ning tech­niques that are used to man­age cash, secu­ri­ties, and other forms of wealth.  Add to this the cur­rent array of energy-related rebates, tax incen­tives, and emerg­ing demand for sus­tain­able prod­ucts and ser­vices, and true busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties become read­ily apparent.

Energy impacts are not lim­ited to the boiler room.  Everyone—from the CEO to the recep­tion­ist to the pro­cure­ment direc­tor–  has a hand in shap­ing util­ity bills now and for years to come.  The lat­est util­ity bill received by your busi­ness or work­place reflects choices made one month ago, a year ago, and maybe even 20 years ago.  Yet energy costs are only half the story.  Effi­cient use of elec­tric­ity not only cuts power plant emis­sions, it reduces stress on the power dis­tri­b­u­tion grid.  Any efforts to improve the effi­ciency of direct com­bus­tion of gas or oil con­tribute to occu­pant safety.  By won­der­ful coin­ci­dence, those same ini­tia­tives pro­vide relief for oper­at­ing bud­gets.  On one level, a cli­mate action plan addresses the emis­sions that con­tribute to adverse cli­mate impacts.  But it can also be a busi­ness plan to iden­tify and pri­or­i­tize the actions that con­tribute to sus­tain­able oper­a­tions in BOTH senses of the word: envi­ron­men­tal and fiscal.

Every­one under­stands the fis­cal con­straints imposed by a bad econ­omy.  That real­ity gives any organization—government or business—another way to look at energy waste.  It imposes a fis­cal drain just like a value-added tax.  Every per­son work­ing in an orga­ni­za­tion has an oppor­tu­nity to reduce that waste, which adds directly to the bot­tom line.  One dol­lar in avoided energy waste adds one full dol­lar of oper­at­ing income.  Sure, there’s sim­ple things like turn­ing off fix­tures when they’re not needed.  But the dol­lars you spend on energy go deeper than that.  It reflects the impact of rou­tine main­te­nance (or deferred main­te­nance) such as air fil­ter replace­ment and tun­ing up the com­bus­tion on fur­naces, boil­ers and water heaters.  It reflects the selec­tion of light fix­tures that were opti­mized for reduc­ing the glare on CRT com­puter mon­i­tors from the 1990s that have long since been replaced by LCD flat-screen mon­i­tors.  It’s reflected in the col­lec­tion of mini-refrigerators that are not only one-third full, they are located under a ther­mo­stat that con­trols air con­di­tion­ing.  It reflects habits and pro­ce­dures set years ago by main­te­nance staff—choices that made per­fect sense at a time when energy was cheap.  But as the cost of energy rises, the trade-off among time, effort, and money changes.  Show me a facil­ity where main­te­nance staff do not see the util­ity bills, and I’ll show you a facil­ity that does not evolve its pro­ce­dures and pri­or­i­ties accord­ingly in response to ris­ing energy prices.

This is what energy man­agers do:  bench­mark facil­ity per­for­mance over time, pri­or­i­tize oppor­tu­ni­ties to make energy improve­ments, and max­i­mize the col­lec­tion of rebates and incen­tives that sup­port invest­ment in new energy-saving tech­nolo­gies.  Smart energy deci­sions made today can off­set future energy waste, and ensure that future rev­enues are devoted to more pro­duc­tive pur­poses.  In the end, energy man­age­ment con­tributes to a triple bot­tom line of eco­nomic, envi­ron­men­tal, and soci­etal goals.

Christo­pher Russell