GREEN COMMITTEE

Monday, March 21, 2011

Board of Supervisors Chambers



Sue Montgomery-Corey, Chairperson



           Chairperson Montgomery-Corey called this Green Committee meeting to order at 11:33 a.m. with the following Supervisors in attendance: Randy Douglas, Sue Montgomery-Corey, and Cathy Moses. Sharon Boisen and Deb Malaney were absent.


           Department Heads present were: John O’Neill and Tony LaVigne. Joe Provoncha and Nancy Dougal were absent.


           Also present: Brian Vattimo - New York State Power Authority, Vic Puman- Community Resources Department, Bob LaVallie - DPW, and Dina Garvey - Board of Supervisors Office. Ken Doyle was absent.



MONTGOMERY-COREY: The first thing I’d like to do this morning, first of all welcome. I’m glad you all could stay, given the weather I know it’s been a challenging morning for travel. I would like to ask people first of all to go around and introduce themselves, since we are a small group and we have a guest.


At this time introductions were done around the room.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: The first item on the agenda this morning is a presentation. Do you need a minute?


VATTIMO: I’m good thanks. I’m ready to go.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: I’ve asked Brian Vattimo to join us this morning. He’s been talking with us, I know he’s been in touch with Lynn Donaldson concerning the Power Authority’s energy efficiency programs and renewable programs and so, I’d thought it’d be a really good idea, given the work that we’ve all done on getting the County buildings audited to have a conversation with NYPA about the programs that are available with their efforts.


VATTIMO: Before I start, I wanted to be here a little earlier, the roads weren’t plowed.


MOSES: We don’t want to hear that.


VATTIMO: On 87, not on the county roads.


MOSES: That’s were I travel.


VATTIMO: As Sue said, this is a good time for all of us to discuss energy conservation, as well as our solar initiative. They are two separate programs. If we could start out with the, this program first, because it’s a little relevant to what’s going on in the County right now. In fact if we could just go right to the program, in the overview page. I think is page 4. It will give you a little bit of a idea about the Power Authority. We are based in White Plains, we have offices in Albany. We have our hydro facilities in Massena, in Lewiston in Niagara County. We are currently generating and distributing power, this is our main reason for existence. The energy conservation is second to what we do at NYPA. It’s relatively new. We have been doing it for a few decades.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Brian, I want to introduce you to Randy Douglas, who is the Supervisor of Jay and the Chair of the Essex County Board of Supervisors.


DOUGLAS: Thank you, welcome.


O’NEILL: Brian, as long as there is a brief interruption, here, maybe you’re going to cover this, but, the Power Authority does have any, it’s just responsible for it’s own services that the Power Authority has, not Statewide?


VATTIMO: The New York Power Authority is part of the State government. We are a public benefit corporation, which is, what that means is, we don’t use any taxpayer dollars. We exist on our own through the revenue generated through the power we sell. Now, a lot of the power that we generate, we sell is dictated by legislation. There are numerous power programs, hydropower, which is the cheapest power to lower cost energy to businesses under the power for job program, that has been around for about 10, 12 years.


O’NEILL: No regulatory authority over other private electric utilities?


VATTIMO: No we don’t have any authority over any utilities.


O’NEILL: Okay.


VATTIMO: We do the energy conservation program, as an important aspect to our mission. Which is clean renewable energy, creating jobs, etc, etc. Because of the dire straits of all government, especially smaller governments, it is time to discuss energy conservation and you’re going to see here in one of the bullets, that the turn-key service is including energy audits, feasibility study, design, construction and financing. I want to focus on that and talk to you on how it relates to Essex County.

First of all the whole existence of our program, the reason why we’ve been successful and we do this and we’ll see some numbers in here too. This is a statewide program, we don’t ask for any new costs from the potential customers. In this case, Essex County. We base our entire philosophy of energy conservation on doing the energy audit, showing you where savings can be made off your electricity and utility bills and using that savings to pay for the work that we recommend within the audit. Which is what they call a performance contract. There are many companies in New York and around the Country, that preform this contract work. But, because we’re not a company, because we’re part of government, we do it just to cover our costs, we don’t want to get into projects where we think we’d lose money, but our whole goal is to cover our costs and because it is to cover our costs, we can keep our costs lower than if you went on the outside to a private site, performance contractor. The philosophy for performance contractor is to use the savings off the energy bill to pay for the work. That’s what the basis of it is. We do projects where there is no burden or time on your staff. We handle every aspect of the project, from the beginning, from the early stages of a program, which usually are gathering information and an energy audit. To the end, which is where we actually provide the financing to you, when you pay us back the saving off your energy bill. I’ll give you an example, even of our financing. Our current interest rate on our loans, for this program is 0.51%. A very, very competitive rate, that would probably be difficult to get through, let’s say a local back or something. You can see here as well, we handle all the costs associated with this and again it’s all worked into the program, in terms of you paying back based on what’s identified in the audit. Here’s some numbers, here on the next page that give you some ideas of where we’re doing projects, how much we done over the years and some other positive numbers about energy savings.

The goal is not only to provide you energy savings, cost-wise, but also provide you with doing more with less energy. Currently replacing HVAC equipment that’s old with new equipment, the lighting for example, other types of measures, because there is more modern that what may exist, there’s an energy saves there. That’s the goal as well, to provide with both savings cost-wise and energy savings.

You can see here, the benefits of this program, which kind of go without saying and the next copy of slides have some information about the lighting measures and the other measures that we typically look for.

We just got approved last year for water conservation measures, so if there is some water conservation potential within the County, we can look at that as well.

I know that the Town of Islip in Suffolk County is in a sense almost like a different state, then where we are up here, but you can see here, a good idea of a good example of a project that we’re doing on Long Island. That kind of goes into what we can potentially bring here to Essex County. When you see the street lighting project, how much the project costs, how much of a savings it’s going to generate. Same with the other energy conservation measures within their town owned buildings.


O’NEILL: Brian I’m not sure which page? Under other measures?


VATTIMO: It’s the second to the last page.

You’ll see Town of Islip, Suffolk County. I wanted to have an example that shows you what we’re doing right now, goes along with work being done, cost of work, how much savings and you can see within the buildings and within their street lighting, that there’s two good examples, which brings me to Essex County. Now, we’re to assume and working with Lynn Donaldson. We’ve had conversations over the last 6 weeks or so regarding what you’ve already done in Essex County and where can NYPA play a roll. Now, Lynn told me and Sue as well, that you had several audits done, I believe through the NYSERA Program, that I was able to get some information from Lynn and I had our energy conservation program manager review that data. I think that it determined that, I wanted to say $700,000.00 and some odd dollars a year is what the County spends in utility costs. Does that sounds like the right number to you?


PUTMAN: It’s more like 1.3 million.


VATTIMO: I must be thinking of something different.


PUTMAN: Well that’s fuel oil, propane, you know.


VATTIMO: Maybe the $700,000.00 was just electricity, regardless back in late February, we realized a couple of things, one there were several buildings, some even larger buildings where there were not audits done yet.

Two, there’s no question, that we think by participating in NYPA’s program, we can bring a savings to the County in terms of overall energy reduction, as well as overall cost. And because of that I did forward on to Lynn, what we call a cost recovery agreement. Our program is complex in a way, because, frankly, we have lawyers involved and that’s the nature of lawyers. We have a 34 page document that I sent to Lynn, which is very intimidating and very much for a lawyer. That document is, it’s the initial step to bring the process of a project. No cost or obligation, whatsoever, on the County to sign this document. Even though it covers almost every aspect, there is no cost to move forward and to go on there’s no obligation. What, by signing this document, the County is saying, we want the New York Power Authority to come in and number one re-do the existing audits that NYSERDA has already provided and determine if additional information is need from those and the audit that remains, and I’m talking about energy audits that need to be looked at. We think that if we can look at all your buildings, combined into one project, we could provide a significant savings to you. This is no cost or obligation to you. Let’s say after today’s discussion and some more discussion with the County Attorney and others, this document gets signed and makes its way back to me and I provide it to our Energy Conservation Program Manager. He probably would contract whoever you want him to, whoever your point person would be at the County and we’d have a project manager assigned to this project, probably out of our office down in Albany. Probably Steve Harrington, because Steve Harrington usually handles the North County region. He’d have a sit down meeting, with whoever you’d want to have at the meeting to discuss what we are going to do. Once that was completed, then bring in one of our consultants that works for NYPA to conduct the energy audit. Once that audit was complete, it usually takes about 4 weeks, the consultant will come back and sit down with the same people that were at the initial meeting for review. The audit will detail all the recommendations that we make. It will be broken out like this, let’s say for example, county office complex replace all lighting, cost $10,000.00, annual savings $1,000.00, those are all made up numbers, it’s easy math for me, because I’m not really good in math. So, that obviously says, 10 year payback $1,000 a year for ten years. That’s how this program would work. The $1,000, remember comes off the savings on your electric bill. So, that’s the reason why I say no new cost.

Then I have another measure. I have a variety of measures, all of the recommendations. It would be up to you to determine what you would want to do from there. Let me give you an example of what I mean. We typically do not recommend window replacements, because window replacement is very, very expensive and doesn’t provide enough savings off the energy bills to pay for it. You see a window replacement project is a 20 or 30 year pay back. A lighting project on the other hand is sometime a 2 or 3 year payback, obviously the faster you can pay back something the more crook of the money would come back right to the County, into your budget. So you would be able to determine from that audit, here is what we want to do. We would then move forward.

It is at that point that we would move forward, that we would have another agreement signed, a cost recovery, a basic contract, where there would be an obligation for a project and a cost to the County. We work with NYSERDA, so anything that we identified within our audit, we were could try for rebates or additional funding, we would do that, to bring your total costs down. I told you earlier that there’s no cost to you when you cost recovery, lets say that an audit was completed, it was reviewed and at that point, the consensus was, NYPA we don’t want to do any work, thank you very much. We leave no cost to you. If you do move forward, with the project, the cost of that audit would be thrown in the final cost to the total project and we tap into a program that NYSERDA has, a flex tech program, were 50% of that audit would be covered. Costs that would be covered through that program. So, that’s the basics of were we are right now, with the County. I talked to Sue at length, I’ve talked to Lynn at length. I’ve gone very abbreviated with you, in talking to you about our program, but most of time I come and speak to groups.

In fact I was involved with the Lake Placid Green Team, and Kate Fish, last year. Not the same message, but being involved. They wanted someone from NYPA to represent NYPA, because Lake Placid and Saranac Lake receive their power from NYPA, which is a great benefit to those residents, because it is very, very inexpensive.

So, usually I don’t already have the go ahead from our Energy Conservation Program Manager, saying hey we can help them, we got a get project here and I’d like to move forward. Usually, I’m waiting, I just come to talk about the program and I leave and I exchange some business cards and then maybe we follow up, but we’re already ahead of the game here, because we know that we can lower your costs, if you want us to by doing a project and having us do your work for you.

The thing about NYSERDA, they have very inexpensive audits, but really you’re paying more, because all of us pay a benefits charge on our electric bills. Whether it’s the County or your residence. That money goes to NYSERDA, and NYSERDA’s has these programs so they can give you an audit for a $100.00 or $400.00 or whatever the costs is. Those audits completed are great, but all you have is an audit. It’s up to you then or whoever, to go and find someone to do the work and that of course, because you’re a government you have to go to bid and you have to bring in companies to offer this or this, etc, etc. We would do this for you, because we’re part of the government, we come to work directly with you, save you the bidding time, the cost associated with that, the cost, time-wise of just sitting down and talking about potential companies that want to do the work. Then there are added little bonuses by coming to our program. I’ll give you another example, Johnson Controls and Siemens, they are companies that are fuel performance contractors, one of the ways that make their money is after their work is complete you would sign a contract with them, a five - ten year contract. I’m working with Herkimer County, right now, and they were, had a contract with Johnson Controls for about $25,000.00 a year, for 5 years, to monitor all of the work to back up the savings that Johnson Control said they would see. Herkimer County didn’t want to do this, that’s why they called NYPA and right now, we’re in the middle of seeing if they want to come with us and our program. We don’t know, we think that we have a smaller project in Herkimer County, than we do here, but my point is, if you did go with a performance contractor, in the private sector, you would have that burden as well. Of an additional contract, to back up the savings. We back up our savings, just as well as they do. We don’t charge you for that. I think that’s about all I have. I think I’ve covered the basics and I would take any questions now. If anyone has any questions.


MOSES: Yes, with the way they’re changing rates, because as we know National Grid rates are raising. How can we be guaranteed those savings?


VATTIMO: We can’t control what the rates are. That’s a very good point, but if you’re paying $10,000.00, if you’re paying $1.3 million dollars a year and the rates are at $1.3 million dollars, whatever that rate is and we can come in and we can cut your bill by $300,000 or $400,000, you’re probably going to be at $1.3 million again in 10 or 20 years, or whenever the rates go up. We can’t control the rates, but we can get you saving. We can’t control when that goes back up, because we aren’t you’re power man.


DOUGLAS: I did a performance contract in my town, the Town of Jay, about 5 years ago. We put in new windows, new lights, performance contract is the way to go, but there are some fine lines in those contracts. I’m not sure, I haven’t seen yours, I just saying to make sure that you’re receiving those savings, you base it on kilowatt hours, and the amount of fuel consumption, or what have you, or what you’re using. It’s not on the dollar amount? Correct.

Are you doing it on a dollar amount or are you doing like, we went in and replaced all the electrical?


VATTIMO: We give you a dollar amount.


DOUGLAS: You’re doing a dollar amount.


VATTIMO: Your final numbers should, it’s going to have for you every single cost and every single item with the dollar amount per savings. It will include those other things as well, but you are going to have solid numbers in front of you to review. We aren’t going to ask you to sign something where we’re just going to say, well we think maybe, we’ll see what happens. You’re going to have some pretty solid numbers and we’ll bill in a 10% contingency, just in case as we’re doing to work we find something that we didn’t expect, to cover the costs. But, you’ll see numbers. Even within our audit, you’ll see numbers, dollar numbers.


DOUGLAS: We did see them, you’re right, I agree with you.


O’NEILL: Randy, were you talking about more, like looking down the road, the only thing that you can control or predict is the kilowatt, the actual energy savings and not the dollars?


DOUGLAS: Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. I think a dollar amount is, I don’t know how you can do that. It’s almost impossible to predict. Who would have predicted that oil went from $2.00 gallon to $4.00 a gallon.


VATTIMO: Maybe I’m misunderstanding you.


DOUGLAS: What I’m saying is, if you’re using, in this building alone, let’s just saying you’re using a 100 kilowatts and you say we can reduce that down to 50 kilowatts or you say we’re using a tank of fuel oil at such in such building and you only use a half a tank of fuel. I know, these are just figures.


VATTIMO: Right, right...


DOUGLAS: But, that’s how you would base it. I don’t know how you could do a dollar amount savings. You don’t know the cost of electricity, you don’t know the cost of fuel oil, you don’t the cost of kerosene.


VATTIMO: We would base it on the current costs. We also can do a project in a short period of time, we are taking 5 or 10 years for a project, we’re talking, maybe a comprehensive project anywhere from 18 months to 2 years from start to finish. But, you’re right, if the price the day we start is this and the price when we finish is this, we’re going to have to discuss that discrepancy. As I said we build into the contingency, but that may not be what you’re talking about either. You’re right, prices fluctuate regularly, we can’t control the price you pay. We can only do what we can to lower how much energy you use and by installing modern equipment, reduce your bills by using the savings through our project. I’m trying to make this make sense here.


DOUGLAS: I just would, in this day and age, I would caution the County to sign any contract unless it was showing the savings of the actual amount of usage, of kilowatt hours or fuel oil, or kerosene or what have you, compared to a dollar amount, is all I’m saying.


VATTIMO; I think we’ll provide you both and you wouldn’t be asked to sign any contract until you had all that information in front of you. None of that information would be in this initial agreement that I forwarded on to Lynn Donaldson. None of that is in there, because that’s just an agreement saying, yes.


DOUGLAS: Yes, it’s the pre-audit, you’re going to come in and you’re going to do the doors and you’re going to check the lights, the fixtures and see if where the most energy efficient, you’re going to give us a report. I’m very well aware of what, how the whole project takes place, because I’ve been through it and I’m still in it. I just, my thing would caution usage, not dollar amount. That’s all I’m saying.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: One of the things, I also got a copy of that boilerplate agreement that he was just mentioning, and I’ll make sure that you all get it, so that you can take a look at it and see if there are other questions that you have, that we might want to think about.


DOUGLAS: To our benefit, Sue, and I’m sorry to interrupt, but to our benefit, Dan was our Town Attorney at that time and he’s the County Attorney now, we actually went through the contract line by line by line and sat down with the representative with Honeywell at time, which he would probably do with the Power Authority to make sure that we’re all on the same page.


VATTIMO: I can tell you a couple of things about that. Any issues that the Attorney may have with the contract, we’ll deal with. These are written a certain way, if there are certain adjustments that you want to see, the Attorney wants to see, we have made these. I have given you the Islip as an example, the Counsel I worked with in the Town of Islip, was an Attorney and obviously the Town of Islip is one of the biggest towns in the whole country, has numerous town attorneys. It took us 6 months to get the agreement signed and we had some NYPA attorneys involved in that. But we made alternations to cost recovery agreement, that certainly if you feel that there certain things that need to be discussed we can do that. If we get through that, the initial sit down with the project manager, these guys are engineers, these guys know their stuff. I’m not an engineer, I’m just a salesman.


DOUGLAS: I understand.


VATTIMO: They can get very specific with you and in fact they can probably, if you said to them, give me an example of a recent project, show me some numbers, show me kilowatt usage, they would with data and numbers and things to really reassure you, because you make a very valid point. What you mentioned too, as well, about the cost of energy always goes up. I can tell you that from our audits and what we say we’re going to produce from you all savings, both energy savings, fuel savings, dollar savings, we’ve never really had an big issues where, when we were gone, and a year or two goes by where we get a phone call and they say, hey listen the savings that you said you were going to give us, the energy savings that you told us, hasn’t happened. We had one time when a small school, a one district K-12 school, called two years later and we went out there and checked it out, they installed 400 computers and wondered why their energy bill went up. We don’t, I never have been told, I’ve been doing this for more than 3 years now and I’ve never been told in one instance that we have had that problem. But, my point is that the project manager that will be assigned to the County he will answer any specific questions that you have.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Great, other questions?

Vic, did you have a question?


PUTMAN: As you are sitting here, you probably realize the significant historical resource we’re sitting in right here. When NYPA does audits and recommendations for improvements, do you cover the cost of historically compliant improvements?


VATTIMO: Any historic structure that we’re asked to look at, we first have to make sure that we have approval to,


PUTMAN: Parks and Rec?


VATTIMO: Parks and Rec are whatever process is there. And any added needed features, because of the historic nature would be incorporated into the cost. Remind you, the whole point is not to have any new costs to the County. So, if there were exorbitant costs because of the historic building and the additional whatever might be needed, it maybe recommended not to do it. Only from a stand point that we don’t what to come back and say, Essex County we can do this, but it’s going to cost you $300,000.00 on top of your savings. We don’t do that. We never have done that, we wouldn’t do that.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: So, one of the things when you and I had talked earlier. I mentioned to you, that one of the buildings that hadn’t been audited was our Public Safety Building, which is relatively new, it includes our County jail and you mentioned to me that NYPA had a fair amount of experience in doing audits on correctional facilities. Can you comment on that at all?


VATTIMO: I know that were working with some State prisons right now and I know that we’ve done other, I believe, county facilities, upstate. I don’t have any specifics on that, but let me put it this way, it’s not unfamiliar territory for us to look at a jail, any more that it’s unfamiliar to look at a recreational building. We know what to look for, there’s certain variations and because of the building construction and whatnot, but it’s certainly something. I think that was one of your larger buildings, too.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Right.


VATTIMO: So, it would need to be in incorporated. Keep in mind again, the whole basis of the program using the savings off your energy bill, create that savings, the more square footage you provide the more savings potential there is. That’s why we want to look at that building.


DOUGLAS: Sue, can I just follow up on that? I have talked to the Sheriff about that and we will make this happen. If this happens and we do the, go ahead with the procedure and we know enough ahead of time, that they want to go to the Public Safety Building, you’ll have to rearrange and what pods, and it might take a couple of days, instead of just one day to do that audit on that building or whatever, so he can arrange where the inmates are going to be at a certain time, but it isn’t impossible that we can’t make this happen.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: I think that’s great, Tony?


LAVIGNE: I’m a little unclear of the services that you would provide. Are you providing an energy audit, an energy audit only, or are you providing design services?


VATTIMO: We provide every aspect of the project.

Once the audit is done and the agreement to move forward, we would being the design to that.


LAVINGE: That would include any environmental impact statements.


VATTIMO: It would include every aspect of this project as if you did it on our own with a vendor.


LAVIGNE: Including labor and installation?


VATTIMO: Labor, yes. One of the things that we’ve done at NYPA, is for different phases of a project we’ve throughout the years have gone and done our own requests for proposals, so we have contractors that work for NYPA in different phases of a project we have them come in and do certain work, depending on what needed to be done at that time. When it came down to construction, if the County wanted us to do a public bid, so local contractors could play a roll, you would do that as well. If that’s what you wanted us to do. We have construction contractors and design engineering firms and companies just doing energy audits, they all are on contract with us. In a sense we would be a general project manager to you, answering to you. We would do all the work for you.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Any other questions?


PUTMAN: The County has like 80 buildings, 17 have, would be considered like power plants, heating systems. We did an audit on 16 of those, the main one the was the public safety building. Some of them are like barns or sheds or storage, I’m not sure it’s worth the expense to do an audit on them if all they need is light bulbs or something.


VATTIMO: That’s your discussion, you would know your buildings better than us. You would know where you want us to go. You’re probably right, if they were barn type buildings that were part of the County structure.


PUTMAN: There are fair buildings.


VATTIMO: I mean, that’s a discussion you would make. You can tell us where you want us to go. I asked our Energy Conservation Program Manager if you wanted to see the inventory that was done through NYSERDA and he said no. I can tell you in the past, when we used NYSERDA audits, we’ve typically been able to take that audit and work it into our program. We rarely have to do additional audit work, based on the audit already done. So, that’s a time savings right there. You mentioned the one building and I think that you mentioned the county fair buildings.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: I think that we did talk about that at one point.


PUTMAN: There is this one building at the County Fair that houses offices, desperately needs help. It only has like a partial basement, and it really should have a full basement. I know that’s a little beyond what energy conservation is, but I don’t know how you would insulate the floor on that building, without doing like some kind of basement.


VATTIMO: We’d probably have to hire someone and they would have to come in and it maybe something we have done before. I would think that there probably isn’t a building we haven’t come across, as far as an unique situation. It can’t cost very much, it will cost nothing for us look at it. We are going to a lot, you should include as much as you think should be included.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Do you want to talk about solar?


VATTIMO: Can we talk about the solar initiative now? In some ways it does meet this green concept, more so perhaps than energy conservation. It’s been around for a long time.

About 18 months ago, our President/CEO announced, he wanted to come up with a way to make it easier for the municipalities and schools to offer solar if they still wanted to do that. Right, now if you want to do that, NYSERDA has programs, but it is a very big financial burden, especially on smaller county governments. Where you would have to pay a significant amount of money for the solar equipment to be installed and then pay a significant amount of money for an operation and maintenance contract on a yearly basis. We take all that in this program away from you. You don’t have to do any of that. So, of you’re interested in solar, by the NYPA program, there’s no cost to do that. What we’ve done is, and I’ll give you a concept of how big this program is, right now 20 megawatts of power in New York is generated through solar. We want to do 100 megawatts. To give you an idea of how big this is. We divide this thing into 5 regions. Ideally we want to bring 20 megawatts of solar power into each of these 5 regions. Right now, we spent the last 8 months reviewing proposals by 44 contractors who have submitted bids and requests for proposals that was due back in late March of 2010. These are contractors from across the Country who have been doing solar installs and solar operations and maintenance for more than a decade or two. They are top, some of the top companies in the Country in terms of solar. Ideally at some point this year, our Board of Trustees is going to approve contracts with about 5 of these contractors, who have done with NYPA. So far we’ve had about 600 plus, public entities, municipalities, schools, airports, you name it, sign up, no cost or obligation to say that they are interested. What we want to see is 40,000 square foot roof space or more. The roof being 5 years or less in age. Or one or two acres of vacant land. Obviously this County has a lot of land, maybe not the roof space, but certainly the land.

If the County’s signed up, eventually one of our contractors that work for NYPA will come out and do an onsite inspection to view the feasibility of installing solar where you think it could be installed. If you felt that, that was something you wanted to do with the contractor, because the contractor said let’s do it, you would have a host site agreement. We would prepare that for you and you could determine if it needs to be altered through your County Attorney. You would be giving this land, or roof space to this contractor to built the solar equipment on your property. Any power that was generated off of that solar equipment on your property, NYPA would own, you would then buy that power back from NYPA at a fixed price over a 20 year period. There would be some adjustments made within that contract, for example, if you generate 100 kilowatts of new solar power, whatever the price is on your National Grid bill, for 100 kilowatts, you’d pay 5% less than that for the first 5 years. For the remaining 15 years, whatever the price is 100 kilowatts on your National Grid bill, you’d never pay more. So, there is somewhat of a subsidy involved, because the cost of solar power is much more than the cost of natural gas through National Grid. There’s really no financial incentive to you to do this. You’re not going to make any money, but there is the leadership standpoint to the County going green, generating power, clean renewable solar energy. As I said earlier, not having the burden of the operation of maintenance. We take care of that through the contractor is a savings to you. If you wanted to sign on, not having to add 50% to the cost to install solar is a savings to you. NYSERDA may have programs that cover 50% of the cost as well, I don’t know.

This one pager kind of explains the program. You’ll see the website at the bottom. Right on our homepage is where you click on to register. If Essex County is interested just click on there, there’s a copy of questions, you can probably answer, Vic.


PUTMAN: Well, actually we did submit a project.


VATTIMO: A project for the use of Essex County property?


PUTMAN: I forgot what building, I believe it was Public Safety. My concern is that, you’re going to hire, NYPA’s going to choose a contractor, contractors to do it, but is the discussion on what building they’re going to do, up to the contractor? As opposed to NYPA or ?


VATTIMO: The decision on what buildings you’re going to use would be up to you.


PUTMAN: No, no, no, I’m talking about NYPA regarding the contractors to do a certain specific owned building as opposed to the contractor choosing, well I’m going to do all my buildings in Albany County because that’s where we do our business.


VATTIMO: Every contractor that would be hired by NYPA knows the magnitude of this project and knows what they are getting themselves into and they could very well be assigned to a region of the state that they are not familiar with, but that would be their region and they would have to handle whatever requests they have for the region. Now, using your example, if there were more of an opportunity in Albany County vs. Essex County, they may do Albany County before Essex County, but if Essex County registered to be participating in this program, eventually Essex County will get a phone call and eventually a contractor would come up and do an onsite visit to determine, hey we can do this or it’s not going to work, but we wouldn’t play a role in that, because we aren’t the experts in terms of solar site, that’s the contractors.


PUTMAN: When I first saw this solicitation for that, it was my impression that the contractor picked the sites where they were going to install the solar and my concern was that they, we don’t have too many solar contractors here in the Park, so why would they come here?


VATTIMO: I see, they would come here because that’s what we tell them to do, if they work this project.


PUTMAN: So, NYPA’s going to choose the sites where these contractors are going have perform.


VATTIMO: The way it’s been explained to me, is this. If you register for the program and you meet the criteria we’re asking for within the questionnaire to register for the program, you get a site visit. If you don’t meet the criteria, eventually someone and come and say listen we have to have 40,000 square foot of roof space, you only have 20,000, we’re not going to be able to do it, but if you meet the criteria, I don’t think they’re going to, I have not been told that they’re going to say well we don’t want to go up to the North Country. We are telling them whoever’s registered and meets the criteria that’s where they’re going to go.


PUTMAN: I have issues with this North Country deal, cause NYSERDA just started this energy management program, but nobody north of Saratoga County is eligible and we all pay the system service charge, but we don’t all get equal performance from them.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Vic, which energy management program are you talking about?


PUTMAN: The energy coordinator.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Actually there is an energy smart coordinator assigned to the North County based out of Jefferson County, through Jefferson County Cooperative Extension and then they have sub-contracts. I know that they got one with ANCA.


PUTMAN: The NYSERDA program that just came out 2141, excludes anyone north of Saratoga County.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: You’re talking about green jobs green New York?


PUTMAN: No,


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Okay.


PUTMAN: We’ll take a look and see.


VATTIMO: I cant speak for NYSERDA, but I understand what you’re saying and there’s not going to be a choice for the contractors, as where they’re going to go. NYPA owns the list of registers people who register, we are going to provide them a list. It’s going to be, they can check off where they do and don’t want to go. Frankly, I don’t think all of these contractors are going to be, I think some of them are frankly out of state contractors, so they might not know. We what to make sure that we have the most professional, the most experienced, top of the line, solar contractors for this project. It’s one of the largest solar projects in the Country, that we’re doing, we want to do it right. I can’t believe that they’re going to say, well, we are going to give them the opportunity to say no, if they don’t want to drive that far, or whatever reason they come up with.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: On the energy efficiency side with some of the NYSERDA programs. The energy efficiency contractors have to be registered with NYSERDA and they aren’t all that many within the Park, very often you’ll have somebody who comes up from Albany, like the person who did audit on my house recently, came up from Albany to do it. Sometimes, they come down from Canton, they come from all over and they’re use to working statewide or region-wide or that tends not to be a big deal if you can find more that are welling to come.


VATTIMO: As far as energy conservation in our program, we have one or two, we have a guy we works out of Syracuse and we have a guy who works out of Albany and typically what they do, is they try to combine their meetings in a day trip or maybe an overnight. I’m not talking about the solar project, I’m talking about energy conservation. We looked at the Watertown Central School District and I think our guy, Dave Lanney, combined that with a trip up to Massena or something like that. I know, I think we’re doing, we’re hopefully going to be doing work with Warrensburgh Central School District. The School Board right now is making the decision and I think that Steve, Steve is one of our guys that works in the north country, he works out of Albany.


DOUGLAS: Sue, if I may, can you get us more information on that, because we should do a resolution from here, regarding that Vic, being opposed to that and that it should be past that area. We just did that with the agriculture thing last week. It went, because they redirected money just to the city and not here, so we need to fight that and any information that you can get us we can pass. We can do the same thing here and fight that and when we meet with representatives, we can say look, it doesn’t even make sense.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: We’ll take a look at it and see what it says.


DOUGLAS: Thank you, Sue.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Any other questions?


PUTMAN: I think I have one other question. Alternative energy, besides solar, do you look at that at all?


VATTIMO: We certainly look at it, any alternative energy ideas that you may have within the energy conservation program. Keep in mind it’s all about using the money generated off your electric bill to pay for it. So, you have to have a significant amount of savings to cover and of these other alternative energy ideas out there, because it is be coming out with new money to pay for some of it. We don’t offer any grants or rebates or anything type of financial incentives, but we have in the past looked at other, energy, alternative energy ideas within the project.


PUTMAN: Are you saving that you wouldn’t finance an alternative energy project through this program?


VATTIMO: We would finance it, but it would have to be enough savings overall to pay for it.


PUTMAN: Life cycle cost, do a life cycle cost benefit?


VATTIMO: We would very well do a life cycle cost, but what I’m saying is would you want to look at let’s say, what do you have in mind?


PUTMAN: Central heating for the county complex, nursing home, school, hospital, courthouse, the County owns 2,000 acres of wood lot up the road, whether it’s chips, something like that, your biomass projects.


VATTIMO: So, the bottom line is, you have to have enough savings to throughout all your buildings to fund biomass to cover your cost. Now, if you incorporate biomass into a project, that would be additional savings because it would be replacing other energy sources, that could be worked into a component of the project as well. But, we don’t want to do anything where we are going to come to you with a bill for new costs that wouldn’t be covered using the savings off your electric bills. So, we’ve done nearly every type of alternative energy project throughout the last ten years.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Great, well thank you very much for presenting. It was wonderful and we will be back in touch, I’m sure.


VATTIMO: Well, okay thank you.


********


           The next item on the agenda was Victor Putman reporting on updates on County Energy Audits and Smart Growth Proposal as follows:


MONTGOMERY-COREY: So, the next item on the agenda is a update on where we are with the audit and the energy smart growth proposal.


PUTMAN: Okay, I did submit the Smart Growth application last Friday for energy management program here in Essex County. That would extend to the Towns. We had a really good return on support letters, which was really good, so we’ll just have to wait and see. We proposed a $80,000.00 project for three years, utilizing existing staff, instead of hiring a new manager, which added an additional cost to the County. I figured it would be much more cost effective to utilize our own forces.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Vic, where did you, I haven’t had a chance to look at the proposal, with that shift where will the staff be housed?


PUTMAN: I was thinking right there in Planning or Community Resources, Lynn, certainly, Anna has assisted in that project as well, so that’s the proposal right now, but things can change. I wanted to use as much experience that’s in house as possible. So of the proposals in there, to do inventory on County facilities, obviously buildings, but also include heating plants, showing a building by building operation / maintenance schedule. So things like the furnace backing, things like that can be addressed. There would be a protocol to address those things for all of our structures.

Doing a Countywide park and ride location map. That would involve going to all the towns and trying to figure out were the best location might be for a park and ride, because I guess there’s only one by the Crown Point Bridge road, but pretty much all the others are you park in King Phillip’s Spring or something, but nothing is signed, marked. It’s just haphazard and I think by doing a countywide park and ride system other people could take advantage of it, if it was more organized, if you will. Maybe eventually have some lighting, maybe even some shelters, places for a bus to stop, to meet somebody that would help energy conservation for residents and tourists, alike. Keene has the hiker shuttle, it’s a good place to park your car and if people knew about it, that would work. So, that’s in there. I just those are the highlights.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Okay, good.

And is there anything else in terms of the audit?


PUTMAN: I thought we were going to talking to NYPA about doing to audit for the safety building, pending, I guess, the agreement with, Dan should look at the agreement, see if he wants the amendments or what.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: So, Randy do we need a resolution in order to go ahead and request that NYPA work with us on the Public Safety Audit and are we ready to do that?


DOUGLAS: Yeah, we would need a resolution. Oh, we did the resolution to do all the audits before. This is just another building. Did we have specific buildings in that resolution?


PUTMAN: No.


DOUGLAS: Sorry, I’m a little off guard, you caught me cheating, on was on my Blackberry.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: That’s okay.


DOUGLAS: If there wasn’t certain buildings on that resolution then, no we wouldn’t need a new resolution. If you tell me...


PUTMAN: Although we have to sign this 34 page agreement to sign up with NYPA.


DOUGLAS: Well we would need a resolution to do that.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Well here’s the thing about the 34 page agreement, my sense is that what he was talking about is not doing an audit of the Public Safety Building as a stand alone project, he’s doing that as part of a package.


DOUGLAS: Right, he’s doing them all.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: And the question is, are we ready to recommend that the County explore packaging this with NYPA and having them move forward. Tony?


LAVIGNE: Looking at this as the guy that’s, we don’t have a contractor to implement it, as far as, I me it’s attractive because it looks like we’re going to get a very low cost contractor on board to complete the whole energy audit and we’ll see an initial savings. If we do it in house, it’s going to take several years to implement, because I just don’t have the staff and don’t have the funding and I doubt very much that, and Randy can probably attest to this, that the Board isn’t going to very implacable to giving me funds to implement any recommendations. This program that NYPA put together here, looks like it’s already a turn-key operation, so that was why I asked them, actually what we would get out of that agreement. We’re getting the whole thing, complete, ready to rock and roll.


DOUGLAS: I have to agree with Tony. This is how I would handle this, Sue. I would take that 34 pages, that you and Vic have and get it to Dan Manning, with a note on it that you spoke to me and it came up in this committee today, that we would to move this at Ways and Means to get this started. It’s no cost to the County, it’s doing the audit. Then Tony when we, we’re asking Tony to budget to implement some of these things for cost savings that he has time to prepare to say what it’s going to cost to do this. So, I would say yes, you’re right on, Dan can prepare a resolution for Ways and Means and then we move forward. I mean it is the recommendation of this committee, right, to move forward?


RESOLUTION ALLOWING THE CHAIRMAN AND/OR COUNTY MANAGER TO ENTER INTO AN AGREEMENT WITH NYPA FOR ENERGY AUDITS OF COUNTY OWNED BUILDINGS, AT NO COST TO THE COUNTY.

This resolution was moved by Ms. Moses, seconded by Mr. O’Neill.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: So, can we have a motion on that?


DOUGLAS: I think that’s what you should do.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Cathy’s going to make a motion and John will second.


DOUGLAS: I think it’s a great idea, that way it gets the ball moving, Ways and Means and then Dan can look over, when he has time to look through the contract. Does Tony have a copy of it too?


MONTGOMERY-COREY: He doesn’t, I going to send it to all of you and will also copy Dan on it.


DOUGLAS: Please do, e-mail it or saying the it came up at your committee today and that we suggested that he go to him and I will speak to him, too. But, Tony should look at it also.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: That sounds great, So we have a motion and a second. Any further comments? All those in favor? All those opposed? Terrific it’s a real green committee action.


DOUGLAS: And an important, I mean something that should have been probably done 20 years ago, so it’s an important step that you guys are taking as a committee. I mean very important.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: When I first heard how the program worked, because I had not a lot of contact with them, I was just blown away, because something like the County, we have so many pieces to this that it’s going to, Tony’s right. It’s going to take us years if we try to do it all ourselves.


DOUGLAS: To Cathy’s credit, Cathy first brought this up, the first year she became Chairperson, that we need to look at making our buildings energy efficient, so credit should be where it is.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Absolutely.


DOUGLAS: I know this committee took the ball and starting running with it, but Cathy was the one that said, you know what we’re not energy efficient here in Essex County and we need to be.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: It’s important it have visionaries, like Cathy, leading the way. So, thank you.

So, we talked about that. The last thing, National Grid. Tony you had come up with some.


*******

           The next item on the agenda was National Grid Energy Programs reporting by Tony LaVigne as follows:


LAVIGNE: Well, actually it was forwarded to me by Brenda. What we have already discussed today, kind of covers it, really. More or less this is information that I got that backs up what NYPA has proposed, here at St. Francis of Assisi Parish Center saved $3,500, by doing basically, implementing what NYPA’s planning on doing for us. My notes on here was to talk about implementing and the potential cost savings.

The other thing is Anita, from Cooperative Extension, sent me this grant application for engineering, by basically a biomass heating, using wood chips. We had a similar program put on with a presentation last summer and there’s several engineering firms that will do this and these system do work well with consolidated campuses. I’ve spoken with a college and I actually did meet a gentleman from a local school. They work well with consolidated campuses. There is a certain amount of heat loss the longer you have to push this stuff. Will it work here? I would really want to have someone study that. At the jail facility, probably. The other is with these biomass, you need labor to supply the wood chips. I’m not opposed to doing anything like that, but still you would have to have the labor and the materials. You mentioned the forests properties, unfortunately, they designated forest properties, we just can’t cut trees down to burn.


PUTMAN: You’re absolutely right, but there’s low grade wood that goes to pulp, so rather than haul that 40 miles.


LAVIGNE: And our brush, we probably don’t chip enough brush to keep a plant running. So, we would definitely have to buy materials, or appropriate materials, possibly with IP. I don’t know if they use up all their wood chips and Bob, I don’t know how familiar you are with that, but I don’t know if they use every scrap of wood or if there’s any waste come out of it.


LAVALLIE: They burn the bark.


LAVIGNE: That’s great idea, we’ve got trees all over the place. You would like that we’d be able to just go out in the backyard, like I do at home, and throw it in the woodstove. But it’s a little more complicated than that.


PUTMAN: Quite a bit.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: We actually followed through with that on that e-mail and had a pre-study visit last week from the consultants working with USDA on it and we’re thinking about trying to get a wood burning system to heat our parks building in our highway garage, because we cut a lot of wood, we have a lot of waste wood. We have waste wood at the transfer station. I know a lot of other towns are starting to do this too. You have to really think about what kind of wood are you going to burn, in or case it’s stuff that we have available, so we probably wouldn’t have to buy that much, but the other thing is, what assumptions are you going make about the labor that it’s going to take, because that impacts your cost. It isn’t a no cost option. Randy?


DOUGLAS: Just to follow up with that, we did that in the Town of Jay, four years ago and we went from, in our highway garage, I want to say, $12,000.00 - $14,000.00 it cost and we don’t pay anything. We use all our blow down wood, I think our fuel oil costs at that building was less than $400.00 last year and it’s zero this year. We do that with all our blow down. It doesn’t cost anything and it was well worth the investment.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: I think we want to come visit you.


DOUGLAS: Yes, please do.


LAVIGNE: The other thing, and along those lines is because we do service so many vehicles, we have actually more than enough waste oil. And we heat our shop with waste oil.


DOUGLAS: That’s a good point.


O’NEILL: Just very briefly, I just keep hearing things. I don’t know what the Economic Development really would work, but I keep hearing the potential for kind of branding or marketing in terms of Essex County for the conscientious and cost savings kind of issues that we are talking, or at the very worse cost neutral and that, why not let’s get that out there.


DOUGLAS: Can I follow up on that, and I’m sorry, I’m talking a lot and this isn’t my committee, but here and I’m waiting for a 1:00 meeting. I can’t say more than what John just said. John, seriously, we get criticized in the media, non-stop, we paying this one too much or we’re wasting money here, why don’t we look at consolidating this, why don’t they lay off this department, you know, all that stuff. But, the general public doesn’t realize the things that Essex County have already implemented. See, there’s that word again. That this cost savings, and our little towns are doing the same thing. So, I agree John, a press-release from this committee is very appropriate, saying what we are trying to do to save money. I think that’s, I appreciate that, John, because that’s true, because what you’re saying is the absolute truth. Check with some other counties, they’re not doing these things.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: We can definitely do a press-release, that’s not a big deal.


DOUGLAS: I think it’s a great idea.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Good, we will do that.

Is there anything else this fine day?


O”NEILL: Sorry, just one other thought. Again, with economic development, it’s a potential of job creation in there.


PUTMAN: The pellet plant in Keeseville.


O’NEILL: You said the pellet plant?


PUTMAN: The pallet company is going to use their waste chips to make pellets and I guess he’s going to be selling them locally.


O’NEILL: So, there’s somebody’s who’s got an idea in terms of marketing.


PUTMAN: There’s Wrisley’s, Mark Wrisley in Essex, they’re proposing to do a grass pelletizing. This would be an agricultural product and actually Cornell was willing to use some of their land to do some of research on which kind of grass makes better pellets. That is one of the objectives in my Smart Growth application, was to provide that kind of information to keep, like a clearing house for people who are interested in local energy production or utilization. A clearing house to be developed on the county website where people can look at energy that Essex County produces or things that are happening in Essex County. The other side at the Cornell Farm in conjunction with UVM, they’re doing test plots on sunflowers. There is a farmer in Vermont, that’s all he uses is sunflower oil to run his equipment. He got like a 200 plus dairy operation and he actually makes oil for fellow farmers, but that’s a bio-diesel. And that can be used, even some towns could just switch some of their equipment to it and create an industry, locally. Instead of importing this stuff.


DOUGLAS: That’s amazing, I didn’t know that you could. That’s some thing with sunflower seed oil.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: That’s cool.


DOUGLAS: That’s wonderful. Tony can switch all his equipment over and we’re running on sunflower seed oil.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: So, if we have no further business today, we probably should adjourn and think about what we want to do next time.


DOUGLAS: You guys have covered a lot in a short time period. You’re complimented. You’re really covered a lot.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Thanks, I still want to do the tour of the composting facility.


DOUGLAS: We can do that, I can arrange that. I just got back on their advisory board, because I was worried about possible prison cutbacks at Adirondack. So, I just got back on their board up there and actually Shirley Seney is the President of Advisory Board, so we can arrange that through their advisory board or the Superintendent up there and take a tour with his committee of their composting plant. It’s used for the APA, DEC, the FCI and Adirondack and the State Troop Barracks and they all use that composting plant.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: And if we could do a combined visit with the APA / DEC facility that’d be great and the other thing is that would be a wonderful opportunity to bring a lot some of our friends from the press.


PUTMAN: They also have a solar panel at the APA that they installed.


DOUGLAS: Oh, that’s right.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Chairman Stiles had invited us all to come up and look.


DOUGLAS: We could do it all in the same day.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Do it all at the same day, I think that would be a wonderful thing.


MOSES: And use our transportation system.


DOUGLAS: There you go. To get there. Maybe we could take an electric car or an electric van. We’re really talking now.


PUTMAN: A hybrid.


MONTGOMERY-COREY: Okay, do we have a motion to adjourn? Thanks, Cathy, second John, all those in favor. Thank you, we’re adjourned.



           As there was no further business to come before this Green Committee it was adjourned at 12:42 p.m.



           The next Green Committee meeting will be on Monday, April 18, 2011 at 11:30 a.m.




Respectfully submitted,



Dina Garvey, Administrative Aide

to the Clerk of the Board