 Welcome to the Democratic Women's Club of Santa Cruz County. We're at the police community room in Santa Cruz, and today is Friday, May 24th. Our program today is being filmed in front of a live audience with Peter McGatigan behind the camera. Our speaker is Mary Arman. She's the Public Works Operations Manager with Citi, and she's going to talk to us about an important subject. The Citi's response to climate action. Climate change. It's the Citi's Climate Action Plan. She'll talk to us for a little while, and then we'll have time for some questions. I'm Judy Warner, your Democratic Women's Club President. Mary? Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming today. I want to explain who I am and why I'm here. I think you were expecting Ross Clark. Ross Clark is the City of Santa Cruz Climate Action Coordinator, and he is off on some very important business. He works half-time for the city, and he works half-time on water issues, and they had applied for a multi-million dollar grant, and the person who was supposed to go to North Carolina to pitch for the grant, was the former mayor of Salinas, had eye surgery and couldn't go. So Ross needed to fill in, and it's for a sustainable agriculture grant, so I'm sure you're all hoping that we get that. So it's a county-wide program. Anyway, Ross asked me to fill in. I'm the Public Works Operations Manager, or one of two for the city. Most of my day-to-day job has to do with the city's recycling and resource recovery programs, but I also work on climate action, and I work on a number of environmental programs in the city. And in 1998, when the city first got involved with climate action and trying to reduce our greenhouse gases, I was the staff person at that time that got a very small amount of my time assigned to that. So I worked with climate action directly for about seven or eight years before Ross was hired. And when the city first got involved was in 1998, and Celia Scott, who many of you probably know, was on the city council at that time, and she felt that the city should get involved with a program that was called a very difficult name, International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, which had an equally unwieldy acronym, ICLEI, and it's now called Local Governments for Sustainability. But Celia at that time said this is something we should do, and the Public Works Department should staff it. And so it kind of fell to me at that point, and I worked on it a little bit here and there for about six or seven years, and unfortunately the city was able to bring Ross on half time. And since that time a lot of work has been done, and the city just recently adopted a climate action plan, which I'm going to talk a little bit about today. I think all of you, I'm not really planning to go into what climate change is, or what greenhouse gas effects are, because I think most of you already know that. I will give the one sentence explanation. Basically, greenhouse gases, which is largely carbon dioxide, but also methane and some others, when they build up in the atmosphere, they trap the heat from the sun and prevent it from going back out into the atmosphere, and it creates a warming effect and causes temperature rise and water temperature rise and sea level rise, and a number of other nasty problems like changes in our plants and animals and forest fires, flood events, all of that. All of those things that we don't really want to happen. Some of the things that are local here, of course, sea level rise would affect us hugely. Our downtown area is right at sea level, so if it rose very much, we would have inundation in our downtown. The whole beach area is basically at sea level, and then coastal erosion along the cliffs is another impact of that. The other thing is that our redwoods, which the backdrop to Santa Cruz, are dependent upon that nice coastal fog that we, at this time of year, are glad isn't hanging around, but they would be greatly impacted by a raise in temperature and might eventually not survive that. That's why we're interested in reducing greenhouse gases and in preventing more climate change from taking effect. Let's get started a little bit. I hope you guys can see this. I'm sorry I had all the problems with the projectors. The City of Santa Cruz has set some climate action goals for how much greenhouse gas reduction we are targeting to achieve, and the goals that the city has adopted are to reduce greenhouse gases 30% by the year 2020, and 80% by the year 2050, and also that by 2030, all buildings, new buildings in the city would be carbon neutral, meaning they wouldn't be adding any greenhouse gas impacts, and that could be done through a variety of mechanisms. Now, cut 30% below what? You know, just cut 30%, you have to have something to cut from, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that, but we have established a baseline, and it's based on an estimate of what the greenhouse gases were that were produced in the city in 1990. We don't actually have data from 1990, but we had 1996 data, and we projected back. And then the last thing on the slide here is responding to climate change. It's one thing to know how much greenhouse gases you have, and to, you know, be working toward reducing them, but there are already changes happening. Unfortunately, we didn't get onto this quick enough, and there are changes that are impacts that we are seeing. I think the fact that it's very dry here this year, most of you are aware we don't have much rain this year, and that's one of the impacts that may be related to climate change. Many people think it is at this point, but it's hard to define climate change in small bites, but that kind of thing is the kind of changes we're expecting to see. So you're not going to be able to read these numbers, and you don't need to read all these numbers, but I just wanted to give you an overview that, as I said, we did a baseline study in 1996. That was back when I was working with the program. I had a UCSC intern, and he basically gathered data on how much fuel is used in the community, how much electric power is used in the community for lighting, heating, and that was broken down into the commercial and industrial segment of the community, the residential, the city offices and buildings and functions, and then also transportation. And that inventory in 1996, we then backed off a few years to come up with our 1990 baseline. And then we've since done an inventory again in 2000, in 2005, and then most recently in 2008 to see, well, what's the progress been. In the city of Santa Cruz, we have a couple of things that have happened. That's a pretty long period of time. There's been growth that's been happening during that time, not a lot, but some population growth. But we had a couple of big things happen. The greenhouse gas emissions actually went up quite a lot between 1990 and 1996. And one of the reasons for that is many of you, if you think back, will remember that the wastewater treatment plant, which is down off of California and Bay, went through a massive process in the early 90s to go from primary treatment to secondary treatment. And that was a good thing because it puts cleaner water back out into the ocean, but it also uses a lot more power. And so that and some additional water treatment improvements that were done are a large part of the increase between 90 and 96. The other thing that happened in Santa Cruz, and this is kind of a bad news thing as far as the industry in our area and the jobs in our area go, most of you remember we used to have some fairly large industries here. We had Wrigley's, we had Lipton's, we had Salt's, Leather's. All those things went away. And they also took away that when they went out of business a lot of energy use went away. And so our greenhouse gas emissions for the commercial and industrial sector took a big drop, which normally would be a good thing. And you know, it is a good thing from a greenhouse gas perspective, but that's not exactly how you want to have things decrease is by losing a lot of jobs and business. So we have a big decrease in that commercial industrial sector and we recognize that that may grow back at some point. So we kind of left some room in that category to say it's not all a bad thing if we see some increase in business growth that leads to some increase in the, I would say increase, but not increase from where it was in that sector. So in just kind of as an overview where we're looking to be, and these numbers are really hard to put them together with anything that means anything, but our goal for 2020 in the city of Santa Cruz is to have greenhouse gas emissions just right at about 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year. And right now, well in 2008, we haven't changed too much since 2008. We're at about 351,000. So we need to come down quite a bit to hit that 2020 goal. And just to give you an idea, and this is the real challenge in Santa Cruz City and Santa Cruz County. A huge part of our emissions are from transportation. Driving cars. In effect, basically almost all of our transportation is driving. We don't have, we have bus systems, but those are also carbon fueled for the most part. We do have seeing G buses in the metro fleet, which is a great thing. But on this picture is all transportation. So the blue is highway traffic, and the green is local road traffic in Santa Cruz. And so it's probably at least two thirds of our greenhouse gas emissions in Santa Cruz come from the transportation sector. So we need to get really creative. This is city, but I think if you looked at the counties, it would look very, very similar. The red pie shape is the commercial and industrial wedge. The brighter green little less than a quarter on the lower left is the residential and then we also show the little slender green pie shape is the municipal. And municipal means all the city operations itself. So like the city fleet, the city buildings, the city waste water plant, that kind of thing is just that one little sliver. And then the brown is waste, meaning garbage. And the reason garbage gets put into greenhouse gases is because when garbage breaks down, if it breaks down without air, so if you have a compost bin in your backyard and you turn it, you're getting air in there and you're not getting that methane smell or that rotten egg smell, it smells kind of good. That's composting aerobically. So if it's got air in it, it's not producing methane. But when garbage gets buried in the landfill without air, then it produces methane. And methane is a very strong greenhouse gas. And so that's why waste is not a great thing. And that's the program I work with the most of the city is trying to get everybody to recycle and reduce their waste and compost. And you've all, and we've all done a great job of that. And so our little sliver of the pie has gotten much smaller. This little bar chart is to show you that we have made some progress. So this is 1996, 2000, 2005, 2008. And then the last bar out there is to show where we need to go. And if you took away that top dark red section, all the rest of what's under there would be the goal. That's to show you how much we need to cut down. And it's a pretty big chunk. So the large kind of brownish red bars across the bottom, that is transportation. That's the most, transportation. The green is the residential sector, the light blue is the commercial and then there's a little sliver of municipal, a little sliver of waste and then that big red bar over there is what we need to reduce. And you can see it's come down just a little bit. We started almost up by the 500,000 and we've edged down just a little bit but we still have a big chunk to get to. So the climate action plan this is something that Ross has been working on for about five years. This was recently adopted by the city of Santa Cruz City Council. The county also has a climate action plan and I can't remember. I think they also recently adopted theirs and it has some of these charts and a lot of this information in it. And even though it was just adopted this year, Santa Cruz goes way back with this. As I mentioned, we started in 1998 a variety of people that have been on the council and a variety of mayors have done different things over the years as far as goals and actions to reduce climate change in Santa Cruz. This plan is really the same goals that were adopted in 2006. So even as far back as 2006 the city had committed to these climate action goals. And then recently we also adopted another document that's called the climate adaptation plan. And so the little difference, people talk about mitigation and adaptation. And some people are irritated about adaptation. Adaptation assumes climate change is going to happen. We've already allowed things to get to the point that we have some warming, we're going to have some sea level rise, we're going to have some impacts. And how do you deal with those impacts? So that's adapting to the change we already have. Mitigating, which is kind of a weird word for it if you ask me, I think of it as avoiding. But the climate action plan and the mitigation is to try to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases to keep any more stuff from happening. So there's kind of two branches and to give you an idea of adaptation, adaptation might be if the city thought that our sea level rise was going to be enough that it was going to inundate, for example, our wastewater treatment plant as I mentioned, which is on Bay in California, the wastewater treatment plant is actually below sea level. So if you drive by on California you realize the plant's down in a hole. And right behind the plant is Neri Lagoon, which is also a little bit below sea level. And between them and the ocean there's development that's keeping the water out of there. If we had a significant sea level rise we would have issues with our wastewater plant having water, particularly groundwater, putting pressure on it. So we're already starting to talk about as a result of discussing adaptation, what kinds of things we might need to do to, it'd be very difficult to move it and so we're looking at ways we can adapt to that. And there's some other major issues with adaptation. So the climate action plan has, it actually has eight chapters. The first chapter is kind of background on climate change and what it is. The second chapter is about the process of identifying and inventorying our gases. The third chapter is a bit of an overview. And then chapters four, five, six, seven and eight are about the thing that the plan is actually about. Identifying what needs to be done, what could be done, what kind of actions and changes we could make in Santa Cruz to reduce climate change and reduce the impacts. So we're going to talk a little bit more about this, but energy use is one. Energy, pretty much, unless it's renewable energy, if it's electric energy right now unless it's solar, all solar, if electric energy, natural gas, coal, obviously, oil, fuel for vehicles, all of those things have greenhouse gas impacts. So the more we can reduce energy use in all aspects, better off we are. Sustainable transportation and land use planning. You saw the big chunk of greenhouse gases that are coming from transportation and land use planning is in with that because obviously the reason we're driving around is because we need to get from point A to point B. You've probably heard and read about smart transportation, I mean smart land use planning. There's an effort to do smart communities and that has to do with trying to put things closer together so people don't have to drive as much. You live closer to where you work. You're able to shop closer to where you work. Some of the things that Santa Cruz is doing with regard to this are some of the quarter plans. You may have heard about efforts to look at Ocean Street, Mission Street, some of those areas where there's a lot of commercial development already is it possible to figure out how to put residential closer, especially the new residential homes we need to build or apartments we need to build, put them so that those people don't have to drive as far. So that's something that the planning department is working on now. Another chapter is on water conservation and solid waste management. Water conservation the biggest impact for water on greenhouse gases is the energy it takes to treat and pump water and especially in our community we spend a lot of energy and money on pumping water. So the more conservation the more savings there is because of reducing energy for greenhouse gas production. There's a section on solar Santa Cruz which is about renewable energy and trying to generate more power from renewables and there's a section in the plan on sustainability through public partnerships, education and outreach which is key because it's one thing to identify all these things that could be done, it's quite another thing to get them done and the only people that can make those kind of changes are all of you and everybody else in the community. It doesn't happen by the city saying this is what we need to do, it happens by people making behavioral changes. So one of the things this kind of document is pretty hard to get your head around and so one of the things Ross has done is try to identify just 12 milestones that he can talk about and people can be working toward and I handed out or they were back there on the table a copy of some of those milestones and there's also attached to that a report that was recently given to the city council about some of the recent progress toward those milestones and the milestones are things, these are from the climate action plan, they're just a smaller segment of reducing energy use in municipal buildings is one for example increasing solar our goal on that is, well you'll see that in a minute I'm not going to go through all of these but suffice to say double bike ridership switch 20% of cars to low carbon fuel so these are things that people can understand what are we talking about here, what kind of behavior changes need to happen and the plan goes into more detail about what kinds of actions would help achieve those things so doubling bike ridership and that's from what it was in 1990 by 2020 frankly right now we don't know what it was in 1990 so one of the things they're trying to establish is what's the baseline on that and then it's one thing to say it but how do you do it I think people choose to ride their bikes instead of drive to work or walk, walking is good too what do you do to get people to do that and there was just, I just read the paper this morning there was a meeting on that, some of you may have attended that, there's a current process underway to try to do a regional transportation planning and sustainable planning on that so some of these milestones are two things, one of the milestones is to reduce energy use in municipal buildings by an additional 40% by municipal buildings we mean like this building our corporation yard, the library, city hall wastewater plant, water plant so that's what we mean by municipal and additional 40% is over where it is basically now and some of the things that we're doing right now and have just done were just about to receive a study where we did benchmarks on 20 buildings we hired a consultant and they studied the energy use and the operation of 20 different city buildings, this one was one of them Loudon Nelson for example was one and they're going to be recommending strategies to make them more efficient and they're also looking at things that just need to be done to create a new roof, does it need a new furnace, for example the civic, the furnace we've known for years the furnace is in really bad shape at the civic and the recommendations will be both for maintenance and energy efficiency but the goal out of that one project is to reduce the energy use in those buildings by 10% many of you probably have noticed some of the street lights around town look different and we have been changing our street lights over to LED lights there's multiple benefits from that they save a lot of energy, they're brighter light and they last a lot longer and it's very hard to change the light bulb into street light as you can imagine and so anything that keeps those bulbs going longer reduces the maintenance cost of it so far we've changed out over half of the street lights that the city owns so street lights are kind of an odd thing the city owns and maintains half of the street lights in town just based on the age of when they were put in the other half are owned by PG&E and the city still pays for the maintenance and power on the ones that PG&E owns PG&E's responsible for maintaining the ones they own and then they bill us and we do everything on the other half so we've replaced more than half of our owned street lights with LED lights and we have another phase coming up so within a couple of years there will probably all the ones we own will be LED lighting we also have a new position that we've managed to get in the budget and just hired and that's a person to actually work on some of these projects, you heard me say Ross is half time, works half time somewhere else, we really don't have anyone in the city whose job is to focus on energy management and on facility maintenance so this is one of the new things we've done so another big goal is to increase the amount of solar power in Santa Cruz and the goal is to have 2,000 homes and 200 businesses with solar power by 2016, this building right out there in the parking lot that the police cars use and City Hall has recently got large new solar arrays, there was articles in the paper and some of you have driven by them, that will make a huge difference in the power cost and the fact that it's renewable power for both of these buildings, the one at City Hall is designed to produce about 90 or 95% of the power used there so it's a big system and it will be well used this one I think is not quite as high for PD but it and this is a very energy intensive building because it's 24 hours a day so I think it comes close to producing almost all the power needs here in Santa Cruz now, last year there were 44 new solar systems added on homes we now have 577 homes in the City of Santa Cruz that have solar systems on them and you can't go a day without seeing big ads in the paper, hearing on the radio that's from the solar system, you probably get them in your mail, this is a big push right now from businesses as well as from the City and it's finally becoming a little bit more affordable there are multiple ways that people can finance solar systems the other thing we have is a program called California First Pace and I'm not going to try to explain what the letters mean it is right now only available to businesses it was designed to be available to residents and I'll explain quickly why not but right now it is available to businesses if businesses want to put solar on their business they can add it as an assessment on the property and pay it off through their property taxes and so it gives them essentially a 20 year payback period on their taxes, I'm sure many people are going to write it off of their taxes I'm not saying that's legal but it's a very and then of course the improvement is an improvement to the property this program was designed to be available to residents as well but unfortunately Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got in the way and most people's homes, the loans are financed with Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac and they basically would not allow this program to go forward on anything that had their loan on it because they said it basically created a prior lien for those of you that know something about real estate so we're still working on that that's being worked at the national level to try to figure out a way to get around that the last thing on this is something called community choice aggregation ring any bells CCA and they heard about a couple people this is something that's been around for I don't know about seven or eight years, maybe a little longer than that the state passed a bill that allows local either governments or collections of governments or regions to create a district if you will that can buy its own power for the people within that district so right now I'm going to guess virtually all of you get your power from PG&E the city gets its power from PG&E and if you were to just call go out and say I want to buy power from somebody else you can't do that right now in California and that goes back to the days when we had in the year 2000 when we had the energy crisis and the state borrowed a bunch of money to finance energy loans and at that point they said okay well until we get these loans paid off you can't buy your power from anybody else but there was a bill passed that allowed local governments or collections of such to form what's called a community choice aggregation and that that CCA once it's formed can buy power for the people within it so for example the city could form a CCA and could provide all of you with your power through that and of course we don't have a power plant so what we would do is we would buy power from somebody else and resell it to you. It sounds like well why would that be any cheaper right and one of the reasons it's a little bit cheaper there's only two entities that have done it in the state and Marin is the one that has the most going on with it. They've established their CCA they are actually buying power and reselling it and they actually are able to save their customers money over PG&E. It has to do with being able to enter long-term contracts and buy power locally and a variety of things but the biggest thing with regard to greenhouse gases is those CCAs can choose to buy renewable power they might choose to buy 50% renewable power or 70% or 100% and that's one of the things that is driving that particular movement is to be able to buy renewable power. The other really good thing about them is right now if you own a home in Santa Cruz or own a business in Santa Cruz and you want to put in you want to cover every square inch of your roof with solar panels if you don't use that much power it doesn't do you any good. You're not going to be able to sell that excess power to anybody. You just put it into the grid and the grid says thank you and off you go that's it. You're just basically spending money you didn't need to spend on your solar system but with a CCA the local Community Choice Aggregation District could buy that power from you and resell it to the rest of the community and so that's a very attractive part of this and there is an active group of people, Ginny Johnson who used to be the Executive Director of Ecology Action is heading up an effort to create a Santa Cruz County CCA and the City of Santa Cruz has indicated that we're interested in joining it so that's something that's happening now it's an interesting project it'll take a while to get it going it's complicated legally but it has worked so already in Marin actually one option is for us to join Marin's but I kind of think that's not the way that'll go forward. Alright so another area we're working with is we have a huge university up there they have big engineering programs and lots of young students that are interested in doing things so we're trying to partner with them on particularly in the energy research area and one of the things that Ross has worked with him a lot on is our municipal wharf. They are, we have what's called the Green Wharf and there's a couple of programs out there and next time you out there look at the roofs and you'll see a small windmill and it's the Wind on the Wharf project and it was very difficult to get a permit even for a small windmill but that's where it is it's one piece of a larger effort to look at energy options along the coastline. There's another thing happening at the wharf which is fun if you haven't done it yet there is now an eco tour that goes along Westcliff and then goes out onto the wharf for tour guides from UCSC that give the tour on weekends so and they're talking about greenhouse gases, coastal erosion and also all the green efforts that are underway. Another project is switching 20% of cars to low carbon fuels. The city's in the process of installing electric vehicle charging stations. We have 11 of them going in. There is now one on the wharf as a result of that City UC Green Wharf program there's a couple of others around town. There's one at Ecology Action there's one at Staff of Life. Some local businesses are putting them in as they improve things. Another area that we're able to control is trying to convert the city's fleet to low carbon fuel and so we have about 40% of the city's vehicles are now low carbon fuel vehicles not all of those are 100% non carbon but for example our refuse and recycling fleet uses biodiesel B20. We would love to use B50 but we can't because there's a state law that you can't do that. It's kind of like that seems backwards right? It has to do with the emissions from refuse vehicles. There's a whole separate law about that but anyway we're doing what we can and as soon as they up the numbers we'll up the numbers. The other thing that we just did have received as we have a CNG refuse truck and a hybrid refuse truck that we are trying out. We're doing a head to head comparison. We bought a diesel one CNG one and a hybrid one all at the same time all the same kind of trucks so we can compare them and we're hoping to decide whether or not we can start turning our fleet over either to CNG or to hybrids and the hybrids have a lot of opportunity. These are hydraulic hybrids and as you can imagine a refuse or recycling truck is hitting the brakes a lot. Stop stop stop stop. Every time it stops it helps recharge the generation system so it's pretty exciting. UPS is using a lot of those. Green businesses. Hopefully some of you shop where you see that little symbol down in the lower left hand corner. That's the Monterey Bay Area Green Business program, Certified Green Business and that's one of the programs I work with. We have a coordinator in the city the county also has a coordinator and we go through a process of certifying a business in areas of water pollution air pollution, waste reduction, energy efficiency and also now climate change and if they meet all of those criteria they're certified as a green business. They get the sticker, they get to advertise that we help advertise that. We have 111 green businesses certified in the city, did about 47 last year and we've got about almost 50 that are currently in process. So many of the businesses you would recognize are green businesses. All of other things that are happening as this climate action plan gets rolled out. One aspect as I mentioned earlier is how do you get people to do this stuff? How do you get people to make these changes? And so we're enlisting the aid of the community. There were a number of groups involved during the plan development environmental groups, community groups and so a working group has been formed that's made up of members of those local organizations that contributed to the climate action plan and we're going to be using those folks to help us figure out how to get people in the community to get on board and what do we need to do to help that process. Each organization was asked to submit names to the mayor and the mayor has recently appointed that committee and I believe they're going to be meeting in June. So then the other side of the house internally we've formed what's called a sustainable transportation and land use planning team and as you can well imagine the city of Santa Cruz has departments and departments often don't work across departments maybe as well as they should. So I'm in the public works department. The traffic division in the city is in public works. There's the planning department there's the economic development department and then there's city manager's office and there's UCSC that has their own transportation and parking department and there's the regional transportation commission and AMBAG which has transportation programs so what we're trying to do is get all those people to regularly be in one place and coordinate transportation planning toward the goal of sustainable transportation. We're aided a little bit by this in the fact that the state said you have to do this which didn't mean we did it for a while we still have put it off for a while but we are working in this area and it's really critical because we as a city can't really change transportation for our whole community. You remember that big chunk that was highway transportation well a lot of that comes from outside the city people coming into work coming to visit we want them to do that but that doesn't mean that we can determine how they get here or where they park or do they ride their bikes that kind of thing so we really need an overall regional effort. Okay so how can you help well some of the things I've mentioned we have this community choice aggregation project going on if that interests you at all I encourage you to get a little more familiar with it and you can certainly contact PG&E or Ross if you're interested in that but support it as it goes forward the good news is nobody has to do it if someone says I don't want to buy my power from that I want to stick with PG&E they can it's an opt out they just send in the card when you get the card in the mail no I want to keep buying my power from PG&E so it's an optional program but it does give if it gets formed it will give the opportunity to have local control over the power we have where we get it from and to a certain degree the cost of it. Advocate for a dedicated implementation of these climate action plans so we have the plans but as you know plans can sit on the shelf for years and years we have lots of them we have shelf fulls of them that are still there and so you know if there's something in it that interests you make sure that that goes forward. The rail trail project the county rail project there's a bunch of things that are involved in that but it has and some parts that people like some they don't but stay involved in that process and see what's gonna you know what the opportunities are there's an effort coming up to try to do one part of a trail across the north well what would that be the western northwestern side of Santa Cruz where we have the rail quarter that would be a huge asset to bicycling in that part of town so even if you don't like the train part the trail part could be a real asset. Green businesses support your local green businesses if you are a business person and you're not certified I encourage you to get certified support the ones that are encourage your local businesses that aren't to become green businesses it really helps their bottom line and it's been interesting to see what people value in it and that's one of the things they value they value the fact that almost all of them their power bills have gone down their water bills have gone down their refuse bills have gone down so it's a real help for sustainable businesses meaning financially sustainable businesses to be green certified and then this one there's just an article in today's paper about this if you're not aware of this issue it's read that article so we went through this process in California that's called cap and trade and basically there were regulations put in place that large power users had a cap placed on the amount of greenhouse gases they could generate and if they want to go above that cap they have to buy additional credits if they beat the cap they can sell to a certain extent the ones that they've saved and the state gets a good chunk of the money of that buy and sell process right now and then there was a large amount of money generated and then the process to determine how that money gets spent is sort of still underway and there's an effort afoot to try to get some of that money back to the local level so that we can use it to implement our climate action plans there's a lot of competition for money as you can well imagine and the article in today's paper is about how the governor is looking to have some of that money to help balance the statewide budget not necessarily even related to greenhouse gas issues so I'm not fully aware of all the details of that last little part there but this is an important thing that there's going to be more money coming it wasn't just a one time thing and we really need to try to make sure that some of it at least is getting invested in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and it would be wonderful if some of it was coming back down to the local level to do some of the projects that we need to do here so those are just a few things and I think that wraps it up so thank you and I'm happy to try to answer any questions if anyone has them excuse me the question was the program that's called the California First Pace program I mentioned that right now it's available to businesses but not homes because of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac restrictions and her question was if you don't have a loan from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac can you utilize that program and I'm not sure the answer to that but I'll check back and let you know I was trying to think if I ever heard that I don't know I just don't know yes so the question was could a residential housing complex use the commercial paced program and I believe the answer to that is yes Peter I think it's just being used to generate power right now that's used to the building that it's on and it's not generating any excess power it's a really it's a pretty small windmill but the goal of that was to try to figure out how much wind is generated out there and whether the wharf site is an opportunity to have wind on the roofs to help power those businesses so the question what's the time element to figure all that out and again I don't know exactly the answer to that I think it's well they just got their permit extended to 2014 so I think they've got a several year process where they're trying to collect data okay so the questions were on the windmill on the wharf who did the permits have to come from that held it up take a guess what do you do with it being in the view shed and all of that and then you also mentioned that you're getting your natural gas from Tiger and yes natural gas is not locked down the same way that electric power is so again if you think back to the year 2000 and the reason it's interesting the reason I remember the year is because again that was when I was working with some of the climate change issues for the city I had put together a request for proposal for the city to buy 100% green power for all the city facilities we issued the request for proposal in August and the proposals were due back I think it was either the end of September or early October and the power crisis if you will hit in between that period and so we only got one proposal and it wasn't really a valid company so that was when basically everything went to hell in a hand basket if you will and the state ended up having to bail out the private operators PG&E, San Diego Gas and Electric, Cal Edison, borrowed a bunch of money lots of money to help that process and is the payback of all those loans is on your power bill and is tied into the rates and so if everybody bailed on PG&E and SDG&E and all those then the money wouldn't come back in to pay those loans off so they said until we get the loans paid off direct access which is what it was called before when you could go to green mountain power was one of the big ones or something and buy your power you can't do that anymore but it's I think we're edging back to the point of that there several of the loans I think have been paid off now so she wants me to tell you Santa Cruz is normal but Santa Cruz is never normal right? We are way ahead of most and we are a little behind the real leaders which of course are as you might well guess places like San Francisco Marin on this issue San Jose is pretty far ahead but we're well ahead of most places I just went to a conference a couple last week actually and it was on sustainability public works and sustainability and many of the things that were being presented as really forward moving things we were doing and so it was very gratifying to see that there were certainly I came away with things that I wish we were doing as well but no we're pretty far ahead Peter just economically it seems like it would really has that ever been discussed or is that just in the ago zone? the question was just economically as well as environmentally it seems like it would be to our benefit to tax ourselves has that ever been discussed to tax ourselves to fund these programs it has come up I don't know there are a couple of cities that have passed a carbon tax or a climate tax I don't think it's been proposed to the extent of like being on a council agenda for discussion it's been discussed at some meetings I was at there has been we've talked about it in our department about a carbon tax if you will but I think that's one of the things that we're hoping will come up is how do you get the funds to fund some of these things as you can imagine most of these things cost money to get them going and that may be one of the things that comes out of this community focus group so yes I can speak to it to the extent that I know there is Bay Street Reservoir which is up above High Highland we are replacing Bay Street Reservoir and so there were some temporary tanks there and now they have completed the underground tanks so they put the temporary tanks in and then they took out the original Bay Street Reservoir and then they rebuilt those underground tanks for Bay Street Reservoir and now the temporary tanks are going to be moved out so those are the only ones I'm aware of and I don't work in the water department so I don't know a lot about that okay okay well through the treatment plant there are no tanks being added or taken away for wastewater treatment we have recently well we go through a process we have digesters there at the wastewater treatment plant on Bay in California these big tanks and the wastewater goes into those tanks and then bacteria break down the solids in the wastewater and create gas thereby product is gas, methane to be specific that methane is in burn on site in a cogeneration system and produces power and it's a big power generator it dwarfs these solar systems it generates about three and a half gigawatts of power a year but we haven't replaced any tanks or we're really not building any new tanks there and the other thing I'm going to mention I get to toot my own horn a little bit here something that people might not remember so the wastewater plant generation system that's a renewable power system that's been there since 1989 so the city way back in 1989 was way ahead of the game then the other place they were way ahead of the game then they also entered into an agreement in 1988 and it was constructed in 1989 at the landfill which is up highway one about three miles to build a landfill gas collection system and a generator to burn that gas to create renewable power and that system is actually produces even more power than the wastewater plant it's about 4.3 gigawatts a year gigawatt hours a year so those are happening the one at the landfill we don't use that much power up there that system is operated by a franchise business and they pay us royalties and so they handle the operation of it and that power is now sold used to be sold to PG&E and now it's fed into the grid but they're selling it to SMUD which is Sacramento municipal utility district because SMUD was looking to buy renewable power and they give them a better price than they needed so several years ago about four years ago that power started being SMUD's power all goes into the same wires of course but so we have two very large renewable power systems on city facilities and then in addition to these new solar systems at the police station city hall we already had four solar power systems there's one at the wastewater plant one at the water treatment plant one downtown on the building has the library headquarters and the water admin building and then there was already a small solar system on city hall yes how much revenue does the one at the dump generate for the city not a lot but about $200,000 a year from the landfill and the revenue we get is just 15% of the growth so they're making money on it too energy carbon production waste your field doesn't look significant but in fact that is a more harmful gas because it's a smaller percent methane is about 21 times as powerful as the greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide so we want to keep all the methane out of the air that we can that's an excellent question that's a great question and thank you for bringing that up because I didn't explain that the wires and the distribution system all stays PG&E all that happens is the power that goes into the power line from wherever that generation source is is from a different generator yeah oh yeah actually right now one of the things that happened as a result of that power and energy crisis in 2000 is basically the independent operators got told get out of the power sales business so they sold off their power plants they're not really in the business anymore of generating power where they're making their money is transmitting and distributing the power so they own all the wires they own all the big places that you see that have all the what buildings and wires they own those but they don't own the generating facilities anymore PG&E or San Diego Gas and Edison or the plant in Moss Landing that you see the two it's not owned by PG&E so that plant is making power putting it into the wires that are owned by PG&E and then PG&E distributes it to wherever it's going and they charge for the wires maintaining the wires the service delivery they charge an overhead on taking the power from whoever's generating it so that wouldn't change that part doesn't change that's the way it is now no no as a matter of fact that's where Marin found that they were able to buy the power and deliver it into the system cheaper than wherever the power was coming from before so yeah it is very complicated and frankly I worked with this whole CCA thing issue about in about 2003-2004 and at that point I was like you know we don't want to get into this right now because it isn't many of those issues hadn't been figured out and so my recommendation at that time was no we don't want to go there we don't have we're too small we don't have the staff let somebody else figure it out so now somebody else has figured it out and has gotten all the way through the process has done a lot of the legal work and paid for a lot of the legal work with money that we didn't have to spend on it so now it probably is something that is workable for somebody our size so oh yeah yeah we don't want to be in the energy company business okay thank you very much great questions we've been listening to Mary Arman public works operations manager for the city of Santa Cruz talk about the city of Santa Cruz's climate action plan this concludes our program for the Democratic Women's Club see you next time