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City previews climate protection ideas

By AMANDA RICKER Chronicle Staff Writer

Efforts by the city of Bozeman to reduce its carbon footprint can be cost neutral if not cost saving, the Citizens Climate Protection Task Force told the City Commission on Wednesday.


 Following the past year of study by the task force, the City Commission got its first official look at the group’s draft recommendations to reduce municipal greenhouse-gas emissions during a policy meeting Wednesday. The commission suggested that its final decision on whether to approve the recommendations be made in June, delaying the vote from its originally scheduled May 27 meeting.

The task force’s plan calls for the city of Bozeman to reduce municipal greenhouse-gas emissions 15 percent below the year 2000 levels by the year 2020. Several dozen recommendations for planning, building, energy, transportation, land use, waste water, recycling and education spell out how to get there.

“A lot of these (recommendations) have cost savings involved with them,” task force member Otto Pohl said Wednesday. “We could take the whole thing to cost neutral.”

Task force suggestions range from simply monitoring and trying to reduce utility bills for municipal buildings to retrofitting buildings to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards and installing a micro-turbine power generation system to capture and use methane gas.

The City Commission in November 2006 signed onto the Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement, committing the city to attempt to reduce both municipal and community greenhouse-gas emissions. A plan to reduce the community’s carbon footprint is expected to be developed following acceptance of a municipal plan.

Commissioner Jeff Krauss stressed Wednesday that he wanted the municipal plan to pay for itself.

“We’d have to recover the capital costs and monitoring costs,” he said.

Hattie Baker, a sustainability coordinator hired by the city to lead the task force, said that if Bozeman continues at the rate it’s going, it will double its 2000 greenhouse-gas-emission levels by 2020.

Seattle, on the other hand, she said, has achieved its goal of reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions to 60 percent below its 1990 level by 2007.

“It can be done,” Baker said.

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