Another long night.
We started the evening with a study session involving infrastructure planning. This was an outgrowth of an earlier council discussion, where we had difficulty deciding on a course of action regarding long-term capital expenditures. This session discussed the topic in more detail. For the most part, we already plan for and fund long-term capital replacement of everything, except for the Civic Center. For many years, we set aside nothing extra for this, and then a couple of years ago, we started saving extra money for this. And the real debate here is how specifically to plan. There is one camp that essentially says “try and figure out the exact goal and its cost, and start saving for it. The other side says “we can’t know exactly what we will need in 20 or 30 years, so save generally and make the decision later, when we’re ready to actually do the project”. I’m definitely in the latter camp. Our public safety needs, or library needs, and our civic center needs are likely to change dramatically over 30 years, and developing an exact plan now seems predestined to failure. Saving into a general pot, and not a project-specific pot, makes more sense to me. I believe we asked for a plan that generally sets money aside and requires council review before using that money for a different purpose.
We then went to the general session, where we started with a special presentation from PG&E. Back in 2010, we received a $1.14 million federal Energy Efficiency Community Block Grant to convert our incandescent street lights to LED street lights. These are expensive fixtures (compared to incandescents), but they use a lot less energy, they do a better job of directing the light only where we want it, and the LED bulbs last considerably longer than an incandescent bulb. Further, PG&E gives rebates for such a transition, representing about 1/6 of the cost of the bulb. We then took the rebate and used it for more fixtures, and so on. The end result was that we swapped out 20% of our street lights for LEDs, which will dramatically reduce our electricity bills for those fixtures. It’s a great effort, and the only down side is the high initial cost (which is why we started with a grant). So this presentation was so PG&E could give us the ceremonial check (for $190k!). More on this later.
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