PEABODY — For the third time since 2008, Peabody will consider becoming a Green Community.
The Ad Hoc Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Committee of the Peabody City Council decided to formally explore the Green Communities Designation and Grant Program again at a meeting last Thursday.
“We have been in limbo with respect to this program,” said Ward 2 Councilor Peter McGinn, who chairs the committee. “I think we are at a point where we need to decide whether we are going to do this or not.”
The City Council was urged to return to the idea by Tracy Valletti, who submitted a communication to Councilor-at-Large Anne Manning-Martin and met with Mayor Edward A. Bettencourt on the subject in February.
“Peabody is the last large Massachusetts city that has not joined (the Green Communities Program) and we stand to gain hundreds of thousands of grant money annually with this designation,” Valletti wrote in her email to Manning-Martin, who is a longtime supporter of joining the program.
During the meeting, Neal Duffy, regional coordinator at the Green Communities Division of the Department of Energy Resources, went through an overview of the Green Communities Program.
There are 280 Green Communities in Massachusetts, which means that 87 percent of bay staters live in a Green Community.
The program invests into energy-efficiency initiatives, renewable energy and innovative projects at municipal facilities. Such cities and towns as Swampscott, Salem, Beverly and Saugus have all been Green Communities for quite some time, said Duffy.
Since its inception in 2010, the program has provided more than $153 million in grants, which has resulted in more than $23 million in savings a year for the Green Communities.
“The savings that were projected on all these projects were the equivalent of removing almost 6,000 homes from the grid or removing over 12,000 cars from the roads,” Duffy said.
If Peabody joins the program, it will receive a designation grant of $125,000, first, which will then be adjusted to the size of its population and per capita income.
“Peabody’s (grant) would be estimated at about $245,000,” Duffy said.
The city will be eligible to participate in two competitive grant rounds annually, which are capped at $200,000.
As a part of the application process, the city would need to do an energy audit of all of the municipal properties and create an energy-reduction plan to reduce the energy use by 20 percent in five years.
“Staff time is probably the biggest resource that you would be using in terms of the designation process,” said Duffy about the costs that Peabody might incur in the application process as the energy audits are compensated through the Mass SAVE Program.
The committee decided to keep the issue in the committee instead of passing it to the whole council after some councilors asked for more information on the details of the program and its implementation.
“I think we all want to go green,” said Councilor-at-Large Thomas Rossignoll. “But with the amount of questions that we have, me personally, when this comes to the committee as a whole, I don’t think I can support it.”
Rossignoll said that there are still a lot of questions, such as who is going to be monitoring the designation process or whether the building inspector is current with all of the codes.
Ward 6 Councilor Mark O’Neill shared similar reservations, saying that he was not a member of the council in the past when the Green Communities Designation was discussed.
“I do like to have the full menu of responsibilities that we would have to do. If I was to vote, if this passes the committee, I certainly would just want to know, can the city commit to the energy-use baseline reducing it by 20 percent? Are we going to agree to buy only fuel-efficient vehicles?” said O’Neill.
The City of Peabody looked into becoming a Green Community twice before, said Manning-Martin, in 2008 and 2011.
“Back in 2008, when this was first proposed by the state, Peabody City Council was one of the first in the state to act to become a green community,” she said.
At that time, Peabody could not participate in the program as the designation was not applicable to cities with a municipal light plant.
In 2011, the legislation was amended to allow cities with new supply plans to enter into the program. To participate, the city would have to enter into a trust with the municipal light plant and charge residents a fee of $3. The plant did not want to do that, Manning-Martin said.
Currently, the fee can be eliminated if a municipality has at least one electric client who is serviced by National Grid.
“It has been a long time coming and other communities are able to make it work and have made it work and the taxpayers have really benefited from it,” said Manning-Martin. “I am a little discouraged that there seems to be, again, more speed bumps in the way to really just move this forward and get to where we should have been some time ago.”
