By Michael Timm

Evaluating Milwaukee County’s Green Print

Bay View’s Marina Dimitrijevic, county supervisor for the Fourth District, spearheaded the initiative five years ago as a way to legislate green practices across county government. It was touted as a tool to comprehensively review the status quo, overhaul inefficient systems, achieve long-term savings, and set an example of how to practice the oft-bandied but ill-defined concept of sustainability.

Dimitrijevic’s February 2007 proposal was met with enthusiasm on the County Board and implemented shortly thereafter, but former County Executive Scott Walker never created Dimitrijevic’s keystone Green Print component—a full-time sustainability director to oversee the program across the county’s sprawling bureaucracy and hundreds of facilities.

This spring, County Executive Chris Abele is expected to hire a full-time sustainability director, though the timeline and salary were not yet clear.

In the meantime, the job of overseeing the Green Print falls to Steve Keith, sustainability & environmental engineer in the county’s Department of Transportation & Public Works Environmental Services Section. Keith has spent a lifetime as an environmental engineer and is considered the part-time Green Print director.

“There’s 16 different initiatives [in the Green Print] and they include things ranging from energy efficiency to stormwater management to recycling to education. It’s kind of broad,” Keith said. “There’s a lot of stuff going on. So to get all these things going all at once—it reminds me of one of those early video games where you have all those things coming at you and you’re firing at all those different spaceships coming at you. There’s a lot of balls in the air. And you try to keep them all going because everybody has a question about that one thing. ‘Shouldn’t we be doing more on that?’ We’re kind of getting there.”

Keith said the county was attuned to sustainability issues before the Green Print, but credits it with balling all the concerns together and creating an emphasis. “That legislation was critical,” he said.

Energy Savings Contracts

A cornerstone of the Green Print thus far has been the use of guaranteed energy savings performance contracts, or GESPCs, which are already responsible for at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in avoided utility costs, according to county figures.

Here’s how they work. The county contracts with a company to perform an energy audit of its facilities and then employs it to install specific efficiency upgrades. The county and contractor fund the project through a loan, not the tax levy. The loan is paid back from the energy savings over time. If the company’s upgrades don’t result in their contractually guaranteed energy savings, they cut the county a check for the balance to pay up the loan. The payback period ranges depending on utility rates, but the county has targeted projects that pay for themselves in eight to 10 years.

One of the first examples is the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Although natural gas savings measures were also implemented, considering the electric bill over the past five years shows a striking reduction in consumption.

In 2007, according to figures provided by Keith, the courthouse used over 24 million kilowatt-hours of electricity for which it was billed just over $1.6 million. Over the course of two phases of GESPCs and an additional efficiency measure funded through the Energy Efficiency Community Block Grant program, the building’s annual electrical usage was slashed 21.5 percent from 2007. In 2011, the courthouse consumed just under 19 million kilowatt-hours. Due to rate increases, it was billed slightly more for those 19 million kilowatt-hours in 2011 than it was for its 24 million in 2007, but assuming an 8.5-cent per kilowatt-hour cost, Keith tabulates a $443,242 equivalent avoided cost due mainly to the efficiency upgrades.

The upgrades cost $2.4 million and included high-efficiency lamps, upgrading building control systems, and adding variable-speed drives to motors.

“I think we’re just getting past the stage where we can say, hey, we’ve done some good things,” Keith said. “And now it’s about trying to be more quantitative about a lot of that stuff. And we need tools to do that more.”

He said the county is looking to acquire energy and billing software that will enable him to better track the data and communicate it to facilities managers.

Other Measures

The Green Print is not truly top-down, nor is it exclusively about large energy savings projects. Since 2008, the county directed that its thermostats be set to 68 degrees for heating and 76 for cooling. It’s purchased a fleet of 35 Ford Fusion hybrids that average 40 miles per gallon. This past year, the Parks Department contracted for services for additional recycling containers at 22 park facilities. An October report estimates that over 14,000 pounds of recyclables were collected.

By using shuttle buses that run on compressed natural gas (CNG) instead of diesel, the county-owned airport reports an avoided fuel cost of over $100,000 in 2011. The CNG buses initially cost $15,500 more than diesel buses, according to Keith, but the upfront costs were offset by federal air quality grants and the vehicles experience an annual fuel savings of $9,960 each, with CNG currently at $1.88 per gallon and diesel at $3.54. The airport plans to convert its two remaining diesel shuttles to CNG this month.

The Green Print also identifies stormwater as an issue for county properties, which have adopted different strategies to better manage it.

One strategy is a green roof, where plants and a shallow soil system are mounted atop buildings to collect rainwater. Green roofs help keep stormwater where it falls, resulting in water quality benefits and reducing the amount of stormwater runoff.

In a partnership with the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, the county-owned Milwaukee Public Museum installed a 4,100-square-foot green roof in late 2011. Another is on the drawing board for one of the buildings of the Mitchell Park Domes. And currently in the plans for the airport’s $51 million baggage claim renovation is $125,000 for green roof segments.

Another strategy is what gets paved and how. The Milwaukee County Sports Complex in Franklin is set to receive a new parking lot in 2012, but planners are paying attention to stormwater management in the design.

“Rather than just asphalt that all across, we’re going to put in permeable pavers,” Keith said. “Not totally for the new lot, but we’re going to put enough pavers there to infiltrate the water from the vast majority of storms.”

According to the draft plans, approximately 98,100 square feet of pervious pavers will be installed where there is currently an unpaved lot adjacent to over 70,000 square feet of paved lot, which will be repaved with asphalt. The permeable pavers should provide for almost 1.6 million gallons of stormwater recharge, according to MMSD’s online h2ocapture calculator.

Keith said he’s also confident that over 100 million gallons of water annually have been saved at the Milwaukee County Zoo—much of those through zookeepers turning off water for exhibits at night.

“Let’s assume some animals do sleep at night,” Keith said, recalling the contractors’ discussions with zookeepers about how to save water, “and they have a running-water thing where the animals go down to drink. Maybe the question is, can we turn it off at night? And it made them ask the question, are they going to be okay? Is that going to bother them?”

Keith said the county was attuned to sustainability issues before the Green Print, but credits it with balling all the concerns together and creating an emphasis. “That legislation was critical,” he said.

He doesn’t expect all change will be quick or easy. There’s a lot of data to manage and communicate. But he compares Milwaukee County favorably with other regional municipalities and businesses in terms of what’s been accomplished so far.

“What’s important for us to do is just ask the question,” Keith said. “Can we do something different in a way that saves us money and consumes less? If it turns out you ask the question and the answer is no, then that satisfies me. At least somebody’s looked at it and analyzed it. But I think sometimes it’s an issue of just asking the question.”