Hinesburg Sustainability and Energy Planning Committee

Meeting Notes

February 21, 2007

The Hinesburg Sustainability and Energy Planning Task Force held our second meeting on February 21, 2007. The next meeting of the Task Force is scheduled for March 21 at 7:00 p.m. at NRG, however, subcommittees should try to meet separately before then to keep the momentum going!

Joe Donegan provided an overview of the concept of carbon farming or sequestration. Joe will be emailing us an electronic version of his white paper on the topic. Briefly, by using grazing and a subsoiler plow, it is possible that Hinesburg could actively manage some of its tillable land to offset the carbon dioxide foot print of our housing stock. Increasing soil fertility via the use of a specialized plow can naturally lower our overall pollution rate. Dawn Francis will approach the Buy Local and Agricultural/Open Space task forces to determine if there is interest in bringing a speaker about carbon farming to the community to inform others of this option.

Wendy Patterson, Julie Colangeli, David Fenn and Bill Flack have been working diligently on the “Hinesburg Light Switch” program. With the help of Efficiency Vermont, they plan to work with Estey’s Hardware to have approximately 2,000 CFL  bulbs (Hinesburg has 1,600 households) available on Green up Day, the first Saturday of May. The group is working on a display for town meeting, door hangers to distribute to every door with information about the program and facts about energy savings that can accrue from the use of CFL’s. The group will approach the CVU Key Club and other committee members for assistance in this outreach and public awareness campaign.

Dawn will work with the Hinesburg Record, Sentinel, Free Press and others to publicize this effort and will find some money for posters and door hangers, etc.

Marty Gray is working with other committee members to do a baseline energy audit for Hinesburg. The goal is to find out how much energy Hinesburg uses and to inventory our public buildings with the intent of reducing the kilowatt usage in our community within a specified time frame. It would be interesting to see how much the light bulb program affected the base line usage if we could get this baseline information from the town’s utility providers. The group is also interested in inventorying some of the abandoned dams to see if mini hydro generation could be reactivated.

Deb Sachs reported on strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. See attached document for more details. Deb reported that 46 % of all carbon emissions can be attributed to transportation so this component of our Task Force’s work is very important.

Kevin Francis reported on the work of the subcommittee who are trying to define sustainability for Hinesburg. The group has developed the attached sustainability model as a visual to convey what the focus of our task force should be. As fellow subcommittee members Chuck Reiss and Stewart Pierson were not able to attend the meeting, the group will discuss this model more in depth at our next meeting.

Committee members discussed several other educational and outreach efforts taking place in other communities including Bristol on March 17 and some upcoming classes. Emails were sent out to task force members yesterday about these activities.