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Date: 12/30/2015
WEST SPRINGFIELD – After about 18 months, the Town of West Springfield was officially designated a Green Community in an announcement from Gov. Charlie Baker’s office on Dec. 22.
The designation allows comes along with a $222,765 grant for the town to use to further green initiatives.
Mayor Ed Sullivan said the town has made this a priority since 2014, and while many other municipalities take three or four years to become Green Communities, he was proud West Springfield moved so quickly.
“The effort to save money for the taxpayers by becoming more energy efficient by using these up front monies to continue projects or add on projects that would do that for us. It’s the right thing to do,” Sullivan said. “You want to be an energy friendly, green community. This is an important part of that. We all have responsibilities to leave the world a little better than what we have for our next generation and I think this will go a long way in helping us do that.”
For West Springfield to become a Green Community, the town had to complete five steps, according to Director of Central Maintenance and Energy Manager Scott Moore. The criteria includes providing “as of right siting and designated locations” for renewable energy generation, research and development, creating an expedited application permitting process for renewable energy facilities, reducing energy usage by 20 percent over five years, purchasing energy efficient vehicles and adopting the state stretch energy code for municipal buildings.
Moore said of these necessary steps, cutting down the town’s energy use 20 percent has been the most difficult.
“Basically what we did is we took Fiscal Year 2015 and analyzed all our usage on everything throughout the town – electricity, natural gas, propane, heating oil, you name it – and we set that as a baseline. Our goal is to reduce that consumption by 20 percent over five years,” Moore said. “This was the most difficult criterion for us to meet because the town was really a green community before green communities were designated. We’ve already done a ton of things in town. If you look back at our history over the five, six years previous to that, we actually reduced our energy costs by 26 percent. We’re already lean, so we’re going to have to work really hard to achieve this 20 percent on top of what we’ve already done.”
West Springfield will be able to use the grant money to fund energy efficient projects, such as upgrading pumping stations for the town’s pumping system and replacing streetlights with LED lights. Though some money has been allocated for the pumping stations, Sullivan said it will fall to Mayor Elect Will Reichelt’s administration to decide how to best use the grant money.
As long as the town continues to meet the state’s standards year after year, it can reapply for funding up to $223,000 once the initial funding has been spent, Moore said.