A Conversation With ... Barbara Lucks

What is your main duty as sustainability officer?
With the emphasis we have placed on sustainability, both internally within the organization and community wide with the Field Guide 2030, it made sense to have a position created to see to that. One of my primary responsibilities and something we are in the process of working on now is to develop a sustainability plan for the city organization.

We also house the environmental and conservation education outreach activities. My staff and I are extremely active in special events, speaking engagements and we do a lot of media work. Our role is a two-way street: To explain to people and show them the importance of environmentally responsible behavior and activities and also to show them how – specifically if it’s a city facility – and how to access it.

With the sustainability plan, this is another opportunity for us to be a role model and walk the talk as they say. We are doing a lot of things, but we can always do more. Part of it is just capturing and formalizing on paper what we are doing. We are looking at goals to implement those plans.

What’s the top burner issue for the city right now?
One of the foremost activities we’re working on is finding an integrated approach to the environmental regulatory area. We are kind of in the middle of a potentially very expensive perfect storm right now. We have increased environmental regulations, born out of us knowing more and learning more. The regulatory agencies understand the connections more between pollution and human health. It’s not just because they woke up one morning and wanted to write more regulations. Then we have decaying infrastructure – things like old pipes – and we also have areas that just aren’t done yet – like our stormwater infrastructure. It’s a perfect storm of old things wearing out, new things not yet built and increased regulations.

There is a big price tag for all of those things to come together. We have the very unique opportunity to look at all this in a holistic approach, instead of separate pieces. To our knowledge, we are the first community in the county that has been encouraged and allowed to do this by the regulators.

Does the city have a budget for sustainability projects or is the goal to save money?
It’s a little bit of both. Depending on the department and the project, there is money budgeted to meet environmental compliance and also money budgeted for capital improvements. The traditional way of things is it’s cheaper to prevent problems than to have to come back and clean them up later. You balance today’s effort with what it will cost down the road.

What is the status of the proposed multimillion-dollar community greenhouse project?
The greenhouse project is associated with the Springfield sanitary landfill. Landfills produce methane gas as the materials decompose and that gas has to go somewhere. We are required to capture it because if it’s not given something to do, it will get in trouble. The first step is to flare it off and it’s like an eternal flame. But this is energy just burning away. The next step – we aren’t the first in the country, but we are right out there – was to capture that and do something with it.

We put in the Noble Hill Alternative Energy Center and we have two generators that convert the gas into electricity. It’s the equivalent of 1,500 homes a year. When we studied the engines we noted they run at full capacity but only about 40 percent efficiency and are putting out a lot of wasted heat. Someone got the idea to capture that and convert it to energy.

With the two engines we have, there is enough there to heat and cool three 30,000-square-foot greenhouses. One of those would be the size of Remington’s. Phase I would include one of the greenhouses and the headworks infrastructure. Our vision is to have it as a community greenhouse. The local education community also is interested in it as a training and research facility.[[In-content Ad]]