Town Council Work Session

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Leesburg Town Council 8h 0m 4 speakers 8 agenda items transcribed 2 days ago official recording ↗

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Why did the council move agenda item 2B to February 10‑11?

0:02

Thank you.

Unknown 0:36

Thank you.

Unknown 1:22

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Kelly Burk 2:00

All right, let us start tonight's Town Council work session of January 27th. We are missing three individuals today, and so I'm going to ask if we could move, if I can make an amendment to the agenda to move 2B to February 10th and 11th, where hopefully everybody will be here tonight. Does anybody, of the four of us, anybody have any issue with moving the vehicle license fee to the 10th and 11th? Okay, thanks. All right, our first item tonight is the 2024 Sustainability Report.

Deb Moran 2:48

Good evening, Mayor and members of the Council. My name is Deb Moran, and I am very excited to present to you our 2024 Sustainability Report. The last time I was here was in 2023 in October, so it's been quite a while. I was here just after 90 days of the sustainability program starting. So this report is much larger and much more all encompassing of the work that we've done this year. In order to make the report a little bit more tangible and digestible, we've created categories to funnel all of our work into. So there are six key categories, which are all listed here. I can't go over everything that's in the report with you in the 10 minutes that we have together. So when you do get a chance to look at the full report, you'll note the icons are on the upper right-hand side of every page to help guide you through reading the materials.

Deb Moran 3:38

That was clever. So the first section of the report and kind of the biggest section of the report is on building and energy. This encompasses our energy efficiency program and our renewable energy portfolio. The biggest thing I wanted to highlight from this last year was the installation of an energy management software called Energy Cap. This is going to be the backbone of all of the work that we do in terms of energy efficiency. uh the town gets approximately 150 energy bills every month and so this tool brings all of that information in in real time and helps do some data analysis for it it does a ton of different things but i wanted to highlight just two particular items so the first you'll see is the cost per

Deb Moran 4:22

cost per area. So we can see which buildings are operating the most efficiently versus the least efficiently and prioritize our efficiency work that way. But because it pulls all of this data from bills, it also does bill audits for us, which is what you see in the second picture. It's flagging things that we should be concerned about like abnormal costs, something is not what it should be. And then we can address it right there. Or there may be errors in billing that we can again address before we've overpaid or underpaid anything. So we're very, very excited to have this tool and it's going to help guide our building energy audit work in the future. Just a reminder that in March of last year, we did establish goals for energy reduction.

Deb Moran 5:06

Our energy efficiency conservation strategy called for a 50% reduction in purchased energy from most municipal operations, excluding wastewater and water utilities, and then a 10% reduction in energy use from our wastewater and water treatment facilities. So again, having this information in real time allows us to make sure that we're on track to meet our goals. And I would be remiss if I didn't talk about solar because I know solar is very important to some of the members of our council. I wanted to highlight the work that we did with Solarize VA. We partnered with them to help our residents figure out the best ways to go solar and to do it in the most cost-effective way possible. Last year, we helped seven residents go solar, bringing over 81 kilowatt hours of solar energy production into the town.

Deb Moran 5:53

So we're very, very excited about that. And then for our own town buildings, we are looking forward to doing a solar study this year that will help us identify the best places that we can go solar in the most cost-effective way, taking advantage of any incentives that might be around and understanding what our interconnection fees are to make sure that we're not only sustainable environmentally, but fiscally as well.