Shawano County has been updating a national database monthly on its energy use, three years after a grant that required the information ended.
The Administrative Committee this week voted 4-1 to allow the Maintenance Department to stop uploading the information to the Environmental Protection Agency’s website. However, that vote is contingent on getting approval from the department’s home committee, the Public Property Committee.
Inputting the data takes three hours per month, Maintenance Director Steve Dreher said, and has become busy work that might never be utilized.
The work started when the city applied for a state grant in 2009. The grant was provided to develop a plan to cut energy costs at least 25 percent by 2025, Dreher said.
When the county started to collect the data, its vehicle fleet accounted for 55 percent of the county’s energy usage, according to the report.
The plan was developed in 2010. The suggestions included establishing videoconferencing locations in eastern and western parts of the county to reducing staff travel, transitioning the county’s diesel vehicles to bio-diesel and utilizing solar power on for some county facilities.
The county has made some progress on the goals, such as installing solar panels on the roof of the shelter at Wilson Lake County Park. However, Dreher was pessimistic about the likelihood that most components of the plan could be achieved, due to financial belt-tightening at the county and state levels.
“Since then, there has been a rather significant political shift in Wisconsin and also on our County Board as far as the aggressive pursuit of energy efficiency projects,” Dreher said. “Basically, we’re wasting our time. All the departments are wasting time as they collect the data to get to our office for us to input into this thing.
“The chances of us ever actually benchmarking our energy usage against somebody in Utah or New Mexico are very slim to none.”
Supervisor Gene Hoppe, the lone no vote, was afraid that ending the practice would make the county look bad when it applied for future grants. He accused county staff of not properly investigating the grant before applying for it.
“We should have known what we were signing ourselves up for,” Hoppe said. “We agreed to do that. I think we should stick to it. If we are going to pull out of these grants halfway, it’s going to get around, and we’re not going to get grants.”
The ongoing data input was never a requirement of the grant, Dreher said.
“If there were something down at the end of this road, I would be supportive of continuing it,” Dreher said.
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