Stephanie Scott has resigned as the Energy Sustainability Commission (ESC) coordinator, but she still shows strong support for its mission.
“I’m stepping aside so that somebody else can kind of take the lead here,” Scott said. “I think that it’s time for the borough itself to take the lead in this effort, and I think they will.”
Her resignation was effective Nov. 30. Scott had been the ESC coordinator for two years and collaborated with the group’s commissioners.
“If there is anything I can do to help you move forward with energy conservation, energy efficiency, and additional sources of renewable energy for the Haines Borough, please let me know,” Scott wrote in her resignation letter to borough manager Mark Earnest. “If there are specific projects that you think I might be well suited to undertake, I would be happy to discuss these with you.”
At the Nov. 30 meeting of the Haines Borough Assembly, members approved a resolution “supporting the goal of reducing energy consumption for borough facilities and directing the manager to prepare a sustainability guideline booklet based on the recommendations provided by the ESC.”
Scott had presented an energy conservation guide for borough employees at the Nov. 9 assembly meeting, when the meeting packet included 26 pages of ESC documents on energy conservation.
The future of the ESC is in limbo. The commission was given a 90-day extension from Oct. 31, so Earnest could evaluate how energy sustainability planning should be organized in the borough.
“In order for it to really be sustainable, it has to be taken on by the leaders, not sort of a group of people on the outside of the government, pushing,” Scott said. “It has to come from within, and I think that’s what we’re going to find out now. Are they going to take it on? Is it really going to become a policy, a practice of our local government, or is it not?”
Earnest said he would soon bring recommendations back to the assembly for how energy needs would be addressed. He said the ESC has built “a great foundation.”
Earnest told the assembly that Scott has “offered to continue to work with administration and the borough on this issue.”
Scott first worked 20 hours a week for the newly formed commission.
“I agreed to do that for the first year, and it really needs that kind of attention in order to make it work,” she said. “My profession is special education, and I was asked to take on a student in the community, and that is a full-time commitment. I felt obligated to commit to that, because it’s a pretty technical job, and that is, of course, what I have been trained to do.”
Her allocation of hours for the ESC eventually was trimmed to 10 per week at her request, but Scott said the job “really needs full attention,” and her schedule as a private contractor for the Haines school district makes that difficult.
“I’m self-taught in terms of energy and all that stuff, but I’m also Alaskan, and you know the story about Alaskans – we do everything from the ground up, and I’ve had my own power system for quite some time, but I’m on the grid now,” Scott said. “I had that kind of nuts and bolts orientation to the subject, and a passion for conservation and resources, too.”
She said energy sustainability efforts in the borough likely would become more technical.
“I have no expertise, other than householder expertise and the capacity to read, and I really think there are people who are professional resource managers, and many municipalities have that kind of person on staff now,” Scott said.
“I know that we can’t afford to hire a full, professional resource manager, but I’ve given the manager and the facilities director a couple of resources for them to look at, so that they can kind of redesign the position so that it requires a little more obvious expertise, so they get the right person when they do go out to hire. I don’t know if they’ll hire somebody or not.”
She said the ESC tried new approaches to educate residents of the borough.
“I think the very best thing we did was we sponsored, for a whole year, a radio show called ‘Energy Talk,’ and it was awesome,” Scott said. “Every week, we covered another topic, and we always had local voices on. We really wanted to showcase how broadly the community was interested in this.”
The ESC also has examined borough expenses, and Scott noted “the municipality knows exactly what it has spent on energy every month from August 2008 to today, broken down into all the different departments.”
“When we started measuring the municipality’s energy use, we used a very broad brush to make our measurements, and we were somewhat naïve, although we had experts on the commission,” she said.
“We have come to the place where we need to get more sophisticated in our measuring devices. That means that we need to incorporate usage data and weather data, etc., in order to really see how the various facilities are performing. That requires some investment in software and commitment from the borough to make information available.”
Scott has collected data at http://www.hainesesc.net.