Bloomington Commission on Sustainability

I went to the BCOS meeting tonight at City Hall.  The commission has a lot of good endeavors they are trying to accomplish and I am excited to help out the commission and in particular my committee. I am in the energy committee, and the commission has some areas were we can assist.  The current goals of the energy committee are to analyze indicators and are focusing on energy efficiency and planting shade trees.  Also mentioned at the meeting was a possibility of  starting home energy audits and renewable energy.

It seems that the at good place we can start to help the committee is to analyze the energy sustainability indicators that were in the 2008 Sustainability Report, and then give recommendation based on our analyses.  I hope that the home energy audit program starts up because I feel I could help the committee with this initiative, because last year I worked as an AmeriCrops VISTA, generating and running a summer long youth volunteer household energy efficiency program.  During my AmerCorps year of service I worked for a non-profit organization called Volunteer Frederick.  With this summer program I hired two energy audits to supervise the youth through activities and to educate them on energy conservation and energy audits. The youth went and make energy conservation improvements to 20 homes, conducting improvements such as installing hot water heater blankets, insulating attics (with an attic hatch and by blowing insulating), outlet gaskets and CFLs.

The commissions goals for the other two committee's food and water were based off the sustainability report.  In the food committee the main focus is to understand and promote local food production.  The main goal is to reduce fossil fuels and have less transportation distance of food.  The food committee has four main objectives:
1) Survey organization and see how they promote and use local foods
2) Start a garden program.
3) analyze indicators
4)figure out how many acres are being used for agricultural production on both private and public lands

The man two focuses of the water committee:

1) Raise the rate for water as part of a water conservation program

2) increase usage of water storage at the household level and educate people on how to use water storage tanks

Another discussion at the meeting was about the Platinum Bike Task-force that is making recommendations to the city on how to make Bloomington more bike friendly.  I love this initiative because I have a bike and I would use it more but I am afraid to bike on the congested street with cars (it makes me nervous).