Hip towns and a clever measure
From Anne B. Butterfield
Hip towns and a clever measure
October 7, 2008
We in Boulder have so many reasons to see Berkeley, Calif. as our rival; in worldclass research and education, in natural beauty and liberal views bordering on wackiness, and for leadership with new ideas. And now the rivalry comes down to Boulder's vote coming up to allow property owners to finance green improvements on their properties with county bond money, and to pay the debt through their land tax bill. Pretty clever: no taxes, low interest, low risk, low or no money down, lower utility bills and the loan goes with the property.
The concept was first dubbed "the Berkeley financing plan" for the idea that was approved by Berkeley's council just 11 months ago. Berkeley's Mayor Tom Bates received hundreds of phone calls from around the world to inquire about it, and Boulder's County Commissioner Will Toor immediately received 17 emails about it. Many dozen cities are carefully watching Berkeley's progress, and Boulder is jumping in to join its western twin through the ballot issue cleverly called 1A.
Voters, please memorize this drab little name, 1A (picture the kid who sits in the front of the class and brings an apple for the teacher), because that item will be near the bottom of our unusually long ballot this November. If it passes we stand to join Berkeley in leading the nation in cutting back our use of fossil fuels.
And 1A is happening in the nick of time. The fuels that power and heat our homes (coal and natural gas mostly) are under severe market and production pressure, with prices rising steadily.
A senior geoscientist who has testified on the natural gas market to Colorado's Public Utility Commission, Dave Hughes explains that our natural gas today comes out of the earth from about three times as many drilling rigs as was needed ten years ago for about the same amount of gas. And those rigs cost up to $10 million each. Our current state of production is widely called "treadmilling" -- meaning we're working harder for the same production. Just last winter, the price on natural gas nearly doubled. Hughes says, "prices will be volatile and upward moving for the foreseeable future."
In coal, we can see extreme increase of demand. On the global market coal has doubled in price in the past three years, with India and China both producing heavily as well as importing more. In the United States we are producing and consuming heavily but the energy content of our coal is decreasing so we should not be surprised that utilities have paid more for coal for seven straight years, with the price of coal futures skyrocketing in 2008.
And such prices get handed straight through to us the ratepayers through a little rule called the energy commodity adjustment, or ECA. Just this summer the ECA increased from under four cents to just under five cents per kilowatt hour, translating to about a 10 percent increase in the average bill -- in three months. Imagine that keeping up. This is the type of financial havoc that can be pushed back by adding new windows, insulation and maybe some solar panels onto one's home or business.
Spin and corporate self-interest are dominating the national discussion of our energy and climate security, with T. Boone Pickens backing a plan that's just wacky to natural gas experts like Dave Hughes; and now a group called " Lights out in 2009?" warns illogically about more brown outs which they claim can only be cured by building 120 gigawatts of new capacity. In the face of this noise, passing 1A will provide a high quality investment to a recovering bond market and a steady path real to energy solutions for Boulder. Thanks, Berkeley.