- I would like to introduce
and welcome Mayor Tim Kabat,
who will be delivering today's keynote address
on climate resiliency and sustainability
on Wisconsin's west coast.
Tim Kabat is the 42nd mayor of La Crosse.
He has worked as a planner and administrator
in the cities of La Crosse and Madison and Sauk County.
He has also worked for the Nature Conservancy,
lectured at UW La Crosse, and served as the executive
director of Downtown Main Street, Inc.
Please join me in welcoming Mayor Kabat.
(applause)
- Good afternoon and I appreciate the invitation
to come and share some of the efforts in La Crosse
on climate resiliency and sustainability
and really trying to be more efficient and effective
and save tax dollars and really to prepare our communities
for what lies ahead.
And I'd like to, and I'm, in some ways,
preaching to the choir here a little bit
with the location here in Eau Claire,
but over here on the west side of the state,
we always like to remind folks that
Wisconsin has three coasts, right?
We have, obviously, the Lake Michigan and Lake Superior
coasts and we also have the Mississippi River as well.
So we take great pride in the fact in La Crosse,
and I know the rivers here in the Eau Claire area as well,
of just what it means to live on the river,
especially this time of the year when you know those
water levels are rising.
And if Eau Claire is anything like La Crosse,
we have our pumps deployed already to deal with maybe
some flooding issues.
So I want to touch a little bit on that and talk about
our sustainability efforts.
I would expect or suspect, like many of the communities
around the state, you all have been working on these
issues for decades, and La Crosse is no exception.
We've been implementing sustainable practices before
they were even called that for decades.
But we really made a concerted effort in 2007
to begin documenting what we were doing.
So we adopted a strategic plan,
we identified goals, and we actually started measuring
what we were doing.
Just a little bit about La Crosse for those of you that
might not be totally familiar.
We're about... 52,000 is our population
according to the census.
We're blessed with a very robust and diverse economic base.
So we have reliance on healthcare,
education, manufacturing is still very strong, tourism,
retail, and the like.
And because we've had that diversity,
I think it's helped us to weather some of those
economic storms a bit better.
We are home to three institutions of higher learning.
So UW La Crosse, Viterbo University,
and Western Technical College.
Our largest employers are both healthcare
institutions, which is kind of interesting.
Both Gundersen Health System
and the Mayo Clinic Health Systems are number one and two.
Number three is Trane Company,
which is our largest manufacturer.
We have a great downtown that continues to
thrive and grow today.
And, as I had said, we're bordered
by the Mississippi River, and we enjoy some
some great natural resources.
I would note as well
from just a little bit on our demographics,
we're younger and smarter than the state of Wisconsin
as a whole. (crowd laughing)
And I don't want to sound too arrogant about that,
but in essence our median age is a little bit
younger than the state median and our education
level is a bit higher.
I didn't say that we're better looking too but, you know.
(crowd laughing)
That's probably not verifiable.
This here is just a real quick snapshot obviously
of the state.
And I'm a bit biased,
but there is the center of the universe there
with the green star and the really big
font size to identify La Crosse.
I do want to point out, though,
and it is a little bit interesting because of where
we're located and in relation
to the other large metro areas, whether you're talking
Madison or the Twin Cities or even Rochester in Minnesota,
because we're a pretty considerable distance
from those metro areas, we've
developed just being very independent and focused on
culture and arts and quality of life and all that.
So we really are the center of our region,
and one of the things that I think is interesting
is the fact of our daytime population,
Monday through Friday especially,
our population goes up by way more than 30%
or more than a third.
So instead of about 52,000, we have 70,000 people
in our community on a weekly or daily basis.
And that does present some great challenges not only
to our transportation systems, obviously, because,
and I've got a slide here in a little bit that shows how
people get to and from work.
Most of the folks that are coming into our community
are coming via single occupancy vehicles.
So that creates some stresses on our transportation system.
It creates some stresses on our environment, and it,
frankly, puts stresses on how do we provide and pay
for services, especially our emergency medical services,
our police services.
You know, we've got a much larger population for a good
chunk of the day and week, and yet we have a smaller
amount of folks who are actually paying the bills
to provide those services.
So let's talk a little bit about our sustainability program.
The focus really is in three areas,
which I know you as folks from other communities
and as individuals, this is also, I think,
really how you try to live your life.
And we really try to apply that to our city organization.
And that's really to be good stewards of our environment
and really what we have, our surroundings,
to take good care of it, to be leaders
and to lead by example.
So if you're expecting folks to do things or change
behavior, you want to show them the way.
And then, really, the third is to be a supporter.
So to see if other folks are wanting to do things or are
making effort, you want to support.
So our vision statement is taken right from our plan.
Our plan is adopted in 2009, a really interesting,
unique, joint effort with La Crosse County,
which that is a separate organization.
You put them together and you quadruple the layers
of complexity and bureaucracy
at times when you're dealing with government committees.
However, the end product, I think, was
eight or nine times what we could have achieved on our own.
And so the vision itself talks about recognizing
the responsibility to lead according to the principles
of sustainability, and we focus on using the natural step.
That's our model for sustainable development,
which I'll touch on in a minute.
We recognize that we have to meet our needs today without
negatively impacting future generations.
So that's a big part of sustainability.
And then the last part of that talks about leading by
example and supporting others.
In talking about the natural step,
there's four guiding principles that we have
really committed to a good chunk of our operations.
We obviously have just like every community, there's always
more to do, there's always room for improvement.
But the four principles I think sum up,
again very neatly, how we approach development
in our community.
That first principle of trying to reduce our reliance
on fossil fuel and things we extract
from the ground.
The second principle talking about really reducing our
need and use of chemicals and things that are not natural.
It's just interesting to note that the doctor in
Sweden that was primarily pushing and responsible
for developing the natural step was a pediatric doctor who
focused on childhood cancer
and was witnessing firsthand the impacts of environment
on things like cancer in children.
I think when we're born we have hundreds and hundreds
of chemicals in our system as a newborn that have no
business being there, right?
So that's a very important, one of the guiding principles.
The third one, obviously, to reduce our encroachment in
nature and really our impacts to the natural world.
And then the fourth one, which I think is very
important for us, especially at the government
or the local level, is to make sure that we're meeting
the needs of our citizens and our residence.
And having that human element, I think,
is so important because there are times I know when
you're debating talking about policy,
folks can lose sight of the fact that there's still a need
to plow streets and put salt down
to make sure they're not slippery and pick up garbage
and do those kinds of services that add
to our quality of life.
Those have impacts.
Our plan itself, again just very quickly I'll touch on
kind of the highlights on the goals.
I don't have enough time to really get into all
the details, but I think you can get a good sense of really
what we started out back in 2009 when this plan
adopted we used 2007 as our base year.
We talked about following those four principles
or those four system conditions from the natural step.
So a goal by 2025 to reduce our use of fossil fuels by 25%.
We're also one of the Wisconsin independent
communities too, and they have 25 by '25 goals,
so they kind of matched up really well.
Out of the energy that we do use,
we wanted to have 25% of that to be renewable
by the year 2025.
We wanted to be able to utilize
the products and those types of things that we needed
for our operations, to have half of those come in a fashion
that were environmentally preferred type of products.
To reduce our community's waste by 25%.
So the solid waste that we were generating.
Also to increase our recycling rates by 25%.
To look at ways to reduce our reliance on single
occupancy vehicles to get to and from work and school
and appointments So looking at transportation alternatives.
And then to protect and restore our natural areas.
So we utilize, I mentioned earlier,
a process with La Crosse County and formed technical
committees, and I think a big part of that process,
again, was just really raising that level
of awareness so that it became part
and parcel of our city operations.
So this gives you just a quick idea,
a quick snapshot of a lot of those goals
kind of put on one slide.
How have we done?
And the take away, of course,
is on the left-hand side was our tracking of our CO2
emissions, our carbon footprint in the year 2008,
and on the right side of the slide is the year 2016.
And we're all proud and happy to report
that the trend, those bars are getting smaller and smaller.
They really combine those three areas of focus.
So our fuel that we use for our fleet to plow snow,
to do our street repairs, to respond to emergencies,
to run our transit system is a chunk of that.
That's the green block on top.
And then the two other blocks relate to our facilities,
our use of electricity and natural gas,
both to heat and cool our buildings but
obviously to operate our water systems,
our sewer systems.
In 2008, when we started to track this,
our carbon output was a little over 20,000 metric tons.
And in 2016, the most recent data that we have,
it's about 13,700 tons.
So a 32% decrease.
The other big part of this is,
and I'll get into that in a little bit,
is how our electricity is produced.
And because we are part of the Xcel area,
the coverage area, Xcel has been making great strides
to utilize less coal to produce their electricity,
which does have, obviously, a positive impact on us as well.
So how did we do it?
And, again, many, many, many projects and initiatives
and really trying to have this flow through our entire
operation as a city organization.
And, again, too many to list here,
but just in general we did obviously,
and this is not rocket science,
I mean all the communities and folks attending
and looking at these all over the state
are doing similar things.
Energy audits looking at automatic switch controls
and lighting controls.
We upgraded our HVAC systems in city hall.
We switched a bunch of LED lighting.
We switched out all of our streetlights
to LEDs, which saved us about $40,000 a year.
When we do new projects, our community centers,
transit center I'll point out in a little bit.
We installed geothermal for heating and cooling.
We installed solar.
So we're looking for opportunities to
seize renewable energy.
We've purchased hybrid vehicles, hybrid buses.
All of that from when we started tracking results in
about a $200,000 a year saving,
which is not insignificant.
Those numbers start to add up,
especially when you're getting down to your annual
budget process and you're two, or three, or $500,000 away
from your target on your levy.
Those $200,000 savings add up.
So in addition to many, many smaller projects,
we also have the benefit in La Crosse of having Xcel's
waste energy facility.
So this is a facility that's been in operation
for almost 30 years.
It basically turns municipal solid waste
and wood waste into electricity.
And to the tune of about 12,000 homes every year.
For about the last 30 years, it's also kept two million
tons of garbage out of landfill,
which has extended our life of our landfill.
I don't think you can argue that that's necessarily
a renewable form of energy.
However, it is a way that has helped to reduce our
impacts to our landfill.
It has produced electricity and Xcel
has been heavily investing in the emissions
and in those areas to deal
with the clean air aspects of that.
So, in addition to something as big and complicated
as a waste incinerator,
we also did very simple things
around city hall.
So we're converting a lot of our paper systems
to electronic systems.
We have a ways to go there.
But you can imagine, again, in your organizations,
whether it's nonprofit or business or government,
I mean those are all very small things
that can add up over time.
And I think that's, if that's one of the themes you
want to take from what I'm sharing with you
today is, you know, all these small actions add up.
We just the effort of setting all your
printers to printing duplex on both sides makes
a difference to the tune there of about $35,000 a year.
More than 30% less paper today than we used in 2007.
We also did a very, so besides the small things,
we did a very complicated public policy change which
was to switch, in 2014, to a single stream
the garbage and recycling cart system.
And that, I think, has been one of our most successful
switches, if you will, in our community.
It has had dramatic impacts.
You can see the level of our recycling has gone up,
you know, 140%, which is amazing.
The amount of solid waste has deceased by more than 25%.
We've saved money on tipping fees.
And for us, very similar to Eau Claire, I'm sure,
and the other university towns,
it's helped to clean up some
of our most densest neighborhoods.
Those closest to the university where you have
a lot of folks living and going to school and working.
Those dense neighborhoods before the garbage carts
always had challenges with just trash and all that.
And the garbage carts really helped us to have a good
system to deal with that in a much more effective way.
So let's talk a little bit about our transportation system.
And this is a slide I could spend my entire time talking
about because it fascinates me and it's also something
I think that we're proud of and that we build upon.
So in La Crosse, because of our density, so you know,
as mayor I'm gonna stand up and take credit for all of this.
This is my initiative and we've done all this, right?
Well, that's not true.
Obviously, all of us are
we stand on the shoulders of the folks that came before us
and hopefully we do some things that the people come
after us can achieve even greater success.
Our forefathers and foremothers when they formed
La Crosse and located it on the banks of the Mississippi
in between the bluffs and the river, that was,
you know, pretty remarkable because what it ended up
doing is causing us to really focus on densifying our city.
So the area of our city and where we have employment
and neighborhoods and all those things
are all next to each other.
And that's really great if you want to have people walk
and bike to work.
Having the place where they work or go to school or have
a health appointment, having that within walking
or biking distance helps these kinds of stats, which is,
the data there points to the number of people who commute
to work every day.
So in La Crosse we have about 28,000 people
in our city of our residents that are
commuting to jobs that are 16 and older.
And based on the census data and based on what we do,
you can see that we have some really great
numbers to celebrate.
We've got work to do when it comes things like our
transit system and obviously,
as I said earlier, your job is never done.
You're always wanting to build upon your success.
But you can see there just from a couple of the stats,
nationally the standard or that average of people that
get to work by single occupancy vehicle is almost 76%.
In La Crosse, it's 74%.
So we're better than the national average when it
comes to how people get to work by driving by
themselves in a car.
When it comes to walking and biking to work,
four times the national average of people bike
to work, three times the national average of people
in La Crosse walk to work, and it's because of how our
city really is laid out, that geography.
And then we do not meet the national average for transit.
So the national standard is about four,
almost 5% of people get to work by transit around,
you know, the entire United States.
We're at a little bit more than 2%,
so we've got some work to do but we're doing pretty well
when we look at our pure cities from around the state.
So I think again, (coughs) excuse me,
the bottom line is these are all good things to celebrate
and to talk about.
I mean, we're a silver, American Bicyclist Federation,
we're a silver level.
For the walking standard, we're at a bronze level.
We've had a very successful Safe Routes to School Program.
I mean all of those things add up.
And I know in places all around the state people are
doing the same things.
And I guess I'm here to just say
that's a great effort and it's very important that
we're making those investments.
We also have a very active green complete streets ordinance.
So in the city of La Crosse, any time we redo a street,
we are required to install additional storm sewer best
management practices as well as accommodations
for bicycling, walking, and transit.
And we have to find an exception to not do that.
So, very slowly but surely we're filling in.
Like, example, we have a sidewalk infill program
that's around our Safe Routes to School Initiative
to try to find places to fill in the sidewalks so
that those students can get to school more safely.
And then the other part of our efforts
really gets at protecting our natural resources.
That great legacy that we've been given in the La Crosse
area and being on the banks of the Mississippi River.
We have active programs, a blufflands protection program.
We've been able to preserve about 1800 acres,
and we're working on restoring a lot of those acres.
We have one of the largest urban wetlands in the state,
the La Crosse River Marsh.
It's a little over 1100 acres,
and that's an area that we're really starting
to focus more and more on, especially with discussions
about green infrastructure and climate resiliency
and just the impacts of flooding.
If you combine those two, about
not quite 3,000 acres, that's 20% of the city's
land mass, if you will.
So we've got about
one-fifth of our area that is green infrastructure,
which I think is pretty remarkable and, again,
has helped us and helped push us to greater heights.
This here gives you just kind of a schematic So this
is basically La Crosse.
Interstate 90 is at the top of the screen.
Our regional airport up in the left corner.
And then, you can see, again,
we're a very tall and skinny community.
The banks of the Mississippi River, the La Crosse River,
and the Black River.
Our blufflands program really tries to preserve
that eastern boundary of our community.
And that's a very, very significant natural resource,
and for a good chunk of that area
it's protected from development through either outright
acquisition or through conservation easements.
And we always like to say we live in a beautiful area
and obviously it was created over many,
many eons to get to that point,
but we're also trying to do our part
because the preservation of those slopes
and those forests don't just happen.
They don't just all of the sudden one day,
yep, they're fine.
There are a lot of people, a lot of organizations,
nonprofits and property owners
making investments to preserve those.
So it's a very, very awesome program that we're hoping
to build upon.
And then the La Crosse River Marsh,
so the La Crosse Marsh up where the label is,
again parallels I-90 and then cuts through and enters
right here at Riverside Park,
a very significant resource.
Again, over a thousand acres.
It is our green infrastructure asset.
I would argue it's one of the greatest ones in the state.
And I don't have, like, the engineering or the flood
background to be able to say with certainty,
but I know that it helps hold gazillions
of gallons of water. (crowd laughing)
When the spring comes and we have a lot
of water and rain and the impacts,
again I don't even know that you could put a price tag on
it because it's pretty remarkable.
So that gives you just a very quick review of what we
have done in La Crosse over the last
10-plus years formally.
I'd like to just shift gears for just a couple minutes
and talk about climate resiliency because that's an
area where communities are growing more and more
concerned with the impacts of storms,
what we need to do to better prepare ourselves to,
you know, to make our infrastructure more
resilient, and we have been working on those efforts,
I had mentioned the La Crosse River Marsh and we'll
get into that in just a little bit,
but obviously those impacts.
So this is a photo of one of our streets in La Crosse.
On the left side of the photo is the La Crosse River Marsh
itself, on the right side is a neighborhood,
and obviously you have a very large sinkhole
and washout that happened last July
when we had those storms.
And before we had really
a large amount of rain that dumped on us in a very short
period of time, we had high winds that knocked a whole
bunch of branches down, which clogged up storm
sewers which then exacerbated this problem.
So this is a direct result of that.
All told our damage,
and again we were not nearly as impacted
as other communities, but almost a million dollars
of damage in La Crosse.
Our insurance is gonna pay
about 20% of that.
We were declared a disaster area.
FEMA's gonna pay, FEMA and the state
are gonna pay about 30%.
So the locals are still on the hook for about half.
And I don't know about your communities or your
organizations but we don't just have
$500,000 laying around that we could
just use at any time we want.
So how do we try to address some of these climate
impacts and climate issues?
We are heavily invested in green infrastructure
and stormwater best management practices.
So we've been installing porous streets all around
our community, and we're looking to do more of those.
We have a neighborhood in La Crosse that we're gonna be
heavily focused on this year as a part
of our capital program.
We, I had mentioned kind of our green complete streets.
So when we redo streets we're always looking
for stormwater fixes there.
And then we have a very active floodplain program as well.
We're also part of the larger effort,
La Crosse is a proud partner
with the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative,
which is a group of us
mayors up and down the river from the headwaters
to the Gulf, and there's 120 communities that have mayors
along the river.
About 80 of us are active participants,
which I think is phenomenal.
We're about six years old.
We consider the Great Lake Initiative and what they do
there with their communities to be our big brothers
and big sisters to help us
because we're still in our infancy.
But we've been very successful in lobbying
the federal government and raising awareness about
the fact that, oh, by the way
the Mississippi River is responsible for
drinking water to 20 million people.
40% of our agricultural commodities are impacted by
the river, so it's a very important resource.
And no disrespect to the Chippewa River,
but we all know that the Mississippi River
is America's mother river.
And we are really working hard to treat that as one
system and to raise that awareness.
So the screen, what you see is just a quick report card
on a number of factors.
It looks to have been studied.
There was a partnership of the Nature Conservancy,
US Fish & Wildlife, the US Geological Survey,
other nonprofits to really look at the health of the river.
This is just the Upper Mississippi River Basin.
So we're just focused on really that upper half.
And you look at things like the ecosystems
and recreation and economy and transportation and whatnot,
the overall grade is a C, which
it's a passing grade and that's fine.
You do see there's a few areas that are in red,
which means they're a failing grade,
whether you're talking some of the floodplain issues or
some of the infrastructure investments.
And us mayors are, when we get together,
we meet twice a year, us mayors up and down
the river, and talk about these issues,
water quality especially.
We're pretty mayors are pretty simple folk,
when you talk about are we passing or not.
And we always talk about the greatest report card
is the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
For us, that hypoxia zone represents a significant failure.
And so we know we have a lot of work to do as mayors,
especially here in the Upper Miss,
that have a lot of agriculture,
have a lot of transportation,
and just what those impacts are.
We've been building and reinforcing and investing in
our levee system.
We had a levee system that was built, really,
in a panic in 1965 when we had a very significant,
our most significant flood in La Crosse.
Those levees have been around since that time,
so for over 50 years, and we've made
some maintenance and some things to try to keep them going.
We need to be more active in maintaining and actually
upgrading those levees, and that's something
that we're committed to doing.
This year is one of our newer levees,
and unless I had that
black arrow with levee pointing to here that is,
you probably wouldn't necessarily pick that out
as a levee, but you can see the difference in elevation
between the levee and then the business a little bit
to the right side of the levee itself.
And we look for those opportunities.
This is part of a larger redevelopment site.
It's known as the Riverside north side.
It's an old Mobil oil tank farm.
And as we're redeveloping it,
we're filming it and we're reinforcing those areas.
Here we're able to put recreational trail on top
of the levees so that folks can enjoy it,
and that's one of the goals with these redevelopment
projects is to get people access to the water,
to the river, to these natural resource areas.
Other parts of our flood program
involve flood proofing, kind of your traditional things.
We try to invest in pre-disaster mitigation.
So grant funding to help us either remove structures
or try to address those things
before they become a disaster.
And so we again, those are areas that we're
really focusing even more resources on because the number
of storms, the severity of those storms are real,
and we have to deal with them at the local level.
Here's just a quick re, I guess recap
of the La Crosse River Marsh.
Maybe a little bit of a zoomed in area.
You can see the trail system that's connected there,
as I talked about, trying to get people access
into these resources.
This 1100-acre urban wetland is very significant.
So really to kind of summarize our efforts,
it's all about building a culture,
and that's what we're working toward in La Crosse
is trying to make the sustainability in our
climate resiliency part of what we do in everything
that we do, so all of our operations.
And not just the city organization but we've got
many adopters, Gundersen Health System,
Western Technical College, many other businesses
and nonprofits that are really all in and heavily invested.
Here you see a couple of examples.
There's a community center on the upper left which has
geothermal and solar.
Our transit center is the upper right.
That's a mixed use development.
It's got 99 units of affordable and market rate housing.
There's a picture of the green roof that helps
with stormwater and helps with some
of the heat island effect there.
And then, obviously, our hybrid that we have invested in.
So, what's next?
Part of what we're doing, and obviously the 25 by '25
in those goals that we set more than 10 years we're
making significant progress.
But obviously the pace of change of climate impacts
and the things that are really,
that we're becoming more and more vulnerable to requires
us to take our efforts up a notch or two.
So we're looking at really
increasing the goals that were established.
I'm part of the Mayors for Clean Energy that really
establishes trying to work toward having all clean
and renewable energy by 2035.
That's a big part of it.
And the city is committed to that.
We're starting to have conversations
with our partners, the Sierra Club
and Xcel Energy and others,
to see how do we get there.
We are looking at other programs through
transportation demand management and, again,
some water conservation policies.
So this here I think is very significant.
We're not trying to just
do the same thing that we've done over time.
We're really trying to ramp up the efforts.
The figure on this slide I think points toward
the future and why I think having partnerships
with our energy providers is so significant.
You can see on the inner ring, in 2008,
this was how Xcel Energy, which again provides our
area with electricity and natural gas,
in 2008 you can see
basically how energy was provided.
47.5% of electricity was produced by coal back in 2008.
You move forward to 2016, that's down to 28.6%.
You can see some of the other changes with wind and whatnot.
And that's very important.
For us, we're looking to become energy partners
with Xcel through some sort of memorandum of understanding
or whatnot to try to keep pushing in that direction.
So I guess the very quick messages that I want to just
leave you with as a part of our experience in La Crosse,
obviously for us it was to develop a plan to really
document and measure what you're doing.
You don't, you're able to improve if you're not measuring.
Many small initiatives and projects add up over time.
The focus on energy conservation
and efficiencies and then obviously renewable energy
is where we're headed now.
Our natural area programs and trying to protect
and enhance those are very significant.
And, really, the area that is first and foremost
in my mind I know is building resiliency.
How do we design infrastructure that can
withstand these storms?
How do we look at green infrastructural alternatives
and incorporate porous pavement and,
you know, improving the water flows
of our current wetland areas.
And then obviously it's about building a culture.
So, with that, I want to thank you for your time
and attention today, and I think we do have a little bit
of time for questions if you have
some easy questions for me. (laughs)
Thank you. (crowd applauds)
All right, so the question is snow removal
on porous pavement.
The snow removal piece is especially the thing that
they take great care is the salting and sanding elements.
I don't know enough about that to know
sort of what is the amounts that are acceptable,
but they do have equipment on the porous paved streets.
They're basically a big vacuum cleaner that they'll
drive over the street and vacuum up
all of those particulates and make sure that the street
is functioning at that level.
So I think, just like everything else,
as the technology and as those needs advance,
I think you'll see better and better equipment,
better and better ways to actually utilize things
like porous pavements.
So we've got several streets, they are as far as I know,
my understanding, they're going just fine.
And we actually had, it was interesting,
a few years ago we provide a little bit of money,
funds in our capital budget process,
to our neighborhoods, and one of our neighborhoods,
they wanted to fix the street but they utilized
some of those special moneys to actually make it
a porous street.
So I think you've got a lot of interest at the local
level and our neighborhood level and citizens who want
to do these projects because, again,
even if it's not necessarily perfect,
you learn from that mistake and then you fix it and do
better the next time.
So I think this type of piloting and experimenting
is really important for places like La Crosse
and Eau Claire and all around the state.
Yes, Jim? - Wait, wait!
- [Jim] What is your vision for the city of La Crosse,
like the long-term vision, knowing with microgrids
coming and all that?
Just a broad perspective of sustainability.
- Well, I do, I really am a big believer that
establishing and signing on to the goal for 100% clean
energy by 2035 and then for other
fuels by 2050, I think is something that I foresee
for our city.
I think it's really important,
again at the local level, that we have some bold
goals, I guess if you can it that.
And then it's all about partnerships.
So all of those examples and the projects that I have
pointed out, they're all a team effort.
I mean between mayors and city councils and committees
and our citizens especially and then our businesses.
So I think if you can create a vision and talk about
the fact that as a community we really want to work towards
clean energy, there's a lot of partners that are already
engaged and I'm sure we'll see more of that.
We've got one of our, again, our largest employer,
Gundersen Health System, they established a very
lofty goal of basically being energy independent.
And that was a few years ago.
And they achieved it.
And they did it in a number of ways.
They're out talking nationally
and internationally and sharing that story.
For an organization that has facilities and obviously
the challenges that they have with
being kind of a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week kind of operation.
But they were able to do it.
And so if we don't establish those goals and a big vision,
well, you're gonna achieve, I guess,
what you think you're gonna do.
So I say let's do the 100% clean energy,
let's look at ways that we can, especially for us,
that along with the floodplain and those issues.
Right now we have a very significant
challenge coming our way.
Because of the billions of dollars of damage around not
only the United States but really the world,
but especially the United States,
our national flood insurance program is basically kaput
And each year in La Crosse we have 1400 properties,
1400 homes, that are in the floodplain.
They were established long before the floodplain boundaries.
And, again, I don't have the time to get into all
the details, but long story short,
you've got older historic neighborhoods
because it's a river town and a map layer
or a boundary was put on those homes which now
basically keeps them from being invested in,
because they're limited by 50%
of their value over the life of their value of being able
to do improvements.
So they can't make investments.
The floodplain insurance, the flood insurance program,
the subsidy is slowly going away.
So the cost of flood insurance is actually more
than mortgages in a lot of cases.
And so for folks looking to buy a starter home
or wanting to sell a home, young families
are not gonna do that.
And so they end up being investment property, which,
in our case, half of our housing is rental housing.
A lot of it is investment property.
We don't see the same attention to detail
necessarily with those homes in general
than we do with others.
So it becomes some really significant challenges.
So, for us, not only the clean energy but, really,
the green infrastructure, what we can do
with our river marsh and other places
to make it as resilient as possible.
All right, thank you.
(crowd applauds)