By GARRET JAROS/YachatsNews
YACHATS – Preparing for emergencies big and small is just common sense – whether at the household level with Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet and a spare tire and jack in the car – or at the municipal level with somewhere for community members to shelter during a catastrophe.
With that in mind, the city of Yachats received a $100,000 grant in June from the Oregon Department of Energy that will help fund an “energy resilience” study to see what can be done to create a self-sufficient hub.
The state program is designed to support renewable energy and energy resilience development for tribes, public bodies and consumer-owned utilities. Yachats was one of 39 recipients from 52 applicants across Oregon.
Yachats has the grant earmarked in part for planning a “resilient” civic campus, according to the grant application. The proposed 15-acre project site would encompass city hall, the library, Commons, wastewater treatment facility, pavilion and park.
The study will assess existing facilities and anticipate upgrades that leverage renewable energy, according to the grant application. It will consider options to create a micro electricity grid that connects buildings and renewable power sources as improvements are made to facilities.
The renewable energy sources under consideration are photovoltaic panels, solar thermal panels, ground source heat and anaerobic digestion of wastewater from the treatment plant. The primary investigation will be to determine how users connected to this microgrid can store and share energy for the surrounding utility grid as incremental upgrades are made on city facilities.
After those basics, sorting out all that the study proposes to address is akin to unraveling a plate of spaghetti. Neither mayor Craig Berdie nor interim city manager Rick Sant could get ahold of all the strands, implications or costs during a short discussion of the resiliency study during a July 19 city council meeting.
Berdie noted that $10,000 was already paid to consultants in preparing the grant application and that it appears the city would have to pay another $40,000 on top of the $100,000 grant to complete the study. And that if he was reading it correctly, once the study was complete, the city could obtain a $1 million grant to implement the proposed renewable projects, but that implementation may easily run as much as $5 million.
“So we need to be very careful about this,” Berdie said. “This may be something we decide to cut our losses on. If we invest $50,000 to get $100,000, and then we get another grant for a million but it requires us to spend $5 million, I’m not sure where we are at.”
Berdie conceded he may have misread the document, and Sant added he had the same concerns but thought maybe they had misread those details. A reading by the YachatsNews came up with the same conclusion.
Sant simplified all the study proposes to accomplish by calling it a “disaster preparedness thing” and suggested council wait for a presentation by the planning commission to help explain it better.
“Right now I just want Jacqueline (Danos) to track down info, give us a clearer idea of what we are dealing with and then if she says, ‘Yeah this makes sense,’ then we can … ”
“That’s sounds like a great plan and I appreciate that,” Berdie said, jumping in before Sant could finish. “I don’t want to panic anybody but when I read it, it got pretty …”
“I thought the same thing, this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” Sant said.
While a decision to move forward or not with the resiliency study has yet to be determined – if it is OK’d – it must be completed in six months to meet state requirements.
Broader plan
Danos, who is also member of the planning commission, brought the grant idea to the city concerned about how the community would fare during a large emergency.
“A lot of people don’t understand what’s resiliency, they don’t get what it is and why we need to even do this,” Danos said. “They think it’s a waste of time.”
Danos pushed past the notion the study is just about creating a renewable energy hub that provides the basics for Yachats residents during an emergency like drought, windstorm, landslide, storm, earthquake, flooding, wildfire or tsunami.
“It’s more than that,” she said. “It’s resiliency under the guise of energy. Yeah, it’s the grid and it’s energy and making sure that if we have an emergency we can still power up. But resiliency is more than that. It’s economic resiliency, long term economic resiliency for the city as well. We have to look at it on a broader view than this is just about putting some solar panels up somewhere.”
It also goes beyond supplying the energy needs of the civic campus, passing excess energy on to others in the community or selling it back to the electric company, she said.
“If you look at communities as a holistic living entity, living entities need to be able to bounce back from a myriad of different issues,” Danos said. “So resiliency isn’t just energy, it’s the future economics of the community. It’s future water sustainability.”
She used an example of planning ahead while street work is being done, when there could be an opportunity to put in extra lines or conduit for the future – for something like water recycling or high-speed internet.
“It’s a planning grant,” she said. “It’s not an actual grant for any work. We can leverage this planning grant to see if we can put some of these ideas and these long-term planning ideas into focus.
“It really is a chance for the city to take a good holistic look at planning a broader view,” Danos continued. “How do we use this and leverage this information or leverage what we learn from this to maybe apply for another grant down the line to do something for water, to do something for something else? How can we leverage what we’re learning doing this beyond what this just is?”
- Garret Jaros is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com
It might be worth pointing out that Yachats has an Emergency Preparedness Committee, and that the committee hasn’t been consulted or told anything about this grant, nor of the city’s decision to spend $10,000 applying for it. One of the committee’s members observed at our most recent meeting that all the buildings mentioned are in the tsunami flood zone, and that in the event of a tsunami, this $5 million investment will likely be destroyed. Of course, consultants gotta consult, but on the basis of this article I think the mayor is right, and the city should cut its losses at $10,000.