What I want to offer the City of Culver City.

By Stephen Murray

An outline of one plan to save money and increase the quality of life in Culver City.

Culver City as a whole, that's everyone, pays out $65M to SoCal Edison and SoCal Gas every year. Between 1/3 & 1/4 of that money is from residential customers.

There are 175k housing units in the city and about half of those are single family structures. What I find is that housing structures are between 20-50% energy inefficient. In this city we ratepayers are spending between $4-10M just in waste. It's energy and money dissipated as heat.

$4M-10M. And that's just residences. I put this to you -we as a city should do something about this. We need to do something about this and we can. The City's Utility tax is 11% that means the city is collecting up to $1M in DIRTY MONEY from these 2 utilities.

What I propose is to start a program with the objective to bring about greater energy efficiency and reduce our energy usage by 25% by 2020. The state, county and utilities already have financing and rebate programs that helps defray costs- Energy Upgrade California is one of them. What homeowners need is a kickstart- marketing, education, possibly an energy audit. To pay for it assume that the $1M in dirty money is already leaving and put 1/20 of it in a program to help homeowners.

This isn't just about energy usage though. When I find that homes are inefficient I almost invariably also discover that they have poor indoor air quality.

Last winter I got a phone call from a client who had a rental on Fairbanks. In the middle of the night the furnace cracked and pumped combustion gases into the house while the family was sleeping. By the time the Fire Dept arrived the Carbon Monoxide levels were in the fatal PPM. This was before the state mandated CO law- They would have died that night if I hadn't enforced my policy of ensuring indoor air quality and installed a CO detector.

As an efficiency contractor I love it when I save people money, I really love it when I save energy. But mostly I love it when I save peoples lives, though grated that doesn't happen to often. But a corollary of this is that I love to increase the quality of peoples life's.

That's what I want to offer the City of Culver City. Saving money, saving energy and increasing the length and quality of our lives.