With the “Cool Cities” emissions reduction initiative officially underway, Ames is taking another step to combat the effects of climate change.

According to the Sierra Club’s Web site, Ames is joining more than 200 other American cities in the effort to evaluate and reduce emission rates.

Even before last Tuesday, however, when Mayor Ann Campbell and the city council officially approved the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, the city has been a leader in other environmental initiatives.

Four of the areas in environmental and energy-efficiency issues the city has led in and is currently working on are transportation, waste management, electricity, and water usage and conservation.

Transportation

As the city begins to evaluate its main sources of carbon dioxide emissions, transportation officials are continuing efforts to make their fleet more energy-efficient.

One of the most anticipated aspects of that effort is the purchase of an all-electric car, which should arrive by late July.

The vehicle has certain limitations, said Bob Kindred, assistant city manager. It can only reach 25 mph and needs to be recharged after traveling 30 to 40 miles.

However, it will serve the purpose of being used by people who work for the city to run errands in town. The vehicle will be kept at City Hall.

Kindred said one of the important things about the electric car is that it will be visible in the community, setting an example for other Ames citizens.

The vehicle is called a ZENN – for “zero-emission, no-noise” – and is manufactured by Zenn Motor Company of Toronto, Canada. Local dealership AmesCars.com carries the vehicle, billed by the company as “Earth’s Favorite Car.” This particular vehicle cost the city approximately $15,000.

In addition to purchasing the ZENN, Kindred said a “fuel reduction team” with members from all city departments was put into place last year in order to find other ways of reducing the need for fuel in the city’s fleet.

The team has recently been considering purchasing hybrid vehicles as well, Kindred said.

Waste management

Ames residents are probably familiar with the Resource Recovery Plant, 110 Center Ave., which opened in 1975. Students, however, may not know that approximately 75 percent of their garbage is turned into fuel that is used in place of coal.

The plant takes garbage materials such as paper and shreds them and turns them into the refuse-derived fuel.

Before recovering the burnable elements found in the city’s waste in order to create the fuel, a magnet retrieves all of the ferrous metals.

The magnets are then recycled as any other metal would be recycled.

The rest of the garbage, which cannot be burned as fuel, is sent to a landfill.

“In the time we’ve been doing this, we have avoided some massive amount of landfill space that we could have used,” Kindred said.

Kindred said the plant was the second municipal waste-to-fuel plant to open in the United States.

Electricity

An important program the city of Ames has which exists to save electricity during the summer is the Power Watch program.

Participants hook their air conditioning units up to the program, and the units turn off for 7 1/2 out of every 30 minutes on particularly hot days when the city has a very high demand for power.

Kindred’s air conditioning unit is connected to the Power Watch program. She said people don’t even notice it

The program saves the city’s power plant a good deal of power during critical times, Kindred said.

Water usage and

conservation

There are many uses and concerns related to water, and two that the city emphasize are managing storm water runoff and drinking water conservation.

Many of these concerns were heightened with the passage of the Federal Clean Water Act, which requires communities in the United States to be more involved in cleansing water, Kindred said.

“The city council and staff have recently given increasing emphasis to the natural management of storm water runoff,” Kindred said. “This has led to a rain garden initiative.”

A rain garden, Kindred said, is essentially a garden of natural plants that collect roof water and allow it to return to the groundwater, instead of collecting on city streets and going through the sewer system, where the water picks up any pollutants on the street and carries them all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

In this effort, anyone may apply to the city for small grants in order to purchase plants for rain gardens.

John Dunn, director of the Ames Water and Pollution Control Department, said the city will emphasize the conservation of drinking water this year.

“It’s a financial issue,” Dunn said.

“With the demand for drinking water we saw last summer, if the demand continues to increase at a rate consistent with that demand, in a very short order – within five years – we would be out of capacity for the city.”

This would not mean that the city’s water supply would dry up, but it does mean the city would have to build a new facility for drinking water, which would cost a lot of money and have a huge impact on drinking water rates for Ames residents.

“A lot of people think of Iowa as a water-rich state,” Dunn said.

While he said it might be compared to dryer states such as Arizona, “at some point we do reach a cap of what can be reasonably contained.”

Dunn said the initiative to conserve water will incorporate educational materials targeted to specific audiences, sometimes at certain city events such as Midnight Madness and the Fourth of July parade.