Banning, California

“We have about 275,000-plus cars a day on I-10 that runs through the city, and we’re situated at a point either from San Diego or from Los Angeles where we’re a perfect stop for a recharge for most electric vehicles of today. So, we figure we can take advantage of that by bringing people into the community to recharge their vehicle and doing some shopping downtown while they’re here.” Speaking of downtown, Schulze says that Banning is intent on creating a walkable, livable downtown area. “A lot of the ordinances are in place to allow that,” he shares. “The city has started to make the public improvements that are required, creating spaces that people want to be in. We’ve been dealing with a homeless problem in our downtown, lately, and we feel that bringing more people into the downtown makes it less attractive for some of the current activity that we’re experiencing in our downtown that’s negative in nature.” Other “green” projects that Banning has instituted to save both money and energy include the conversion of roughly 90 percent of its street lights to LED. “That was a cost recovery, or ROI, of roughly three years,” Schulze says, “and a reduction of our energy costs for our street lights of about 75 percent.” In addition, Banning has implemented Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) for both its water and electric utilities. “We’ve got about 95 percent of the electric meters deployed, and the water meters, we’re deploying over a two-year period,” says Schulze. “We’re using a local company called Zenner USA. They provide water meters for cities all across the world. With the AMR/AMI program, we’ll be able to be more accurate with our billing, and we’ll reduce our labor costs for meter reading. Data collection for decisions relating to load, infrastructure, and customer usage will be readily available. And we’ll be able to help