January 2017 | Business View Magazine

72 73 Atlanta, Georgia marking program and data base. And we’re now benchmarking energy and water usage; we’ve got a year’s worth of data, already. “We have a very aggressive recycling program; we’re about to re-label all of our recycling bins to improve the contamina- tion rates. We are the first city to do a pilot program–we’re going to be measuring all of the waste that the city generates with an innovative new technology that we’re work- ing on. We went from losing money on our recycling program to now we’re making a profit because we renegotiated our contract. “We’re building a seven-mile greenway trail. We got kick-off funding to master plan the trail and we just completed the survey for the initial three miles. We’re going to start the design and engineering for the first three miles in January. We hope to have the first three miles of the seven-mile trail complete by next year. That’s going to be a fabulous project. “We have the first Urban Agriculture Director in the country, here at City Hall. We’ve just identified a surplus property site that we think will be really appropriate to have an ‘adopt-a-lot’ programwhere city residents can sign up to adopt city-owned land demonstrated an enviable track record. She recounts many of the city’s groundbreaking programs and initiatives: “For example, in the past year and a half when I came on board with the city and we started getting the political support for our work from the Mayor and the City Council, we’ve added 65 electric vehicles to the city’s fleet; when I began, we had one EV and it was donated. We’re about to have a hundred elec- tric vehicle charging sites at our airport, where we had zero, and our plan is to expand that to three hundred by next year. We have passed a Climate Action plan; we were the first city in Georgia to do that and as result of the momen- tum that we built with the Climate Action plan, we were invited to participate in the Climate Action talks in Paris. “We have entered into contracts for ener- gy-saving performance in almost a hundred city buildings. We’re completing the auditing stage now. We had a very competitive RFP process and we selected four energy-saving companies that are going to be working across departments to retrofit city buildings. We passed a commercial building energy efficiency ordinance. We were the first city in Georgia to require water audits – that involves buildings that are in the city limits that are 25,000 square feet and above, and we created a whole bench-