Best Practices Chosen for Pine River

The GreenStep Task Force met on Thursday to discuss and evaluate progress from last brainstorming meeting.

With six of the best practices mandated from the MN Pollution Control Agency, Pine River had the ability to hand pick six more best practices that they feel would benefit the city best.

The task force chose the following:

1) Establish a farmer's market and a community garden (Already Completed)

2) Install private and public-sector renewable energy systems

3) Make traffic signals and street lights more energy efficient

4) Improve the surface water quality

5) Create efficient highway-oriented development

6) Promote alternatives to single-occupancy car travel

There was also discussions of finding the energy use of public buildings (ie heat, water use). This would give the city a place to start looking at not only environmentally changing their practices, but to perhaps also save money.

Encouraging the city to change their 90 plus street lights from a mercury vapor lightbulb to a more energy efficient bulb (ie sodium vapor or metal halide) was discussed. The current practice is to change out the bulb if it needs replacing. It was suggested a report should be formed to show the cost and eventual cost savings of replacing the bulbs en masse.
The next meeting will be on April 21, 2011 at 8am at the HUG campus.