Author: Jeffrey Hughes (Page 3 of 6)

SOG Environmental Finance Ctr

Springing Forward from a Great 2014 at the EFC

March 19, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Springtime in North Carolina normally showcases two things I love: the environment and teamwork.

Even if your work doesn’t involve environmental protection, it’s hard not to think about environment this time of year with trees budding out in a green wave, flowers blooming everywhere, and rivers churning with winter and spring rains. At the same time, everyone is talking about teams. It’s NCAA basketball tournament time, and it’s hard to walk down an office corridor or go into a restaurant without someone talking about teams and team strategy.

I couldn’t help thinking about these two subjects as I helped write our annual report this year, because they are the very same subjects that dominate our work. Obviously we are focused on the environment – it’s in our name, and the drive to protect and preserve the environment is the constant force that runs through our diverse portfolio of projects.

Continue reading

Four Myths about Water Rate Setting

February 12, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Infrastructure has been in the news a lot lately. The president highlighted it in his budget speech/State of the Union address, and if you live in North Carolina, you heard the Governor highlight it in his State of the State speech a few weeks later. Both leaders identified infrastructure in general (including water and wastewater) as key problems that required new national and state initiatives. Initiates such as new types of bonds and augmented public funding programs will help, but none of these will replace the most important and somewhat magical water and wastewater finance tool – namely, locally determined customer water and sewer rates. Water rates are the tool that customers dread and elected officials rarely embrace, but rates ultimately drive the ability of communities to protect their environment and public health.

Continue reading

Breaking News: MS4 uses P3 for TMDL!

December 2, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Chesapeake_Bay_BridgeJust in case you aren’t up on your stormwater finance acronyms, the long version of today’s blog post is A Municipal Separate Stormwater System (MS4) uses a Public Private Partnership (P3) to address a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) Regulation. Still confused? Put in terms of environmental goals, the punch line of this story might be: County partners with a private company to improve the quality of water in the Chesapeake Bay!

There are many ways that local government stormwater programs work with private property owners and private companies, but few if any arrangements are as large and comprehensive as what was entered into by Prince George’s County, Maryland last month.  Prince George’s signed several agreements with a private company to oversee a massive stormwater management retrofit program involving 2,000 acres of County owned property (with an option to increase to 4,000 acres). Under the agreement, the County agrees to pay the company $100 million dollars to oversee all aspects of design and implementation of stormwater best practices including planning, public involvement, procurement, and construction management. The agreement includes a host of financial incentives for environmental success and local economic development that are part of the overall concept of employing the strengths and profit motive of a private company to more efficiently achieve public goals.   Continue reading

Encouraging Property Investments with Stormwater Fee Credit Programs

October 29, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Storm_DrainGreentown, USA wants to join some of its large older city peers such as Washington and Philadelphia that are rebranding themselves as Green Environmental Cities. Greentown wants to become the greenest small town in the country and would like to encourage property owners across their town to plant more trees, convert their rain shedding roofs into rain absorbing green space, and dig up their pavement and replace it with rain gardens and other stormwater systems that reduce run-off. They have started a media blitz promoting this green transformation, yet progress has been painfully slow. Older shopping centers, like the Southside Shopping Center, continue to produce torrents of rainwater runoff laden with oil and trash that pollutes the area’s waterways. Retrofitting existing space is costly and property owners have other competing needs for their scarce renovation dollars, and education alone only goes so far in promoting transformation. The city council is deadlocked between a contingent that wants to enact regulation that requires older properties to “Greenify” and a contingent that thinks the city should just use public grants to incentivize the transformation. Greentown, like many communities across the country, is stuck. What’s the solution? Continue reading

Bottom-Up Financing Options for Green Infrastructure: What Will Your Approach Be?

October 8, 2014 / / 0 Comments

seedlingGreen Infrastructure (GI), a common term to refer to a range of different types of small and mid-scale installations that support water management and other environmental goals, has become a growing component of many local government’s environmental stewardship strategies. Rain gardens, restored urban water-ways, increased tree plantings, permeable pavement and other distributed “nature mimicking” infrastructure installations are making their way into Green Infrastructure plans across the country (like one recently created in Durham, NC). While many local governments are making strides in implementing these installations, other local governments are still in the pilot phase – experimenting with demonstration projects but nowhere near scale with their investing, at least compared to other types of their infrastructure investing.  As these installations become an accepted part of a local government’s infrastructure investment portfolio, the inevitable “How to pay for it?” questions will arise. While many smaller scale demonstration projects across the country have attracted external grant funding, full scale implementation will require a robust financing approach. Continue reading

« Older posts Newer posts »

Knapp-Sanders Building Campus Box 3330, UNC Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3330 T: 919 966 5381 | F: 919 962 065

Accessibility: Report a Digital Access Issue

© 2024 Environmental Finance Blog

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑