Fifth in a series on winners of the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber & Visitors Bureau and Hailey Chamber of Commerce Community Awards.
Since its inception last year, the Hailey Environmental Leadership Program has made significant strides toward reducing the city's impacts on the environment as well as its contributions to the problem of global warming.
Due to that work, the program and its dedicated group of volunteers will be honored by the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber & Visitors Bureau as Environmental Advocate of the Year.
The Sun Valley-Ketchum chamber and the Hailey Chamber of Commerce will present a joint Community Awards Night to recognize individuals, businesses and organizations that have made outstanding contributions to the community and to the chambers on Wednesday, April 23.
The event will feature cocktails accompanied by piano music by R.L. Rowsey and a sit-down dinner followed by the announcement of the awards and speeches from the honorees.
The Hailey Environmental Leadership Program, which morphed out of the previous Hailey Climate Protection Committee, consists of city staff and one citizen liaison. The committee was formed in early 2007 to implement the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement in Hailey.
Former Hailey Mayor Susan McBryant signed the climate protection agreement in February 2007, joining more than 700 other municipalities in the United States committed to meeting or beating the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement established to set standards for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions below 1990 levels. The United States has not ratified the protocol, which became binding in February 2005 on the 141 countries that have.
As part of the program, the city has already conducted a walk-through of city facilities with the Ketchum-based Environmental Resource Center and Idaho Power representatives to identify low-cost energy reduction methods. The city has also installed efficient lighting fixtures in its buildings and is in the process of doing so in streetlights, and has installed motion sensors to turn lights on and off in specific rooms. The benefits of these changes extend beyond just simple energy savings, said Hailey City Treasurer Becky Stokes.
"It's better lighting. It's less costly, and it's less consumptive," Stokes said.
The changes aren't all that difficult to make or endure, said citizen liaison Elizabeth Jeffrey.
"I hope we demonstrate how easy it is," Jeffrey said. "There's no suffering."
The program also concentrates on creating greener purchasing standards for the city.
Stokes said one of the benefits of Hailey's purchasing large quantities of green office products is that it helps drive down the cost of such products for the entire community.
"They're not so expensive," she said.
In the coming months, the program will reach what is perhaps its greatest milestone when its volunteers present the Hailey City Council with the results of a study looking at the city's overall carbon footprint, which contributes to the buildup of the greenhouse gasses blamed for global warming. Based on the study and recommendations the group makes, the council will consider ways to reduce the city's carbon footprint.
"The City Council will set goals to get back to pre-1990 levels," Jeffrey said.
