Adam Sontag, the city administrator for the city of Rippon is joining us this morning.
Good morning, Adam.
Good morning.
Thanks for having me again.
I
appreciate you coming in.
Of course.
The city is looking at an energy plan or actually developed an energy plan.
I guess this was a couple years in the making, maybe?
Maybe a little less than a year.
We had applied for funding through the Public Service Commission.
through what is called like a rural, I think enterprise, sorry, rural energy startup program, RESP.
So the PSC gave us an RESP grant for $75,000 to complete our first energy plan.
And really the idea was to look at the city's current energy consumption and find areas in where we
you know, can save money, become more efficient.
The city has executed plans in the past, right, or projects in the past.
We've, you know, taken street lights and made them LED.
We've retrofitted LED in terms of, you know, light lighting and buildings, all that stuff.
So some smaller projects.
But what we sort of learned during some of the projects we've been doing, whether it's senior activity center, library, public works building, all of those buildings are built to be really
efficient, but we didn't really have a chance in the design there to talk a lot about renewables or how to kind of go that next step beyond just designing an efficient building.
So the study and the plan really was kind of setting us up for the future as to making energy planning a bigger priority for
projects as well as just kind of reviewing what we were currently doing.
So there's a presentation done.
We contracted with a company out of Green Bay called GDS and Associates.
They do a lot of energy planning across the state.
for schools and municipalities and private businesses and Generally speaking, you know the they looked at you know our newer buildings and said these have all been designed and are operating really efficiently You could probably could tweak some things, but generally speaking pretty good They looked at our wastewater treatment plant, which is our by far our largest energy user and they looked at
our city hall, which city hall is not very efficient.
It's been built on three different times.
So we looked at other projects like solar.
We looked at our fleet as well and making sure we are looking at renewable options there because, you know, our squad cars don't get a lot of miles per gallon, right?
They're idling a lot and the things we can do there.
And then we have, you know, one vehicle like a Maverick that's
partial hybrid and that thing can get up to 60, 70 miles per gallon at times.
So, you know, right, right, getting the right vehicle for the, the actual use.
So it's more efficient.
So that was presented some good information in there.
Is it also information for the public?
We wanted to make it more outreach as well and provide resources for.
businesses and community members, whether it's focus on energy, financing grants, things like that that are available for people to maybe become more energy efficient as well.
Our view from the city's perspective, we've done some things that have...
been more efficient, but the cost of electricity is going to do nothing but likely go up.
So what can we do to at least kind of stabilize that for ourselves in our budgets and in our spending?
So this was like a 10-year plan?
Yeah, it's about a 10-year plan.
It had different suggestions and projects.
And then what it allows us to do is basically build off of this grant.
The PSC then has other grants.
And so you can apply once you have the plan to actually implement a project.
So we'll look next into what makes sense.
It's not like we're going to go all in by a bunch of electric vehicles for our
Public Works Department, it's not like we're gonna go putting up solar everywhere, but where this makes sense and over time Where where we can implement and track things and and make you know the right investment we'll use this plan as kind of another Checkbox right to make sure when we're planning a project or we see a problem.
We can address it
Okay Another thing that is being done is kind of a revamp of the city's zoning code
yes it's been uh that's been over a year in in the making but yes the um the city contracted about a year plus ago to um work on a zoning code update and really there's there's not a lot changing in terms of the the content of the zoning code it's more formatting um there are certainly um
You know some challenges within the current zoning code how it reads and how people like you know just have to interact with it.
It's just pages upon pages and it Contradicts itself and it's been basically added upon and you know cobbled together over
30 plus years right so kind of resetting it all into more Easier to use format that's more searchable or table-ized and then just looking at some of the uses and Making sure it makes sense where we're what we're allowing in certain districts and what we're not allowing what's permitted what's required a conditional use You know making sure definitions make sense for today versus you know
It's just like, you know, work from home, for example, versus home occupations versus a residential business activity.
There's a lot of different little things.
So the council or the plan commission held a public hearing in August.
The common council reviewed the initial changes last week.
And then in early September, we'll look at the full package.
Okay.
So when this comes to development, this is a way for the city to make sure that everything is zoned properly.
Yeah, it provides the framework for how we we develop as a community so the zoning code is uses right land use So it at times maybe makes it more easier for development other times it maybe makes it more challenging for you know obvious reasons You don't want to make you know, you want complementary development and complementary uses so you don't have conflicts So generally speaking you have your residential districts your commercial districts
You have your industrial districts and then some conservancy institutional and it's it's enough none of that's really changing It's just some of the the uses within those are changing in terms of what's allowed and what's required for conditional use and then what's not allowed
We talked a little bit about the Pacific Street bridge not in Great detail.
Yeah, but the city has been awarded a major grant to
Correct this bridge problem.
Yeah, so the Pacific Street bridge is our lowest rated bridge We've been a few years back We had an engineering assessment done of all of our creek crossings right not everything is a bridge, but it's considered a bridge
It's very it's very bizarre, right?
We have I think 13 or so bridges in the city or crossings I believe three or four of those are DOT rated which means they are 20 foot span or more and if you're 20 foot span or more you're allowed to obtain funding to rebuild bridges at an 80 20 grant through the state and I have a program and I've had this program for a long time that leaves like eight or nine bridges in the city that are under
20 feet that you basically are the cities to fund, right?
So Pacific Street being one of those East Jackson is one of them State Street Bridge.
We reconstructed a few years ago.
It was a few thousand dollar project and that was just kind of two box culverts, but there's utilities and other things, right?
So it gets pretty expensive pretty quickly, but Pacific Street Bridge was by far the lowest rated bridges rated a two and the state came out with what's called the local small structure improvement program and that program was at a 90-10
And what the state recognized is that they had a lot of bridges that weren't eligible for that other program, right?
Pacific Street Bridge is only 19 feet.
It's one foot short, right?
Not eligible, right?
Yet a bridge right down the road on Eureka is eligible because it's 20 plus feet.
So we were awarded $1.6 million at a 90-10.
split with the state.
We'll work on finalizing those plans over the next couple of years.
We'll also look at Pacific Street as that's been on our capital plan.
The road is pretty in rough shape.
There's other utilities there.
There's lift stations.
There's property acquisition.
There's floodplain considerations that need to be made.
So it's a pretty major project.
So it's pretty expensive.
And we obviously put inflationary impacts in there as well.
So hopefully it comes in under that number.
and in total we hope to do a pretty big project there all together.
The bridge is just sort of the first funded piece of that and we'll begin planning that out.
So as you can see there now there's a couple like blocks on the side and it's kind of shrunken and that's because somebody hit one of the posts or the guardrails on the side and we couldn't actually repair it because we would have to like
repair the entire bridge.
We couldn't put it back the way it was because that's not how you're supposed to build a bridge anymore.
Just how they constructed it previously is not compliant and not safe.
So the condition continues to fail.
It's still safe to cross at this point, and we would assume by the time we repair it, it'll still be safe to cross, but certainly it has seen better days.
And it's 60, 70 plus years old, I believe, some of the elements of the bridge.
So that's one, we still have eight more to tackle over time.
So we hope the state continues to fund these programs because they are very helpful, and these things are not cheap, and we have a number of them in our community.
Adam, thank you for joining us.
Of course.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
We've been talking with Adam Sontag, who is the city administrator for the city of Rippon.