Conscious Choice: Chicago will be America's Greenest City

April 2002

Chicago will be America's Greenest City

by Jim Slama

Have you heard? America’s third largest city has set its sights on a new image. Hog butcher to the world is out. Solar power, energy efficiency, habitat restoration, and twenty-first century windmills are in. It’s an exciting time to be an environmentalist in Chicago.

The effort is being led by Mayor Daley. In the early years of his administration, he began an ambitious program to plant thousands of trees each year in neighborhoods across Chicago. Now more than 250,000 of these living air conditioners have been planted to provide oxygen and cooling throughout the summer. And inspired by world class cities like Paris and Rome, the mayor has also embarked on an ambitious beautification program in which grafitti is blasted, flowers are planted, and litter is cleaned up from streets and neighborhoods throughout the city.

In recent years, the Mayor teamed up with Commissioner of the Department of the Environment, Bill Abolt, a nine-year veteran of the administration. During his tenure, Abolt has led an impressive effort to make the city a global leader in renewable energy production and manufacturing. If you’re in Chicago, you don’t have to travel far to see some of his successful endeavors. Solar panels on the Field Museum, Art Institute, and Nature Museum come to mind. So does the rooftop garden on top of city hall. Next month the Chicago Center for Green Technology opens as a showcase green building that houses some cutting-edge environmental companies. And soon after that, internationally known green consultant Bill McDonough will introduce his view on what it will take to make Chicago America’s greenest city.

Abolt’s hard work and effectiveness recently were rewarded with a promotion. He is now Chicago’s Chief Management Officer, the number three job in city government, behind the Mayor and his Chief of Staff. This new position should give Abolt even more authority and resources to support the city’s green vision.

Jim Slama: Chicago has an intention to be the greenest city in America. Tell us about that goal and how it developed.

Bill Abolt: The vast array of environmental projects we have created are making the city more prosperous, more beautiful, and more healthy. People are paying attention to this because very few other major cities have defined themselves as green. You expect progressive policies in places like Seattle and Portland. When a big, diverse city like Chicago takes these steps it’s pretty significant. The bottom line is that Mayor Daley is committed and serious about our environmental initiatives and sees them as a key part of the city’s competitive strategy in the future.

What’s driving the mayor?

The mayor appreciates that cities are an environmentally friendly way to live. Dense urban areas served by good public transit are far preferable to far flung suburbs contributing to sprawl, traffic congestion, and the related air pollution. Mayor Daley also understands the importance of sustainability and the responsibility that he has to be a steward of the city and its resources. There is a tremendous opportunity to reconnect city dwellers with nature and with natural areas. With the right kind of programs we can beautify streets and neighborhoods, improve our air quality, and make the city more livable and attractive — the kind of place [where] you want to work and raise a family.

What kind of projects are you working on?

The city has a tremendous commitment to a variety of green programs. Chicago is already the leading big city for bicycling in North America. Our beautification program has placed planters loaded with beautiful plants and flowers throughout the city. Development of the museum campus park and reconstruction of the entire Lake Michigan shoreline are also important programs. Beyond that the city has the largest and most aggressive brownfields redevelopment program in the United States.

What’s a brownfield?

A brownfield is a piece of property that is under-utilized and has some kind of environmental contamination. Examples are an old gas station with a leaky oil tank or a former factory with contaminated grounds. You have to clean that contamination before you can redevelop the property. So the mayor was on the leading edge back in the early 1990s in turning brownfield sites around.

What is the cornerstone of your vision to make Chicago America’s greenest city?

The mayor has laid out an energy plan for Chicago that is strategically linked with this goal. The plan aims to meet most of our future electrical needs through a few simple strategies. The first is to transform the city of Chicago into one of the smartest energy managers out there by making most of our facilities energy efficient. The next strategy will use clean-burning small-scale power plants placed in city facilities to generate power at peak times. Those can be managed from one location and dispatched as needed without the additional cost of a new power plant. We were able to create what amounts to a six-and-a-half megawatt power plant in six weeks just by installing the technology. In a similar vein, we are working with a hospital association to convert the diesel generators used in over forty city hospitals to cleaner burning natural gas.

The third element of the plan is to promote renewable energy. Last year Mayor Daley committed to make the largest purchase of renewable power in the United States. So we signed a contract with Com Ed to develop 20 percent of the city’s electrical needs from renewable sources coming from the Chicago area. Some of it will come from burning methane that comes off landfills. The majority will come from new wind, solar, biomass, and small scale hydro-electric generation. The biggest challenge is getting the wind online, but already Com Ed has agreed to have fifty megawatts under construction this year with a commitment to sell us this wind power by the beginning of 2003.

Tell us more about your energy efficiency programs.

Mayor Daley has committed over a hundred million dollars to rehab buildings across the city to be more energy efficient. It’s going into everything from private developments to individual residences to city facilities. We will be retro-fitting over 15 million square feet of city facilities and building new facilities like public libraries and fire stations — all using state of the art energy efficiency technology. The rooftop garden on top of city hall is another example of our work in energy efficiency, with an estimated impact of about $4,000 a year in reduced energy costs. We are also putting in more efficient light bulbs in 145,000 traffic lights across the city, which will save taxpayers about $4.5 million in electric bills.

On a micro scale, last year when citizens were having problems with their gas bills we gave out vouchers in cooperation with Home Depot to weatherize homes. We are also constructing five new state of the art energy efficient homes and restoring four historic bungalows as a model for environmentally responsible residences.

How are you encouraging solar power?

This is a really exciting part of our green policy. We created incentives to lure Spire, a new solar manufacturing company to the city. They are the anchor tenant of our Chicago Center for Green Technology. The company will create about 100 good jobs. Using Spire technology we already put solar panels on top of the Field Museum, the Mexican Fine Arts Museum and the Art Institute. These are some of the biggest solar installations in the Midwest.

How did the Chicago Center for Green Technology come about?

The site has quite a history. It used to be an old demolition debris facility that we shut down when it got out of compliance. The company went into bankruptcy to protect themselves from having to pay the clean-up costs. So the city had to go to bankruptcy court and ultimately become the receiver of a seventeen-acre parcel on the west side of the city of Chicago. When we received title to it, the site had 600,000 cubic yards of construction debris piled up on top of it. So we applied some environmentally sound principles and recycled much of the debris, which cut our disposal costs in half. The concrete was crushed and used in everything from the construction of parking lots to roads and sewer projects.

Once the site was cleaned up it consisted of an abandoned building and twelve acres of vacant property. Our goal was to then find a green company to redevelop it in an environmentally friendly sort of way. At that point, we had reached a settlement agreement with Commonwealth Edison to create a $100 million green development fund which gave us the money to redevelop the site. In addition, the U.S. Department of Energy came to us and said that people are going to want to buy green power but there is no green power in Illinois. They recommended that we make a significant purchase commitment to lure a solar manufacturing company to Chicago. We did and that is how we landed Spire.

What other types of businesses do you want to attract to the Center?

We want Chicago to be the nation’s premier manufacturing center for green technology. In addition to Spire, we hope to land companies with other solar products such as thermal solar and integrated solar. I also think we can attract manufacturers who are involved in wind energy production. The Center also houses Greencorps Chicago, a community gardening program that also teaches job skills.

Is the city doing any other innovative economic development plans that tie in with the environment?

The Mayor has worked with Governor Ryan to create a $34 million program to revive the Lake Calumet area with a combination of environmental restoration and green business development. The centerpiece of the project is an initiative to restore and enhance the environmentally sensitive land in the region which has the largest collection of wetlands in the midwest. Ultimately we expect the Calumet Open Space Reserve to consist of over 3,000 acres of wetlands, streams, marshes, and lakes. This is great opportunity to enhance the wildlife in the region, because the area is home to so many unique species, including the yellow headed blackbird and black crowned night heron, both of which are on the Illinois endangered species list.

The plan for the area includes the development of a renewable energy center. We hope to build the country’s largest solar generating station as well as a facility to convert landfill gas (methane) to energy. In addition, we will create an environmental center to showcase the rich habitat and history of the area as well as to teach people about sustainable industrial and economic development.

Keep up the good work, Bill.

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