OPINION: Working together to green Long Island's homes

Identify a vital interest during a time of crisis, mix in leaders on Long Island seeking to transform "business as usual" and add in a little competition along with collaboration. What do you get? The beginning of a movement that demonstrates how leaders in government, business and the nonprofit sectors can tackle the challenge of high energy costs, dependence on foreign oil and the need to create a new green economy.

The Long Island Green Homes and Building Consortium demonstrates that large, complex problems can be addressed regionally on Long Island - even though we Long Islanders pride ourselves on "home rule" and have multiple jurisdictions to prove it.

Community Development Corp. of Long Island has weatherized 15,000 homes of low-income people in the last 20 years. The effort is helping homeowners on a fixed income save money on their oil, gas and electric bills.

The Town of Babylon, in late 2007, decided that all homeowners, regardless of their income, could benefit from "retrofitting" their homes. That's a fancy way of saying, adding insulation, doing weather-stripping, upgrading inefficient heating systems and completing other cost-saving improvements that reduce energy bills nearly 30 percent. With the high cost of energy, that's a lot of money to save!

The work for both the Town of Babylon and the CDC program is done by local contractors who have found a way to expand their businesses (or to start new ones), thereby stimulating the economy.

So when the Department of Energy put out a challenge grant meant to stimulate innovative ideas to ramp up programs to offer all homeowners the opportunity to make their homes more energy efficient, Long Island was already in good shape.

And then, an amazing thing happened: Eight towns came together in a consortium to develop a retrofitting program with uniform features. The uniformity would enable the money to pay for the work to be secured in the capital markets. But each town also had the flexibility to develop program features that would appeal to their residents.

For example, the Town of Huntington is starting its outreach to residents with an education focus - teaching homeowners about work they can do themselves, like changing their incandescent bulbs to fluorescent. Then the town can evaluate which homes are "leaky" and can encourage those people to do a deep retrofit.

The result of this collaboration has been a living, breathing laboratory for learning what works in achieving a critical goal: a movement in which people become aware that they can save energy in their homes, reduce their carbon footprints, and stimulate a green economy on Long Island by taking simple steps that will also save them money.

While the consortium's application for Department of Energy grant money wasn't accepted, New York State did win some funds. And the consortium got a boost when Rep. Steve Israel (D-Huntington) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) encouraged the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to set aside $5 million from its grant for Long Island.

That's good news for taxpayers who will benefit from federal dollars coming back to Long Island. It's good news for contractors who will be employed to make the home improvements. And it's good news for the consortium, which can continue to work across jurisdictional lines to demonstrate that when a vital interest is at stake, a regional approach leads to solutions in our interdependent world.