Although the Obama administration made it a point to encourage environmentally friendly infrastructure, the ambitious timeline of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) gave applicants little time to undertake "next-generation" projects.
Instead, most stimulus-funded projects are touting water and energy efficiency-certainly nothing groundbreaking, but green nonetheless. "It's primarily water conservation, water metering, and leak efficiency," explains James Taft, executive director of the Association of State Drinking Water Agencies.
The stimulus package added $2 billion to this year's $829 million federal allocation for Drinking Water state revolving loans, and the Clean Water loan program caught a windfall of $4 billion on top of its $689 million allocation -- a three-fold increase in just one year. But there was a catch: 20% must be awarded to projects that qualify under at least one of four categories: energy efficiency, water efficiency, green infrastructure, and environmental innovation.
Everything from installing water meters to replacing leaky pipes to the adding leak-detection equipment is eligible for - and receiving - "Green Project Reserve" monies, but state loan officials aren't seeing much true innovation.
"City engineers are going for the easy, low-hanging fruit like energy-efficient projects," says Bill Harkins, technical review manager for the Indiana Finance Authority, which administers both of the state's revolving loan programs.
As of Oct. 5, states had entered into assistance agreements totaling $288.4 million for "green" drinking water projects and $135.9 million for "green" clean water efforts. Many states are still processing applications, so for some projects it's now become a waiting game.
To help establish priority lists and avoid delays in case the regional EPA office were to request additional information to determine whether a project qualifies categorically (thereby requiring no additional documentation) for Green Project Reserve funds, many states required all applicants to formally document the environmentally friendly aspects of their projects. The EPA requires that business cases identify inefficiencies and determine the savings associated with water and energy efficiency improvements before they can be approved for funding.
While projects that generate energy from biosolids, feature wind turbines or hydrogenerators, and use green roofs automatically qualify, more mundane projects have received categorical exclusions as well.
Wastewater pump improvements, the installation of sludge dryers, the addition of distribution pipes for water reuse, and the replacement of old motors with variable frequency drives all qualify categorically as long as the application documented that the changes would achieve a 20% net energy reduction. Because systemwide audits are performed with the expectation that they will reveal unaccounted energy and water losses, they qualify as well.
In Indiana, where all Green Project Reserve funding has been exhausted, $22.5 million in "green" Clean Water loans was awarded to 18 projects. Tiny Dugger (pop. 930) received $942,000 to replace coarse bubble diffusers with fine bubble diffusers at the wastewater treatment plant, while Columbus received $4 million toward a $56 million project to install high-efficiency motors and a high-efficiency heating system in its wastewater treatment plant.
In Georgia, many applicants are still waiting to hear if they've been approved for the remaining $321,000 of the state's $7.3 million Green Project Reserve allocation for drinking water projects. Unlike Indiana, communities applied specifically for either green funding or standard revolving loans.
Since the March 9 deadline, only four projects have been funded, says Shane Hix, spokesperson for the Georgia Environmental Financing Authority. If all the funding is not obligated, it will be transferred into the state's regular loan fund.
Like their counterparts in Indiana, all have highlighted efficiency in their applications. The city of Calhoun received $1.5 million to upgrade approximately 5,500 water meters for automated reading; the Carroll County Water Authority got $4.6 million to upgrade 17,000 water meters for automated reading; and the city of Tennille received $250,000 to replace almost 800 aging water meters with electronic meters. The financing will also fund a systemwide leak detection study.Sixty percent of the principal will be forgiven on all loans, and recipients will pay 3% interest on the balance of the loan portion for 10 years.
