Director Named for Home Energy-Efficiency Initiative

A program that helps Bedford residents improve their homes' energy efficiency finally got its director today, a week after the town board delayed his appointment for procedural reasons.

At a special town board meeting Tuesday, environmental activist Thomas Bregman won unanimous approval to start work Wednesday as the $83,500-a-year director of the Home Energy Efficiency Retrofit program. The board also appointed a five-member advisory panel, comprising volunteers from a number of northern Westchester groups active in energy-conservation efforts.

The director's job, which officials clearly expect to see grow beyond Bedford's borders, depends entirely on federal money. If the funding—part of $2.52 million in current and projected grants from the U.S. Department of Energy—dries up, the director's job also vanishes, the board spelled out Tuesday.

Since Bedford has already banked about half of the anticipated grant money, Bregman's salary and benefits appear fully funded. Some financing for his ambitious Retrofit program, on the other hand, has hit a bureaucratic brick wall in Washington.

The Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program would have allowed municipalities to issue bonds to bankroll homeowners looking to take advantage of the Retrofit project. With a betterment charge attached to their property tax bill, homeowners would then repay the loan with their taxes. If homeowners sold the property, the new owner would take over the payments.

PACE was scheduled to launch as a two-year pilot program this summer, funded by $150 million in Department of Energy grants. But in July, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the regulator and conservator of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (Freddie Mac), directed those agencies to restrict mortgages for homeowners who live in municipalities that offer home energy retrofit programs, citing "unusual and difficult" financial risk of the program in an already fragile housing market.

As a result, PACE funding remains in limbo.

Both the House and the Senate are said to be considering bills that would override Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and clear the way for the program to begin in participating communities.

Bedford is a member of the Northern Westchester Energy Action Consortium. The NWEAC, or nee-wak, as it's called, is a coalition of 13 municipalities addressing common energy-conservation problems and other green issues. Bregman's job, the board said Tuesday, will begin as a Bedford position but is expected to transition over time to become largely a NWEAC post.  

Along with appointing Bregman, the town board also named an advisory panel to work directly with him. Mark Thielking, the town's director of energy resources, will chair the panel. Joining him are a NWEAC member, Leo Wiegman, the mayor of Croton-on-Hudson; a town representative, Councilman David Gabrielson, a longtime proponent of the conservation efforts; Mary Beth Kass, who chairs the Bedford Energy Advisory Panel (BEAP); and Olivia Farr, a Bedford Village environmentalist and treasurer of Bedford Twenty by 2020. Farr's group, part of the Bedford Climate Action Plan, is seeking greenhouse gas emissions that are 20 percent under 2004 levels by the year 2020.

Like the director's job, the advisory panel is designed to take on an increasingly larger NWEAC identification, replacing Gabrielson with a coalition member after one year and Kass with another NWEAC representative after two. A NWEAC member would also chair the advisory board beginning with the third year, although Thielking would retain a seat on the panel.

In a prepared statement released by the office of Supervisor Lee V.A. Roberts, Thielking pledged to "work closely with Tom to build capacity, provide links to trusted sources, leverage the federal funds to create robust financing options and move the program beyond its pilot phase."

The Retrofit program is seen as ultimately expanding to embrace all 13 NWEAC communities. It promotes residential energy efficiency though Energy Star assessments and retrofits in the home. Gabrielson, the Bedford councilman and advisory board member, estimates that the Retrofit program could benefit as many as 5,000 homes in Bedford alone.