BY ADAM ATKINSONNorth Country This Week

POTSDAM -- The village has adopted a new slate of policies and procedures for analyzing the energy usage of its municipal buildings.

The energy use benchmarks, which is part of the village's Climate Smart Communities Task Force work, will help the village to apply for grant funding for sustainability projects.

The village board of trustees and mayor approved the new procedures at their meeting on Aug. 19.

"This is very long, complicated wording all to say this is part of the Climate Smart Planet Smart Communities Task Force work and the Energy Smart Communities work," Mayor Alexandra Jacobs Wilke told the board.

"In short there is an EPA portal and we are gathering our energy usage data for municipal buildings of 1,000 square feet or larger from the past two full calendar years," Wilke said.

"It's just going through all those bills and the energy usage and the amount we spent. It gets uploaded into this portal and it will earn us a free energy study. It should identify ways we might plan ahead to improve our infrastructure and energy use and it gets us points towards all those sustainability grants," Wilke said. "So, this is part of all that."

The new policies and procedures list definitions, set down deadlines for the information gathering and how that data will be disclosed to the public. The resolution also specified how the benchmark information will be managed and maintained and how the reporting will be enforced at the village level.