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SLO’s Sustainability Director Leading Region

Marcus Carloni has already been with the City of San Luis Obispo for seven years, but unless members of the public are watching City Council and Planning Commission meetings like a hawk, they may not have seen his work.

On June 20, his new role with the City got a very public launch on the steps of City Hall with speeches from Mayor Heidi Harmon and Councilwoman Andy Pease introducing the concept of Net Zero Energy Day on the summer solstice and Carloni as the City’s new Sustainability Coordinator.

It’s a job created to execute a focus on climate action as a ‘Major City Goal.’

With both the press conference and the solstice taking place in the middle of a heat wave, the proclamation for Net Zero is timely, but requires some explanation.

“Net zero energy” as the City has adopted the phrase, refers to energy-efficient buildings that are designed to produce enough energy to meet its own annual energy consumption.   A bunch of diesel burning generators in the basement don’t count though – as are often implemented as backups in hospitals and other public buildings – the whole point is to lower the carbon footprint of new construction and increase renewable energy sources.

Six months into the job and Mayor Harmon is more practiced at delivering the green energy stump speech than ever, explaining from the podium that a focus on net zero would keep SLO a beautiful, safe and prosperous place and that she was “personally excited…as an activist” to be implementing climate action as a city goal for the first time.

Carloni was also pleased, more so that he was leaving the post of Special Projects Manager for one that let him focus on the reason he studied city planning at Cal Poly in the first place.

“It is a bit of a passion, sustainability,” he said. “That’s what I went to school to do. Absorbing these responsibilities was the natural flow from the projects I’ve been working on.”

One of the projects he now intends to spearhead will be teaming up with those interested at the County level to create an alternative to traditional energy utilities through Community Choice Aggregation.  Eric Veium an Energy & Sustainability Analyst with Cal Poly, attended the Net Zero announcement as part of his interest on the Leadership Team of the SLO Clean Energy Coalition.

“I’m excited that we have resources being dedicated to this now with him [Carloni] on the job,” said Vieum. “This has been building for years and we just missed [having Climate Action named a Major City Goal] by a hair during the last cycle.”

He added that the efforts being piut forward now were perfect timeing as County staff are expected to have a feasibility study back to the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors, “any day now.”

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