City Council Seeks Clean Energy Grant

Environmental concerns dominated discussion at last night’s Cambridge City Council meeting.

If all goes as planned, solar power will soon be beaming in to Cambridge’s Andrew Peabody School, City Manager Robert W. Healy said at the meeting. The city is seeking a Clean Energy Choice grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, a state agency that promotes development of green energy.

The grants, which will be awarded next May, allot a minimum of $100,000 for renewable energy and energy efficiency measures in municipal buildings that serve low income residents. The Peabody school qualifies for the program because more than 50 percent of its students qualify for free and reduced lunch, Healy said at the meeting.

The city will submit a grant application detailing its plan to install photovoltaic solar panels at the school, which serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade, later this week.

“With any luck...some kids could learn how they work and end up working with photovoltaic cells in the future,” said Jason Taylor, a Peabody School parent who spoke during the public comment segment of the meeting.

City Councilor Sam Seidel, who requested in September that Healy look into the grants, said he had hoped that the city’s affordable housing projects would be eligible. But the projects are privately-owned, and only city-owned buildings qualify for the grant program, Healy said.

If the City does not secure the grant, it will apply again in nine to 12 months, he added.

The Council also discussed efforts to implement a bicycle share program for the Boston region. Assistant City Manager Beth Rubenstein said that a regional program would be more feasible than the Cambridge-only bike sharing program that the Council had floated previously.

“We’re more ambitious than that,” Rubenstein said. “We want people to envision biking from Cambridge to Bridgeport.”

But Seidel said that he was concerned such a large-scale program would stall. “Community to community cooperation can take a lot of work to get a very small distance,” he said.

City Councilor Craig Kelley added that he thought Cambridge streets might not be safe enough to support such a program. At the beginning of the meeting, several residents had remarked on the danger of biking in the city.

—Staff writer Sarah J. Howland can be reached at showlands@fas.harvard.edu.