Turning off the lights

During my first year in office, I was walking out of the county government center to my car, following an evening public hearing. The sheriff deputy who watches over the buildings at night was standing by the entrance of the parking garage and said to me, "Supervisor McGimsey, turn around and look at that building. I think every light is on, in empty offices, and it's like that all the time. We're wasting energy and money, aren't we?"

He was absolutely right. We figured out that even if county staff were turning off the lights at the end of the workday, the cleaning staff had not been trained to turn them off when they were done cleaning.

I am happy to say that nowadays, you'll see most of the lights turned off.

Our energy manager, Najib Salehi, likes to say that if he lit a match and burned a dollar bill, people would say, "What is wrong with this guy?" He tells us that leaving the light switch on is as good as burning money.

Do you see government buildings where we need to turn off the lights? Let me know, and I'll follow up with the appropriate staff.

A new blog for Loudoun

Loudoun County is a wonderful place to live, work, and play, and because of that great quality of life, we attract many new residents and businesses every year. Our growing community means our local government provides more services every year, from Fire and Rescue to teaching our children.

The goal of this blog is to create a dialogue in the community about how we can best utilize our tax dollars to provide those valuable local services. I want to look for ideas together for where we can find efficiencies and economies of scale, identify and reduce waste, do things in a smarter way, etc. We have a highly educated community, and I am hoping that together, we can make Loudoun an even better place to live.

I will take the good ideas that we generate here back to the County Administrator and see what we can implement. I will report back any savings we are able to achieve.

Welcome to Streamline Loudoun.