How do we pay for a City of Lights?

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced recently that he wants to boost tourism in Chicago by making the city a new "City of Lights", a la Paris.  Without overly dwelling on the decision in Paris to tone down the lights in order to avoid wasting energy, the proposal to do so in Chicago raises two issues that I am not sure will be addressed by those charged with implementing this vision.  One of the concerns has to do with the already suspect commitment to the environment shown by the mayor's agenda.  The second concerns the double standard applied to environmental decisions relative to ones of other forms of "commerce".

The obvious concern deals with the additional energy required to power an expanded lighting of the city's architecture.  At a time when Chicago's benchmarking ordinance and new green building requirements have made building owners rethink the "light all night" philosophy, reducing energy use, environmental impact, and urban light pollution, the current administration now wants to reverse some of those gains with a new initiative to drive tourism.  On the surface, this seems remarkably hypocritical, especially when the current Sustainable Chicago 2015 plan calls for a 5% reduction in energy use...but the goal appears to be to achieve the City of Lights after 2015 after the reduction goal.  This can be addressed by requiring the cost of the project to include additional, unplanned reduction in electricity usage to offset the added usage.  Or better yet, to require new, distributed and renewable energy sources be used to power the new installations...perhaps with newly developed battery storage technology coming out of Argonne National Laboratory.  Pursuing the new lighting initiative does not necessarily mean it will be detrimental to the environment, it would just take an approach not yet shown by the administration to accomplish it.

On a more important note, we should hold initiatives like this to the same scrutiny that we apply to energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other environmental projects.  Do the investment of money, energy, and environmental damage actually deliver the five million extra visitors?  Already, questions have arisen as to whether this initiative would deliver the desired increase better than additional festivals, events, and other forms of tourism development.  I hope that when the true costs of the initiative come out, that the analysis provides the guarantee that tourism will increase...at least to the point that those of us in the energy field have to justify the return on investment of efficiency and renewable energy projects.

Tourism helps the local economy.  An increased number of visitors mean more eyes on the city, and a greater chance that more help will become available to the most distressed among us.  I want tourism, and I want improved quality of life.  I just hope that those who have pushed for this have to clear the economic hurdles and guarantee the results, then they have to account for and address all the environmental concerns.  Increasing economic development for some, but not for all, is not worth it.