City Hall: Anti-Salmon?

Seattle City Light offers a conservation program for businesses great and small.

If only City Hall would look into it. The P-I reports today that the new, energy-efficient City Hall uses 15 to 50% more electricity (depending on the month) than the old one. This is doubly surprising given that the heating and cooling relies primarily on natural gas, not electricity.

Seattlest urges City Hall to think of the salmon, and take action. It's well known that salmon and hydroelectric power go together like "endangered" and "species list."

The news of this year-long electrical sucking sound has got everyone scratching their heads, oddly enough. Seattlest is in the habit of monitoring its electric bill monthly to manage usage. Isn't this someone's job over there?

City Light Superintendent Jorge Carrasco tries to put a happy-face, be-here-now spin on things. If the building didn't have energy-saving measures it does have, he says, it'd be using 19% more than its current prodigal amount. Perhaps Pogo still has something to teach us.

Short of space aliens stealing the electricity (though reports have them operating in Chile), Seattlest supposes that the new City Hall uses more electricity for the same glaringly obvious reason that gas-sipping cars use more gas. When something says "energy-efficient," people tend to read "unlimited, guilt-free usage." So let's see if City Hall can tighten its own belt.