A growing number of Minnesota cities are using an innovative new website to be more green, and the company that developed that site is reaping its own rewards.
LHB Inc., a Duluth-based firm with an office in the Twin Cities, has made measuring energy efficiency and sustainability a top priority for the hundreds of commercial and residential projects the company has designed and engineered.
Several years ago, LHB began applying those same high standards to the cities that participate in the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency's GreenStep Cities Program, which helps communities become more sustainable by reducing their consumption of natural resources, including energy and water.
While the program tracked which of its best practices the cities adopted, it didn't have a way to evaluate how effective these strategies have been at actually making the city more sustainable.
Rick Carter, LHB's executive vice president and a performance metrics expert, led the effort to collect, summarize and measure that data.
"How would the cities know if what they set out to accomplish by completing 14 out of the 28 Best Practices actually happened," said Carter. "The answer was unclear."
The solution was the Regional Indicators Initiative (http://regionalindicatorsmn.uli.org), a website that was initially launched in 2010, but was made available to the public last year with five years of data for 22 Minnesota communities, including Woodbury, Oakdale and Lake Elmo. LHB developed and manages the site in collaboration with the Urban Land Institute of Minnesota.
While this initiative is helping communities monitor their sustainability, the idea of measuring and tracking performance has helped LHB survive the Great Recession, and promises to help build revenues into the future.
