While this specific program didn’t gain momentum, the city is seeing successes in other sustainability initiatives, said Chase Jones, energy conservation coordinator for the city of Missoula. The city adopted a Conservation and Climate Action Plan in January 2013, and Jones is at work on implementation.

The city has started to comprehensively track its energy consumption using a program called Utility Trac Plus, Jones said. He said the city is compiling data for every electric and natural gas meter in municipal operations from 2010 to the present.

“We have wonderful goals in our plan, but we can’t really manage for improvement or success toward those goals if we don’t know where we are and if we don’t measure and track,” Jones said.

He named Park Place, the parking garage on Front Street, as another feather in the city’s conservation cap. At the time the parking garage opened, he said, it was the largest solar photovoltaic installation in the state, and it will power roughly 80 percent of the building’s energy needs.

“That’s a really great thing to be proud of and I think a huge model for the future of how the city is going to do buildings,” Jones said.

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