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Dane County Executive Joe Parisi in early April announced he will on May 3 after 13 years in office.
Since he was elected in 2011, Parisi’s administration has dealt with issues such as mental health, homelessness, affordable housing, sustainability and renewable energy. The county now has nearly 600,000 residents, and he said the nonstop growth has brought new challenges as well as opportunities.
“Initially, my plan is to enjoy the summer and spend time with my family,” Parisi said, sharing his retirement plans. “It all sounds like what everyone says when they retire, but it’s true. This is an extremely demanding job. I’m extremely grateful to have the opportunity to do this and can’t believe how fortunate I am. But I am at a point in my life where I want to step back and enjoy my family,” he added.
In 2017, the Dane County Office of Energy & Climate Change was founded to help reverse climate change and since then converted the county’s fleet to use natural gas and offset 100% of county government buildings with renewable electricity. The projects have helped the county reduce its carbon footprint and raise revenues.
Although Parisi said he felt at the time that he accomplished everything he wanted as county executive, he acknowledged the work is done only for a short amount of time before the landscape changes.
“I feel like I’ve accomplished everything I’ve wanted to accomplish in this position,” Parisi said. “The community and the needs are constantly evolving. So the work is never done for a long time, but I think this is a good time to hand it off to the next person,” he added.
Questions and answers have been edited for style and brevity.
The Daily Reporter: How did the Dane County Office of Energy & Climate Change start?
Joe Parisi: The Office of Energy & Climate Change was part of our climate-related and energy-related focus we’ve had for as long as I’ve been in office. We realized early on with climate change and our weather patterns changing that there were going to be things we needed to adapt to as a governmental unit. We have a highway department, a human services department, a clean lakes effort and so on.
We partnered with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to do an assessment of how likely climate change is likely to impact us locally. We’ve all heard about the forest fires in Canada, but as a local unit of government we need to be able to take care of our people right here. What the report told us, and this is before the floods a few years back, locally we’d see warmer and wetter winters, shorter winters, hotter summers and more intense rainfall. We certainly saw that a few years ago.
Heavy downpours can cause flooding and cause roads to wash out. We asked each of our departments to assess how changing weather patterns would impact them and made changes to adjust. For example, our highway department looked at how we grade and how we place roads. We’ve looked at using larger culverts. We’ve looked at what we can do about increased floods and temperatures. Our health department deals with certain insect-borne diseases we didn’t used to see here.
So, we decided we needed to adapt to the changes to be ready. Then we decided to look at how we can become part of the solution to climate change. And so we started investing in energy efficiency for our buildings. We started assessing our facilities’ ability to take solar power on the roofs. We started looking at how we can use renewable fuels. Part way through this journey, we decided to create an Office of Energy & Climate Change to focus specifically on these areas.
TDR: What are some recent key projects the office completed?
Parisi: As of 2023, we hit a milestone last year, two years ahead of our goal. We’re offsetting 100% of the energy our county government uses with renewable electricity, and we did that through solar panels on roofs and two utility-scale developments. We did one in partnership with Madison Gas and Electric and one in partnership with Alliant Energy. These are important to the evolving economy and to the construction trades.
We partnered with MGE to build a 10-megawatt solar field on some airport land. The deal was, we leased MGE the land, they built the field and we promised to buy the electricity. That’s a great example of creating local jobs by getting energy locally. This was during the pandemic when people were getting laid off and we had construction workers who were able to work outside and construct those panels. Just from that field of panels alone we save around $400,000 a year on our electric bill.
Our next project was to look at our landfills – folks know landfills create a lot of greenhouse gases – and we’ve always for decades extracted methane from our landfill for safety and to generate electricity. A few years ago we invested $28 million in a plant at a landfill to take the methane, clean it and compresses it and turn it into transportation-grade compressed natural gas.
We do two things with that: We fuel 100 of our vehicles, the big orange trucks people see plowing or working on the side of the road. Those are fueled by CNG, which has 400% lower greenhouse gas emissions than burning diesel. It costs the equivalent of a buck and half a gallon.
The CNG we can’t use because of capacity, which is quite a bit, we sell into the interstate natural gas pipeline. That’s purchased through a contract from Kwik Trip. The gas we sell we get renewable energy credits for, the county profits $7 million annually from that. It’s nice what’s good for the environment is good for the bottom line, too.
TDR: How did Dane County get on the cutting edge of affordable housing and other initiatives?
Parisi: A half-dozen years ago we started an affordable housing fund. The county didn’t have something like that before. But now we have millions of dollars a year that we make available to partner with other entities, developers, the state, cities, towns and villages to build affordable housing units. That’s been a successful initiative. We’re pumping tens of millions of dollars into building affordable housing.
We’ve also done things like the McKenzie Regional Workforce Center that the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County developed that provides training for construction trades. They work with WRTP | BIG STEP and others to help provide opportunity to young people and help provide a pipeline to the workforce. We chipped in a million and a half dollars to help that center become a reality.
Not only is this a facility that’s directly impacting and improving the workforce pipeline by providing skills and training for young people in construction trades, but they also invested up front in energy-efficiency and renewables. They have an extremely efficient building now with geothermal heat with minimal energy bills. When you have a nonprofit organization doing that kind of work, every dollar they don’t have to pay for energy they can put back in their training programs.
TDR: Tell me more about workforce initiatives under your watch.
Parisi: One of our workforce initiatives we’ve had that’s successful is our partnership with the Urban League of Greater Madison and the Latino Academy for Workforce Development as a way to provide opportunity to people in the community and create a job pipeline for commercial driver’s licenses for people in the highway department.
We created a program with those two groups where people get hired on as limited-term employees. While they’re doing their work as LTEs, they go through a training course and learn what’s necessary to take their CDL test. Once they take their CDL test, then they can apply for jobs at the highway department. We’ve created a really nice pipeline of folks coming into our highway department through the CDL program.
TDR: What do you see in the short term for Dane County?
Parisi: I see Dane County continuing to grow at an incredibly strong rate between the economy and the population. Therein lies both the challenges and the opportunities. Madison is becoming a bigger city. Dane County is pushing 600,000 now and that’s not going to slow down. All the issues of being a rapidly growing community is what we’re going to be dealing with, be it transportation, housing, societal and environmental issues. Those change and evolve as a community grows like we are.
