her welcome to the westwood public works update i'm your host today backhands and today we'll be talking to todd courtship and tom feldman about some projects that are going on in westwood so this is our second episode and hopefully this will be very interesting and useful for people in town to know what's going on in the summer so first of all i'd like todd to give us an update on some of the construction as of right now currently to date we started off the project for the summer i th winter joint done especially a lot of these projects that will make things safer one of the you mentioned the sheriff he sort of described for people watching shares or shared use lanes or it's a marking for the to remind voters that bicycles could be in the road and also remind bicycles that they can use they can use the road they want to ride in the gutter and they can know they should be traveling with the traffic so you'll see these markings on  street of street they've recently the entire distance again street now has these markings and i've ridden them myself and it helps a little bit it helps to feel you have a little more of a right to be there and done here and still you always want to update and i'm i want to turn things over time here tom is the energy efficiency manager for the town of west which is a new position i think right last few years and yes maybe you could describe going to how your role ago westwood became a green community and such kind of grants as that part of that it's actually becoming a green community that grant was expanded by putting new boilers in and lighting efficiency and so forth but after that the town is committed now to reduce over a five year period it's a new consumption by twenty percent so my role is to make sure that comes forward and then we can and we have a lot of projects that we then have to kick of companies that in the long term we just recently competed with other towns in the commonwealth for a grant from green communities which is on an annual basis and we were awarded two hundred forty two thousand dollars to help with these projects which is and will go a long way toward accomplishing more of trying to do i give you a quick overview of what we are going to do by way of projects the biggest and most interesting one is converting all of the street lights in the town each light to communicate with each light and communicate back to the central facility and this sets up what we call a radio frequency mesh over the town and what we're trying to do then long term is using that mesh you can communicate with different buildings you can maybe read meters you can move plot hops control temperature in buildings and all kinds of energy efficiency oriented controls with the goal of a minimizing consumption through the mesh that would be set up they call a mesh it's actually a radio frequency mesh set up all the time there are other cities i've done that the city of new haven for example has done that and the city of cambridge is doing it and we're among the first that are doing it on the smaller scale  quit wherever we can so the new fire station and the new police station are going to be at their big plan with the idea that it will be sold and approved ops but we're going to go in a broader basis accuse them of the whole town back the costs it's a four year payback on the street life for example for all the town will be contributing roughly eighty percent of the cost of their solution the twenty percent come from the grant and then maybe some of the money that will get from ever source for we have incentives if you look at the cost of that project the savings and electric will pay for the cost of the insulation here of about four years and then they last for a lifetime here they last they're guaranteed for ten years totally guaranteed for ten years by installer in the last they should last one and then also the system that will have to monitor every street light in town will give us accountability and more or less an asset management style format where we're going to be able to assess what street lights  percent of the electric consumption of the library in the lighting will be cut out and that will give immediate savings and the same thing for the downy controls will help with the gas consumption will and everything else  propose projects these products are used by the engineers it's part of the army resources deal we are and they pick the ones they think of best and they fund so we have like in this one and this year it's the grants plus money down the