PUSH grant to upgrade business buildings

By Bryan Price and Nick Stutzman
BengalNews Reporters

The West Side and the areas surrounding it have many historic commercial buildings but some of these structures face hazardous and maintenance issues because of their age. Building issues such as bad foundations, leaking pipes, out of date lighting fixtures and drafty windows are eyesores to the community.

 That’s where the PUSH Green Building Retrofit Program makes an impact, and its target is small commercial buildings and non-profit organizations on the West Side and across Western New York.

PUSH leaders discuss the retrofit program:

Launched on March 27, the $800,000 incentive grant has a goal to upgrade Buffalo’s buildings by making them more affordable and more energy efficient, improvements that will make them more sustainable in the long term.

PUSH Green Director of Workforce Initiatives Clarke Gocker considers this program a way for owners to afford their building renovations, in what might not have been available before, using PUSH as the point of entry.

“This program is to leverage the private investments that small businesses make. And so a $35,000 cap is seen as a carrot to incentivize them to dig deep to do big improvements that will help turn our communities around,” Gocker said.

Gocker said that PUSH Green will be the liaison between the building owners and the contractor who will walk them through the process of conducting the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s Green Jobs-Green energy audit. Then PUSH will take the load off of the energy auditor, taking the customer and handling the rest of the process, such as guiding them through the financing to perform the work needed. Incentives from NYSERDA partners from across New York State can help lenders offer energy efficient financing.

Local developer Rocco Termini agrees that there is a lot of different things that this money can be used for that will benefit qualified grant recipients, and it’s an organization like PUSH that makes the process all the easier.

“I think it’s a really good program. I don’t think you could have found a better organization to administer this program other than PUSH,” Termini said. “PUSH understands what we all go through to rehab a building, so I think this going to be a very successful program and I would encourage everybody to get their applications in as soon as possible because there is only a limited amount of resources.”

Applicants will be required to provide documented evidence of funding for the project costs.

PUSH Green Program Manager, Kate Howard is in charge of the residential energy efficiency program that launched January 2012. The program was the stepping-stone that helped create the building retrofit program.

 Buffalo has the third oldest housing stock in the nation. And since PUSH’s home base is on the West Side, Howard says there has been an outreach to the community to access these incentives and make upgrades to existing homes.

“Part of living in Buffalo, is that you live in old houses. So they are interesting and beautiful, but completely inefficient and expensive to maintain,” Howard said.

Having the energy assessments and showing the homeowners where they can save money, just like the building program, they can get work done that they needed or didn’t know they needed done. Howard said on average, owners could save 20 percent to 40 percent off their utility costs and bills.

Examples of house improvements are new furnaces and heating systems, new insulation, blower door assisted air ceiling, duct work; essentially a whole house retrofit. Anyone across Erie County can benefit from these programs.

These programs are also helping the economically troubled community with working alongside Green contractors. These contractors are benefiting from the demand of work provided from the programs, as well as employing local skilled workers who need jobs. There are about 35 new jobs estimated to be created by these programs.