SENTINEL NEWS SERVICE 
Those damned hippies are at it again! This time they're mounting solar panels ontop of the Kenton Fire House, home to the North Portland Neighborhoood Services office and other long haired racial groups. The building, long the scourge of decent god fearing folk, recently won an award for "Preservation in Action" from the Bosco-Milligan Foundation, a militant left wing group no doubt. When will President Palin come and wipe clean this liberal blight from our midst? When??!!! More on that later...until then. Carolyn Neuhausen has this report.
~Cornelius Swart
Kenton Firehouse plans to add solar panels this fall
By Carolyn Neuhausen
The Kenton Firehouse will be outfitted with solar panels this month, which will reduce the amount of energy used in the building by an estimated 50 percent.
“We’re assuming that the reduction [in energy usage] will be by 60 percent; 50 percent was a conservative estimate,” said Tom Griffin-Valade, director of North Portland Neighborhood Services.
The Firehouse, located at 8105 N Brandon St., was allotted $73,506 dollars from a community livability pot for the solar panel project, which will provide energy for lights, computers, air conditioning, and other office machines inside the Firehouse.
Funds for the solar panel renovation came from the Portland Development Commission’s Interstate Urban Renewal Area (IURA) division. Though the funds came from the PDC, it is the community volunteers who sit on a variety of committees that decided to fund the solar panel project for the Kenton Firehouse.
“It’s really local citizens who volunteer to serve on these committees and so we’re even more gratified that it’s local people seeing that this building is a priority,” said Griffin-Valade.
One of the local citizens who helped with the solar panel project is Dexter Gauntlett who works as a clean energy researcher with Green Empowerment.
“The St. Johns Neighborhood Association provided a letter of support to the application — and we’ve identified the clean energy job sector as something we would like to connect North Portland residents to since we have a large population of people who have experience in manufacturing and interest in clean energy,” said Gauntlett.
Gauntlett hopes that placement of the panels on such a public facility will build interest in the efficiency and uses of solar power and will create lasting interest in solar energy as an industry.
The solar panels will reduce the carbon footprint of the Firehouse and save North Portland Neighborhood Services money in the long run. These savings will be passed on to community members through lower rental fees of the building’s facilities, said Griffin-Valade.
If energy prices stay the same and the Firehouse is able to get pass-through tax credits for saving energy, the panels are expected to pay for themselves in 20 years.
Because the Firehouse was built in 1913 and is an historical landmark, the project underwent a design review to evaluate whether the solar panels would interfere with the building’s historical integrity.
If all goes well with the design review, the Firehouse will get permits to start the project in early October. In September, the building will be re-roofed so that once the panels are installed, there will be no need to pull them off again and retile the roof for at least another two decades.
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