We have the weather. We have the terrain. Give us the bike lanes. It is time to make Charleston the bicycling capital of the Southeast.

I would like to put forth a program that collects and publishes our energy usage as a county, either monthly or quarterly.

Gasoline, Natural Gas, Electricity, water, recycling and solid waste.

Publishing these statistics will make us much more aware how much we are actually consuming. Using these numbers, we can track together how much we use, and collectively work to bring these numbers down.

Sometimes it is hard to get motivated to conserve when looking at individual home energy bills, when only a few dollars are at stake each month. It would be different if we tracked these numbers as a county where tens of thousands of dollars of potential savings are at stake. It is even more important when you realize that we import almost all of the energy we use.

Carry on.

The impending expansion to an industrial lubricants facility in North Charleston is certainly a good thing for our local economy. I would like to suggest, in light of our already extremely poor air quality, that local government work closely with DHEC to insure that the best possible air quality control standards are initiated at the plant.