FAYETTEVILLE — A new sustainability and strategic planning director is set to start work with the city July 23.
Mayor Lioneld Jordan and his chief of staff, Don Marr, hired Peter Nierengarten earlier this month. He is a University of Arkansas graduate with more than eight years of civil engineering and energy management experience with the Portland (Ore.) Water Bureau.
Nierengarten will replace John Coleman, who left the city in January to pursue a job with Viridian, a private sustainable building consulting firm.
PROFILE
Peter Nierengarten
Fayetteville’s new sustainability and strategic planning director was selected earlier this month from a pool of 14 applicants who met the minimum qualifications for the job.
Age: 35
Hometown: Born in Atlanta, raised in Arkadelphia
Family: Wife, Meredith; son, Austin, 10 months old
Education: B.S. and M.S. in civil engineering, University of Arkansas, 2000 and 2001
Experience: Engineer, Portland (Ore.) Water Bureau, 2003 to present; project engineer, USI Consulting Engineers (Springdale), 2001 to 2003
Other Qualifications: Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) accredited
Fayetteville’s $70,000-a-year position is one that’s uncommon in many Arkansas cities, but it’s a position Jordan and Marr said is valuable to their goal of keeping Fayetteville at the forefront of environmental issues.
“It’s a position that moves the city into a new level in the future,” Jordan said. “Not only does it save us in costs and energy efficiency, but it literally cuts back on the use of fossil fuels.”
Nierengarten said the job will bring him closer to family and provides an opportunity to “join a progressive city staff and be part of long-range development of a vision for the city.”
“I’m really, really excited about the opportunity to come back to Fayetteville and serve the community in this position,” he said. “I think it’s a really important piece of city government.”
Nierengarten was selected from 14 applicants who met the minimum qualifications for the job.
Marr, Coleman and Jeremy Pate, Development Services director, interviewed the candidates and helped select Nierengarten. All three said they were impressed by his analytical approach to energy savings and asset management.
As an engineer with the Portland Water Bureau, Nierengarten said he helped save the city more than $100,000 in utility costs last year by installing hydrogen-powered pump stations, mechanical devices that move sewage uphill where needed.
Nierengarten said he and his wife try to make as small an ecological footprint as possible. They live in a modest home on which they’ve spent time and money to weatherize, he said. An avid bicyclist, Nierengarten went 2 1/2 years without a car before his son was born, and he said he gardens and eats locally grown foods as much as possible.
“I think to his core, Peter seemed to exude that sustainable lifestyle,” Pate said. “He wasn’t just putting on airs in interviews.”
Nierengarten will have a lot to keep him busy when he starts work this summer.
He’ll be closely involved with implementing any long-range recycling goals the City Council approves and developing “green building codes” for commercial and residential development. Other possible projects include developing a city stormwater utility and looking at ways to better measure energy savings in capital expenditures by all city departments.
Coleman said working with other managerial positions can be one of the challenges of the job.
“But I think (Nierengarten’s) got the skill set to work with all the department heads in a way that puts everyone at ease,” Coleman said. “That’s really critical. You’re not coming in and trying to railroad something.”
Having a position solely focused on environmental issues that reports directly to the mayor and chief of staff is something fairly unique to Fayetteville, Coleman said.
Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville — and many other cities in Arkansas — do not employ sustainability directors solely focused on environmental issues.
Tammy Zborel, senior associate for sustainability programs at the National League of Cities in Washington, D.C., said such positions often are housed in a public works or planning department and report to a department director.
In the past three years, however, Zborel said her organization, which advocates for local governments nationwide, has seen the number of standalone sustainability departments grow.
In Fayetteville, the position “is considered as important to us as any of our other core areas,” Marr said. “It’s the way we have to live in the future. We have limited resources and have to work within those limited resources.”