Portland taps local startup to help it track and reduce its environmental impact

Rapport has landed its home city of Portland as its first municipal client.

The city plans to leverage the software platform Rapport has developed to helps small- and medium-size businesses (and now municipalities) track their energy and water usage and other sustainability metrics.

The contract calls for Rapport to provide environmental impact measurement, monitoring, and reporting for 50 city buildings, including municipal offices and schools.

While tracking energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from heating buildings or operating vehicles is fairly straightforward, the city will benefit from working with Rapport because of its experience identifying and tracking a more diverse range of metrics, including emissions caused by waste handling, employee travel, and purchasing goods, according to Troy Moon, the city’s sustainability coordinator.

Portland is joining other U.S. cities that are leaders in sustainability—including Boston, San Francisco, and the other Portland—that benchmark their own buildings as part of the EPA’s Energy Star program. Benchmarking is simply the act of tracking how a building uses energy and water, and then using that data to make efficiency upgrades to save money and reduce its environmental footprint.

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” said John Rooks, Rapport’s CEO. “Rapport simplifies sustainability management and efficiency benchmarking by automating utility data collection and making environmental metrics more comprehensible and actionable.”

Moon said the city isn’t currently required by the federal or state governments to report greenhouse gas emissions.

“However, if you don’t identify and track emissions you can’t reduce them,” Moon told Maine Startups Insider. “Benchmarking performance helps identify areas where an organization can reduce energy consumption, which reduces carbon emissions and saves money. The city has completed greenhouse gas inventories in the past, but working with Rapport will help us do so in a much more rigorous manner.”

Rapport began working with the Portland International Jetport earlier this year, but the city is the first true municipal client, according to Justin Jaffe, Rapport’s chief operating officer.

And 100% of the data collected by the city using Rapport’s platform will be publicly available, according to Jon Hinck, a Portland city councilor who has championed the city’s efforts in this area.

Rapport is the company AOL co-founder Steve Case selected to receive a $100,000 investment during last fall’s Rise of the Rest tour in Portland. It also won last year’s Top Gun Showcase event.

Rapport will help integrate the city’s massive trove of utility information with the EPA’s internal software tool that tracks sustainability metrics for the Energy Star program.

While the company’s initial customer focus was on small- and medium-size businesses, municipalities could become a more important market. The EPA’s tool “delivers a notoriously harrowing user experience,” Jaffe said, which is why a majority of municipalities outsource the process to a third party like Rapport.