UNVEILING OF THE FIRST BUILDING RETROFITTED THROUGH THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT

February 15, 2011 – (RealEstateRama) — Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Councilmember Herb Wesson attended today the unveiling of the first building – the Vineyard Recreation Center – to be retrofitted by workers trained through the Green Retrofit Workforce Program. Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the first-in-the nation, workforce development retrofit program targets workers from low-income communities and trains them with the skills they need to obtain good-paying, green jobs.“The Green Retrofit Workforce Program is a national model for how to build a specialized, highly-trained workforce that can retrofit municipal buildings to drastically reduce our City’s carbon footprint,” Mayor Villaraigosa said. “After all, electricity use within buildings accounts for almost one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions — emitting almost 17 million tons of greenhouse gas a year into the air we breathe.”