Accountability and Clear Direction
The Green Building Initiative assigns an individual Assessor to each project. The Assessor evaluates information submitted by the team and conducts an onsite walkthrough to visually inspect environmental claims. The Assessor is a contracted industry expert, not employed by the Green Building Initiative, who must possess professional credentials and relevant experience. For an EB project, an Assessor is required to have 10 years or more of applicable industry experience directly pertaining to commercial buildings and a minimum of five years in facilities maintenance or operations management. (Learn more here.) Assessors also must carry at least one credential from 11 designated credentials for EB Assessors, such as a Certified Facility Manager from the International Facility Management Association, Houston, or a Certified Energy Manager from the Association of Energy Engineers, Atlanta. “In addition, we require involvement in three or more projects where building sustainability principles were applied in the areas of energy, water, site, resources/ materials, emissions, indoor environment, management,” says Shaina Weinstein, GBI’s senior director of engagement. “By requiring so much experience from our Assessors, they can plant seeds of innovation and bring new ideas to each project team they work with.”
“It was interesting to see Crown Plaza through the Assessor’s eyes,” notes Elizabeth Hirst, assistant property manager with Melvin Mark Cos. “He was really thorough. He examined the building’s interior and exterior components, including tenant build-outs, parts of the mechanical and HVAC system, and the parking structure. Afterward, he offered guidance on how we can further improve the building’s systems, as well as ways we can further push ourselves toward greater resource reduction.”
Raigosa Cottrell thought the Assessor was an advantage in the Crown Centers’ process. “There’s nothing like a face-to-face interaction with someone—you’re always more productive and it’s a more efficient way of interacting. After the walkthrough, we sat down together and I pulled the additional information he needed, emailed those things to him on the spot and checked them off the list,” she explains.
Features that Shine
Set in Portland’s downtown core, Crown Plaza combines a 293,300-square-foot, 11-story office building and adjacent 241,300-square-foot, eight-floor parking structure that includes offices and retail. The project achieved Four Green Globes, the rating system’s highest award. Notable sustainable features of the project include energy-efficiency measures, such as a motor retrofit to a parking garage elevator that increased operating efficiency by 30 percent and strategies that cut the HVAC’s fan system horsepower needs in half. Melvin Mark Cos. also purchases renewable energy through Portland General Electric’s Clean Wind program, resulting in an offset of 5 percent of the building’s total energy use and a carbon reduction of 595,722 pounds of CO2. Dedicated recycling areas for paper, glass, cardboard, batteries, electronic devices, wooden pallets, metal, and ink and toner cartridges serve tenants. A bicycle storage room inside the building offers repair equipment, tire air pumps and wall-mounted bike storage.
The two Crown Center projects in Fort Lauderdale each achieved Three Green Globes. Built in 1987, 1201 Crown Center is a 108,645-square-foot, 1- and 2-story commercial office building. The 1475 Crown Center building was constructed in 1986 as a 3-story, 66,837-square-foot office facility. Strategies that gained Green Globes points for both projects include an array of Midgard Management’s formalized and implemented policies, such as an Energy Management Plan, Green Cleaning Policy and Program, Integrated Pest Management Plan, a campus-wide Indoor Water Efficiency Policy to aggressively reduce water consumption and a Sustainable Purchasing Policy. Tenant spaces are submetered, and the structures have automated lighting controls, occupancy sensors and task lighting incorporated into the desk units to save energy. Both buildings have very high ENERGY STAR ratings (92 for 1201 Crown Center and 96 for 1475 Crown Center) with demonstrated year-over-year reductions in energy consumption.
Tenant Preferences
Third-party verification of environmental stewardship has a constantly increasing following. “Tenants across the nation tell us they want to go into a space that has been environmentally certified,” Mark says. “They even write it into their RFPs and RFQs, specifying the space must be certified in some way.”
Hirst’s professional experience echoes this fact; she has seen avid tenant interest in being located in buildings that reduce environmental impacts and support occupant health.
At Design Management Services, Raigosa Cottrell says her client is pursuing certification because the buildings contain federal government tenants. “They want to attract more government tenants, so bringing their buildings into compliance was a compelling reason to seek Green Globes certification. It’s also a very streamlined process. We got a site visit within a few weeks and found out our results almost immediately.”