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ALAMO CITY GREEN PROGRAM TOPS AT AWARDS
SAN ANTONIO (San Antonio Express-News) – The National Association of Home Builders on Friday named San Antonio's green building program, Build San Antonio Green, the best in the nation.
San Antonio rolled out its first Green Building Awards program Friday to celebrate commercial and residential projects that have improved energy performance.
Build San Antonio Green has certified 254 homes. The program is geared toward new-home construction and remodeling, is based on common construction methods and ties into local utility rebate programs.
Build San Antonio Green is a partnership of the Greater San Antonio Builders Association, the City of San Antonio, Bexar County, CPS Energy, the San Antonio Water System, VIA Metropolitan Transit, Solar San Antonio, the Greater Bexar County Council of Cities and the Alamo Area Council of Governments.
ENERGY STAR'S TAX-FREE WEEKEND
SAN ANTONIO (San Antonio Express-News) – Homeowners, developers, landlords and anyone else wishing to buy energy efficient appliances will be able to purchase them tax-free Memorial Day weekend across Texas.
May 23 through 25, taxes will be deducted from Energy Star–qualified appliances. This will include air conditioners under $6,000, washing machines, ceiling fans, dehumidifiers, dishwashers, light bulbs, programmable thermostats and refrigerators priced under $2,000.
The Energy Star label, developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, appears on appliances that use less energy or water than the industry standard to operate. There is no limit on the number of Energy Star appliances that can be purchased tax-free.
Additionally, San Antonio Water System customers who purchase the highest efficiency washing machines, known as Tier 3, can also qualify for a $100 rebate on their water bill.
The Real Estate Center is part of the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University in College Station - the heart of the Research Valley.
Stimulus Update courtesy of McGraw-Hill
As of May 1, McGraw-Hill Construction Dodge was tracking 15,876 confirmed or potential Stimulus Funded Projects, and has confirmed that funding will be provided through the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act for 4,069 projects.
Click here for more info: http://www.construction.com/stimulus/default.asp
The attached PDF includes the Stimulus Update, as well as a map overview of the stimulus activity by county. Please see below to download the document.
How Building "Green" Is Creating New Jobs,
Cutting Costs and Increasing Students' Scores
By Michael Fjetland, USGBC Houston Member
28 April 2009
Global American Series
Yesterday I was part of a US Green Building Council group that went to Austin to encourage our legislators to vote for several "green" bills pending before the House and Senate. While there, I learned several interesting things.
One lady named Angela that I met at a USGBC reception at Austin's famous Scholz Garden is helping farmers and ranchers get wind turbines. It all started from dating a Dutch guy (he left but the business idea stayed). Angela said that the Midwest is converting rapidly to manufacturing wind turbines – and the plants are spreading south. Even the old Maytag plant in Iowa is now making wind turbines (which means even fewer people will be calling the lonely Maytag repairman). These are the new "green" jobs of our future.
She said that wind farms were going up all over the Midwest and spreading south. They usually build a plant near the wind farm. Then they keep the plant open making parts for other wind turbines so it provides a source of permanent employment in a new "green" industry. Farmers and ranchers have a lot of energy needs to run their operations. She said some existing turbines are too big and others too small for this market. She is seeking turbines that are "just right," about 44 KW. They don't yet exist but she thinks they will in two years.
The mood in the Austin legislature is different from when they last met two years ago when energy efficiency bills went nowhere. Now the legislature is almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans and the feeling is that some kind of energy efficiency bill will be passed with bipartisan support. There is a bill for green schools and another to require future State buildings be built green.
However, there has been some misinformation on the cost of building green and Texas Senators Dan Patrick and Joan Huffman voted against SB16. Most cost estimates for building a LEED building are that it will add less than .1% to 2% to the initial construction costs. The payoff is in the drastically reduced operating costs of a green building – up to 60% less electricity, water usage, etc. That makes LEED buildings more attractive to tenants and investors. The lower operating costs will recover the extra construction costs within a few months –and will continue delivering the owners lower operating costs for decades of the building's life. LEED buildings also command higher sales prices and rental fees.
Studies show that students score up to 20% higher and have fewer sick days when they are in a LEED building (which allows more light in) and employee productivity is higher in LEED buildings. On average, green schools save $100,000 per year, enough to hire two new teachers, buy 200 new computers or purchase 5,000 new textbooks, according to the report "Greening America's Schools: Costs & Benefits" by Gregory Kats of Capital E, a national clean energy technology and green building firm.
However, few schools are being built "green" because contractors used by trustees don't want to change their ways. The only way to change this is to get the public telling their school boards –and legislators-- that they want "green" schools and more energy efficient buildings. Students are the next generation. They need to know about the latest technology and LEED's uplift on student's scores.
If you want success in creating new jobs and importing less foreign oil, then encourage your legislators to vote "green." The bottom line is that green building is making us more energy efficient, cutting costs and creating green jobs to take the place of old manufacturing jobs lost.
Our future depends on it. If you think this is important, pass it on.
-Michael Fjetland
Global American Series
Opt-in/out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GlobalAmerican/ Comments/Updates at: www.TexasViking.blogspot.com
Sponsored by Armor Glass International, Inc.
A Green Company Saving Energy + Providing Security
http://www.ArmorGlass.com
USGBC looking to fill two senior-level, critical positions
1. LEED for Homes Technical Development Director — Key technical role with responsibility for driving the evolution of scaling, metrics and integration opportunities associated with USGBC's LEED for Homes programs and rating system.
The LEED for Homes Technical Development Director is a strong manager with familiarity in the single and multi-family housing market and/or extensive experience in program development and management that guides the technical development of the LEED for Homes Rating System. In addition, qualified persons will have detailed knowledge of high performance, green residential building practices. The Director of Residential LEED Technical Development will collaborate with USGBC staff, including the Residential Market Development organization, and volunteer committees to develop and refine the technical content of the LEED for Homes Green Building Rating System. This position will work with technical committees, staff and contractors to engage industry stakeholders and experts including local and national homebuilding organizations in developing technicalcriteria through a consensus-based process. The LEED for Homes Technical Development Director is not responsible for the business development of the residential marketplace.
Specific Responsibilities Include:
* Manage procurement and oversight of LEED for Homes contractors and vendors.
* Collaborate in the development of resources, services and training to support the use of the LEED for Homes Rating System.
* Conduct LEED for Homes information sessions and trainings as needed.
* Handle media inquiries and outreach to industry organizations on LEED for Homes as needed.
* Manage the technical evolution of the LEED for Homes rating system.
* Related Organizational Goals and Objectives:
* Encourage and accelerate global adoption of green building practices through LEED standards, tools and performance criteria.
* Offer a comprehensive portfolio of programs including technical tools and services supporting LEED products to meet the diverse needs of the building industry.
* Earn widespread and routine endorsement by industry leaders and stakeholders.
Qualifications/Skills:
* 5-10 years program development and management experience including work plan and budget preparation
* Four-year technical (architecture, engineering, construction), management
* Relevant homebuilding, design and/or environmental management experience
* Financial management, procurement, and grant administration experience
* Effective written and interpersonal communications skills
* Attention to detail, organizational skills and team leadership experience
* Familiarity with LEED for Homes and other voluntary green homebuilding programs
* Experience in rapidly changing organization; ability to understand and manage change; ability to multi-task in fast-paced environment.
* Commitment to mission of the USGBC.
2. Director of LEED Rating System Maintenance — Key technical role with responsibility for managing the LEED certification review process and technical development.
The Director of LEED Rating System Maintenance oversees all activities of the LEED maintenance team. Duties include HR aspects of staff supervision, hiring, and training, team workload management, oversight of review consultants and technical development consultants, maintenance of good customer service, planning and executing team meetings, resolving challenging issues and tough customers, improving internal tools and processes, managing LEED program implementation improvements in conjunction with the Vice President for LEED Implementation, advocating for team needs to senior management, and thinking strategically about future needs. This person will also advise in reshaping team workflows for the next year. As a LEED Director, this professional is responsible for the transition to and establishment of a LEED program maintenance team that preserves LEED program integrity while providing a positive user experience for LEED customers. The Director coordinates the efforts of the maintenance team and technical development staff and serves as a point of contact for the project team. S/he strives to maintain equity, precedent, and technical rigor as it applies tocontinuously improving the implementation of LEED over time.
LEED Maintenance Responsibilities Include:
PRIMARY:
* Ensure all required LEED certification submittals protect LEED program integrity and strive to minimize customer and reviewer errors by being clear, specific, consistent, thorough, and targeted
Align submittals across all LEED rating systems as much as possible while preserving essential diversity among them
* Ensure all LEED data entry forms and certification templates reflect all submittal requirements while being clear, functional, easy to use, and reasonably free of errors
* Ensure LEED precertification, where offered, technically sets the stage for full LEED certification of the project
* Continuously improve LEED submittals, data entry forms, and certification templates over time in response to user feedback; update the contents of LEED Online versions 2.x and 3.x as needed
* Develop and refine formal business processes for all of the above to ensure institutional knowledge and procedures are retained over time
SECONDARY:
* Assist the LEED Technical Development team in crafting LEED credit requirements language that is enforceable and suitable for practical submittals
* Propose improvements to certification procedures to make the process more efficient or user-friendly; advise GBCI staff as needed
* Propose errata, updates, and substantial future modifications / additions to reference guides and rating systems in response to stakeholder feedback; work cooperatively with stakeholders to develop needed improvements
Specific Responsibilities Include:
* Communicates job expectations and standards, clearly assigning responsibility for tasks and decisions
* Distributes the workload fairly, delegates appropriately
* Provides specific performance feedback in a timely manner, providing guidance, praise, direction and/or discipline as appropriate
* Supports employee development efforts by providing challenging assignments, setting stretching objectives and/or providing coaching and training
* Takes the time to listen to others' ideas, suggestions, problems and concerns
* Develops sound plans to assure the achievement of objectives, determining the length and complexity of tasks, processes and projects
* Is prepared for, anticipates, and effectively deals with issues and obstacles
* Monitors project or process timetables, milestones and deliverables ensuring timely and accurate completion
* Effectively manages multiple competing priorities
Qualifications/Skills:
* Bachelor or Master of Architecture or Engineering or Environmental Science with 5-10 years of professional practice experience
* 1-3 years experience managing technical work groups
* Ability to manage multiple projects and teams
* Team-building and supervisory skills
* Excellent written and verbal communication skills
* Energetic, detail-oriented, comfortable handling multiple tasks, able to prioritize
* Detail-oriented, able to handle multiple tasks and good organizational, written, communication and computer skills (MS Office: Word, Access, Excel, PowerPoint)
* LEED Accredited Professional
* Passion for and commitment to USGBC's mission
For more information, contact:
Adam Smith
Managing Director
ASESC
Tel: (703) 998-8118
http://www.adamsmithsearch.com
Growin' Up: The US Green Building Council at 15
By Bill Walsh, Executive Director
Healthy Building Network
December 12, 2008
Invited to contribute my thoughts to the US Green Building Council's 15th Anniversary commemoration, I offered a metaphor suggested to me by a colleague. When you think about it, the USGBC is a lot like a 15-year-old.
Public displays of confidence and idealism guild a workaday manner heavy on insistent experimentation and inconsistent judgment. The potential is breathtaking. There is anxiety still. The green building movement, in a vehicle turbocharged by a $50 million annual budget, approved by corporate America, is turning heads on a very slippery road.
The big concern, of course, is peer pressure. Inspirational role models and industry leaders are elevated center stage at Greenbuild, but reactionary industry forces work over the committees and working groups like bullies defending their turf. Nowhere has this been more visible than in the stalemate over LEED materials credits.
For years, crowds applauded Greenbuild keynoters like Paul Hawken who championed USGBC member efforts to institute a LEED credit for PVC avoidance. Meanwhile architects and designers complained, and complain still, that if Walmart can have a PVC avoidance policy, so should LEED. In the end, despite an internal task force analysis that found "PVC consistently among the worst materials for human health impacts," the industry successfully maneuvered to keep the proposed credit out of LEED. That took seven years, half a lifetime.
This year, the commanding presence of Archbishop Desmond Tutu at Greenbuild 08 amplified the USGBC's elevation of social equity "as a value and outcome integral to sustainable built environments."[1] But Archbishop Tutu won't be in the room when someone decides whether the timber companies get their LEED amendments that will leave indigenous peoples "open to exploitation." You can bet the timber industry, and their lawyers, will be just outside. This is not kid stuff. There is real pressure and real consequence at issue in rolling back the modest protections offered the world's forests and forest peoples by Forest Stewardship Council certification.
There is also real reason to believe that as the institution matures, it will be better equipped to handle these pressures. In its new 5-year Strategic Plan for 2009-2013, the USGBC eschews self-congratulation and acknowledges that "achieving sustainability is very far off, . . . green buildings . . . remain very small percentages of market share, and [t]he pace of change must increase to prevent significant deterioration of ecological conditions in many places around the world."[2] This acknowledgement is significant because the pace of change cannot possibly increase if we continue to indulge - for years - those who, like the plastics and timber lobbyists, push resistance to change to the top of the organizational agenda. Standing up to bullies is, after all, a rite of passage in the maturation process.
The strategic plan also expands the organizational Guiding Principles to include a commitment to Fostering Social Equity. Combined with the Precautionary Principle, this sets a remarkable leadership standard for a business organization. It challenges USGBC members, chapters, board and staff to lead rather than follow the crowd in pursuit of the final point on its Agenda for Transformation: Organizational Excellence.
Admittedly, these are only preconditions. The devil, or as my architect friends like to say - God - is in the details, and in our expectations, as the USGBC approaches its full expression as the enduring progeny of this generation's green building movement.
H-GAC's Boyers Receives State Planning Award
December 4, 2008
Kudos to Amy Boyers, Senior Environmental Planner with the Houston-Galveston Area Council, who was selected as the 2008 Solid Waste Planner of the Year by the Texas Association of Regional Councils.
The award specifies that she is "Recognized and selected by her peers for outstanding service and dedication to fellow Planners and Councils of Government, and exemplary service to the improvement and maintenance of environmental quality in the State of Texas."
"Green Plus" a Green Minus for Coffers of Fuel Additive Company
November 3, 2008
News Release: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(Washington, D.C. - Nov. 3, 2008) Biofriendly Corp., incorporated in Nevada with principal offices in Covina, Calif., has agreed to pay EPA $1.25 million for manufacturing and selling an unregistered fuel additive in Texas and California.
“The fuel additive requirements of the Clean Air Act are a critical part of EPA’s program to reduce air pollution,” said Granta Nakayama, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. “This is the largest penalty ever levied for violation of the Clean Air Act’s registration requirements for fuels and fuel additives.”
Biofriendly sold “Green Plus,” an unregistered fuel additive it claimed reduced emissions in diesel fuel, between Sept. 2002 and May 2006. When Biofriendly discovered it was in violation, it stopped selling Green Plus domestically.
The Clean Air Act requires that motor vehicle fuels and fuel additives meet stringent environmental standards before they can be distributed. Biofriendly failed to register Green Plus according to EPA procedures ensuring that fuel additives not increase emissions of harmful air pollutants or interfere with vehicle emission control devices. At a minimum, companies must provide EPA with information on the chemical composition and structure of the additive, and may also be required to test products before obtaining EPA registration.
Biofriendly operates in the United States and internationally. The company manufactures, sells, and distributes fuel additives and fuels that contain additives.
The agreement was lodged Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division, and is subject to a 30-day public comment period and final court approval.
More information on the Biofriendly settlement: http://www.epa.gov/compliance/resources/cases/civil/caa/biofriendlycorp.html
U.S. Green Building Council Announces Recipients of $2 Million Green Building Research Grants
September 11, 2008
By Cody Adams
The U.S. Green Building Council announced on Tuesday the 13 recipients of
the 2008 Green Building grant. After identifying an alarming dearth of
research and development in the field of sustainable construction practices,
the USGBC created the $2 million grant to further the development of
sustainable building practices and increase green market share. The Green
Building grant has also secured over $1 million in additional funds from
outside partnerships.
http://www.usgbc.org/Docs/News/GBRF%20grant%20press%20release_0808.pdf
The New Trophy Home, Small and Ecological
By FELICITY BARRINGER /New York Times
Published: June 22, 2008
For the high-profile crowd that turned out to celebrate a new home in Venice, Calif., the attraction wasn’t just the company and the architectural detail. The house boasted the builders’ equivalent of a three-star Michelin rating: a LEED platinum certificate.
The actors John Cusack and Pierce Brosnan, with his wife, Keely Shaye Smith, a journalist, came last fall to see a house that the builders promised would “emit no harmful gases into the atmosphere,” “produce its own energy” and incorporate recycled materials, from concrete to countertops. For more on this story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/us/22leed.html?ex=1214884800&en=5dc779f8ad37dd5c&ei=5070&emc=eta1
McLean Cargo Specialists leases LEED-certified industrial building
Liberty Property Trust has leased the second of two LEED-registered industrial buildings that the developer said were a first for Houston when they broke ground late last year.
http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/stories/2008/05/12/daily14.html?f=et63&ana=e_du
Liberty Property Trust has leased the second of two LEED-registered industrial buildings that the developer said were a first for Houston when they broke ground late last year.
Houston's 'Lights Out' program a success, city says
Commercial buildings participating in the city's "Lights Out Houston" program during Earth Week saved about $55,000, or 495,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, according to preliminary results.
http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/stories/2008/05/12/daily18.html?f=et63&ana=e_du
Code would force more 'green' building designs in Houston
NOTE: After this story printed, the Houston City Council adopted an update to the city's state-mandated codes. Click below to learn more. The code becomes effective August 1, 2008.
http://www.publicworks.houstontx.gov/planning/enforcement/docs/houston_commercial_energy_conservation_code_4_29_08.pdf
By CAROLYN FEIBEL/Houston Chronicle
Houston builders will have to incorporate "green" design techniques such as heat-trapping vestibules and "cool roofs" that deflect sunlight under a proposed new energy code for commercial buildings.
The City Council could pass the new code for commercial buildings on Wednesday. A new residential code also is being developed and could come before the council next month.
For more on this story: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/5737872.html
The AIA's New Report: Quantifying Sustainability
In May 2008, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Sustainability Discussion Group released the report, Quantifying Sustainability: A Study of Three Sustainable Building Rating Systems and the AIA Position Statement. This report analyzes three rating systems that score sustainable features of buildings: Green Globes™ for New Construction, LEED® for New Construction and Major Renovations version 2.2 (LEED-NC), and SBTool 07. Click on the link below to read the full report.
Downloadable Resources
Related Links
USGBC visit with Ask Me How Home Show
Listen to USGBC directors, supporters and collaborators visit with hosts of Ask Me How Home Show, 100.7-FM radio. The radio broadcasts can be downloaded as MP3s.
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FOX news coverage of USGBC-Houston and Wine and Food Week
Enjoy this fast-paced interview on Fox News in the Morning among Executive Director Lora-Marie Bernard and KRIV anchors Jose Grinan and Sibila Vargas. The three chatted about the WFW collaboration, the EGB Green Maze at Natural Street @ Market Street and about Houston´s LEED Buildings.
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