Going Green: Loudoun County's Conservation Efforts Gain Momentum

Loudoun County's private and public sectors have taken a strong stance in pushing green initiatives this year.

Whether it is the increased participation of local hotels in Virginia's Green Lodging Program or the removal of light bulbs from vending machines in government office buildings, conservation efforts are percolating throughout the county.

"We have to build 30 to 40 schools in the next 10 years," Supervisor Andrea McGimsey (D-Potomac) said. "The county has already been doing a lot of great stuff. My favorite example is the light bulbs in the vending machine. We took light bulbs out and saved $4,000. I'd rather be spending that on children's education."

What does it mean to "go green"? Well, it depends. A heated debate came up last month during discussion of a bill in the Virginia Senate, which if passed, would allow some state construction projects to be built to the standards of either Leadership in Energy in Environmental Design, promoted by the U.S. Green Building Council, or Green Globes, a similar certification endorsed by the Green Building Initiative. During the debate, some refuted Green Globes certification as not as legitimate as LEED standards. The reality is many people in the architectural, engineering, or construction fields have not even heard of GG.

Private Sector Buildings

GG who? Pat Coggins, vice president of development, who leads the green initiatives for Atapco Properties, a real estate development company, is among those who hasn't heard of GG. His company has plans to build only green developments in the future.

"We think it's the right thing to do," he said. "Our company has a philanthropic side and it goes along with the company values. It's started to make sense economically."

Atapco, in coordination with Equinox Investments, formed East Gate Partners, which represents East Gate Marketplace, Loudoun County's first green shopping center. The center is planned near South Riding at the intersection of Rt. 50 and Tall Cedars Parkway. The 200,000-square-foot shopping center will anchor the nearby mixed-use East Gate Community when it opens in 2009.

The center has been designed to meet LEED certification requirements. The rating system addresses six major areas: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality and innovation and design process.

Based on a set of required credits in those six major categories, there are 69 possible points. Buildings can qualify for four levels of certification:

* Certified: 26-32 points

* Silver: 33-38 points

* Gold: 39-51 points

* Platinum: 52-69 points

While the retail portion of East Gate Marketplace will be LEED certified, Coggins hopes the office portion meets LEED's gold standard. The building has higher levels of insulation and better glass to make it a more efficient, better-insulated building. Tenants will see heating and cooling energy cost savings of more than 17 percent. East Gate also has a white roof.

"The black roof can be 160 degrees on a summer day," Coggins said. "You can't even stand on a black roof on a hot summer day. This will be much cooler."

Green buildings provide a marketing advantage for his company, Coggins said.

"I think if you're building a class A office building and it's not green it will be a class B office building very shortly," Coggins said.

Why has Atapco started to incorporate green practices?

"There's a very strong demand in the Baltimore, Washington region," Coggins said. "A lot of that is driven by the government. Any GSA buildings now need to be silver."

Other businesses also are embracing energy saving building concepts. Middleburg Bank's newest branch office, under construction on Ft. Evans Road in Leesburg, is designed to meet LEED certifications.

Much like LEED, GG is an environmental assessment and rating system that grew out of the UK's Building Research Establishment's Environmental Assessment Method.

Last year, in a graduate architecture class at UC Berkeley called "The Green Workplace," students evaluated GG as part of a broader series of assignments related to the evaluation of green building rating systems.

In the study at Berkeley, perhaps the area that received the most critical feedback from the students was that using the GG online system made it difficult to track how the user's decisions and changes affect the building's final score.

The GG weighting system is unknown and the effect of each design and construction decision is unclear.

One complaint about LEED is that the documentation is onerous, and GG attempts to minimize this. However, the student consensus was that GG goes too far in this regard.

"There is a feeling that Green Globes is tied to industries that aren't sustainable," said Brett Kass, a project engineer for Turner Construction, the company in charge of the west wing of the Inova Loudoun Hospital expansion. "It's not as rigorous or accountable as what USGBC requires. They don't carry the same weight."

Turner Construction recycles 50 percent of construction waste. "All of the office paper we have, all of the construct waste is brought to our hauler that's sorted," Kass said.

McGimsey asked Kass, who worked on the Green Building Task Force in Washington, D.C., if he would help revise the county's Facilities Standard Manual, which includes the best practices of design and construction of public buildings. Kass and others will soon start meeting to make the manual "green."

"It could be everything from controlling stormwater runoff on construction sites, to the amount of trees you plant, type of roof you build, a low emitting type of roof," he said. "All sorts of requirements that would constitute a green building."

A Green Future: County Buildings

Although the county's office of capital construction has implemented a LEED silver standard policy on public buildings, called the Green Building Design Guidelines, the Board of Supervisors hasn't yet adopted it.

"The team worked on it last year," Najib Salehi, the county's energy manager said. "This would require us to comply with these standards. Loudoun County is taking positive steps toward green policy. We hope in the next couple years we will make a positive impact."

Salehi said simple policies go a long way.

"We definitely would have to consider geothermal. That's a no-brainer, that's easy and it saves energy. The orientation of the building will make a difference," he said. "If a building is facing south, having material from local areas, green roofs, a lot of things outlined in the standards design, in order to build our future buildings green."

If plans to build a new county office building move to construction, it would come under these guidelines.

"There is a consciousness in the county, as far as making it a requirement," Kass said.

Kass believes government leaders could create more incentives for developers to build green, such as through expediting permit approval.

"Loudoun County is ripe [to be incorporating more green building]," Kass said. "The amount of building going on, we're paving so much of the land here, we're cutting down so many trees. Since I've been here [Lovettsville] in two years, they probably cut down 20 to 30 acres of trees. I find it alarming the amount they want to build out there. They're really squeezing out our rural economy."

McGimsey, who serves on the county's Ad Hoc Committee for Energy Efficiency, has plans to look at energy audits of county buildings.

"That's my biggest push," she said, "the low hanging fruit" so to speak. "I think the county needs to look at increasing our energy efficiency. Looking at ourselves and seeing how we can change (equipment, employees, buildings, and vehicles), so our carbon footprint will be much smaller."

From a hands-on perspective, employees can change behavior, she said.

"Not printing out every single e-mail, turning off their monitors," McGimsey said. "Just keeping our employees cognizant. I'm really hoping to take it out into the community."

Is it more expensive up front? Not if the county is smart about financing, McGimsey said. "The new government center, a lot of this can be paid out of the capital budget, then we can realize savings in the operating budget."

In McGimsey's mind, this initiative is about doing the right thing.

"I think this is the way the market is going," she said. "And more and more businesses are interested in this. This is a market shift, things get less expensive, economies of scale and the price comes down. You want to be prepared to take advantage of those things."

The ad hoc committee hopes to address its green strategy at its meeting in April. "We're right in the midst of creating that strategy," she said.

To McGimsey, the momentum for green building feels like the beginning of the worldwide web in the 1980s.

"I not only see this as saving tax dollars, there's tremendous economic opportunity," she said. "I want Loudoun to take advantage of that. I'm concerned for our children's and grandchildren's future. I want to bet on the right thing."