Lean & green

Extra costs are becoming irrelevant when building green

By Candy McCampbell

Alan Sparkman, executive director of the Tennessee Concrete Association, is faced with making the same kinds of decisions other business executives must make when planning a new building.

One is how “green” the building will be. Sparkman is seeking platinum for TCA’s new headquarters building. Platinum is the highest level awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council in its LEED program.

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There are two reasons for it, Sparkman says.

“Our primary motivation is to showcase the building for concrete products in green building. It’s also an opportunity for us as an association and our individual members to learn about green building and how to modify our operations and approach.”

The construction budget is important to Sparkman.

“We are trying to build at a competitive cost for a commercial building,” he says. “We want to build a great, well-functioning building.”

He also wants greater control over building operation costs, something not possible in TCA’s present leased space.

Green building has been criticized for extra costs, including hiring a firm for the required third-party verification.

However, Sparkman says some of the cost is in paperwork that now can be done online. And he estimates about $15,000 in fees for the third-party verification of his 5,000-sq-ft building.

Some of those extra costs can be mitigated as the building is designed, says Anna Roberts, architect with Gresham Smith and Partners in Nashville.

“It helps to start from day one,” she says. “The (LEED) credits get more and more expensive as you try to apply them to buildings already designed.”

The Tennessee Concrete Association has not yet picked a contractor, though Sparkman says it is “almost essential to get the whole team assembled on >>the front end.”

Contractors, architects, engineers and other designers increasingly work together from day one for a top quality, cost-effective project.

LEED-certified buildings in the South Central area cover a wide range of sizes and uses, including the Guild-Hardy Architects office in Biloxi, Miss.; William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock; Trussville High School in Trussville, Ala.; pair of Oak Ridge National Laboratories buildings in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; U.S. Courthouse in Jackson, Miss.; Nestle Waters bottling plant in Red Boiling Springs, Tenn.

Building cost - from the inception and construction to operation over its lifetime - is what owners look at, says Nick Musso, principal in Musso Architects of New Orleans.

“They look at the capital cost, the cost to build, plus operating costs,” and want to lower operating costs by anywhere from 10% to 25%, he adds. If green building can cut operating costs “by reducing energy cost, absenteeism and other factors that add up, it’s a win-win situation. That’s what is driving this.”

Another driving force is the federal government, which is requiring green building for structures paid for with federal funds.

The U.S. General Services Administration, for example, mandates that all new construction and substantial renovation projects must be LEED certified and that encourages planners to take the next step and get LEED silver rating.

Local governments are also on the green bandwagon. The U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Association of Counties have gotten behind an American Institute of Architects goal for all buildings to be carbon-neutral by 2030. Individual cities like Nashville are also mandating LEED certification for their buildings.

Rush Stallings was project manager for Bear Brothers Inc. of Montgomery for construction of the LEED-certified Integrated Operational Support Facility at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., in a design-build job with VOA Associates Inc. architects in Orlando, Fla.

It was the first time Bear Brothers had three large trash bins on a site, two of them for recyclables.

Much of the “green” work came in the design, such as specifying low-VOC paints, Stallings says.

Green credits also come from incorporating materials that are produced within 500 mi of the project site, saving on fuel to haul materials and preventing pollution generated by moving them great distances. “That part of the process the general contractor is involved with,” Stallings says.

Owners planning on long-term building use can see the payoff of a green building in energy savings, says Judson Newbern, associate vice chancellor for campus planning, construction and environmental health and safety at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Vanderbilt won LEED silver certification for a pair of residential buildings, designed by Street Dixon Rick Architecture of Nashville, in The Commons, a $100 million-plus residential facility for freshman students and faculty.

“We were doing what made sense,” balancing the initial investment against the payoff over the building life, Newbern says.

Student involvement also played a part, and that “has helped us raise the bar,” Newbern adds.

The university, which has several construction projects under way, is committed to energy efficiency and is incorporating LEED principles. Most new buildings have more natural light, windows have low e glass and mechanical equipment that will lower costs later, he says.

Motorized window shades, for example, are sensitive to the amount of sunlight coming into a room and can move to one of four preset positions while occupants to see through the shade to the outside. The payback comes in savings on energy bills.

“If the payoff is much more than five to eight years, we typically do not jump at it, but five to eight is easy to do,” Newbern says.

During the design process, the owner reaches decision points about continuing the LEED pursuit, Gresham Smith and Partners’ Robert says.

Some owners have pressure from the home office to go for it while other owners want to make a statement to the public or their competitors by going for LEED, she says.

“In the end, it becomes the owner’s decision,” she says.

“Our job is to provide sustainable design in all of our projects, regardless of whether our clients pursue certification.”

Nissan Americas’ $100 million corporate headquarters in Franklin, Tenn., is an example of a company that decided to build as if it would be a LEED building but not seek certification, Roberts says. Her firm did the design and engineering and Skanska USA Building Inc. is construction manager.

Nissan’s building will have daylight harvesting, under-floor air circulation, workspaces away from west-side windows and a protected wetlands area on the site.

Green building is not just for new construction, but can apply to renovation projects as well.

“You can renovate an old building, make it much better performing, and it will still look the same,” says John Anderson, principal architect at Unabridged Architecture in Bay St. Louis, Miss.

The way a building is designed will change as sustainable building increases, he says.

“Whether that means they will look different has not been answered.” And some green aspects aren’t immediately apparent to users, such as solar panels on the roof and wind-generated power, he says.

SSOE Inc., the Ohio-based architect and engineering firm with offices in Tennessee, surveyed public and private companies around the country on their sustainability goals.

Early results show that only 45% of the companies have sustainability goals.

Among them, 57.5% of the privately-owned companies say they are being driven by consistency with corporate beliefs, 50% claim corporate citizenship and 38.8% public relations. (Respondents were allowed multiple responses.)

With public companies, 63.6% said it’s corporate citizenship, 57.6% say consistency with corporate beliefs and 42.4% public relations.