by Tracy Ostroff

Public architecture in Washington is going green as the state government there is set to implement legislation requiring state-funded buildings—including offices, schools, universities, and justice facilities—be built to nationally recognized high-performance building standards. The new rules ensure that billions of dollars in new construction and renovation projects will be built to the U.S. Green Building Council LEED™-silver, or in the case of public schools, the Washington Sustainable School Design Protocol.

Beginning this summer, the rules apply to any new construction more than 5,000 square feet and any remodeling over 5,000 square feet when the cost is greater than 50 percent of the assessed value. State funded affordable housing projects will have to adopt an available system for measuring building performance as well. Exemptions include projects for which the agency and the design team determine the standards “be not practicable” and for various types of laboratory facilities, hospitals, pumping stations, hospitals, and research facilities. The City of Seattle implemented green building policies for public architecture in 2000.

The design team and the agency must determine if they can achieve any LEED standard, or they must report to the legislature why they cannot. The bill also includes an indemnification clause for the design and construction team in the event that they make a good-faith effort to implement the standard but fail to meet the requirements, and adjusts the fee schedule to reflect additional reporting and documentation work, which most often falls to the design team.

As the architects and their colleagues in the allied organizations made their case for the green building legislation, they became increasingly energized by the positive message they conveyed and the consensus-building work in which they were involved. With a Democratic governor and legislative majority, the architects and their allies knew they could push through the green building bill without much difficulty. Instead, however, they worked hard from the beginning to make the bill a bipartisan issue. AIA Washington Council Executive Director Stan Bowman says they sought out prominent members to get them invested. They also sat down with the various groups to make sure their concerns were addressed quickly and equitably. “Our goal was not just to set a new standard but one that would work for the agencies, designers, contractors, and suppliers once the standard was set. Otherwise, any one of those groups would work to undermine the standards of the bill and the whole program would ultimately fail,” Bowman says.

Falling into place
“It really started to gel last fall when some AIA members and environmental groups and others honed down what they wanted legislatively,” says Bowman. Those groups included the Architects and Engineers Legislative Council (AELC), a broad based group of architects, landscape architects, and engineers, and the Sustainable Design Advocacy Committee, an interdisciplinary group led by Amanda Sturgeon, AIA, that helped raise money, draft legislation, write editorials, and meet with editorial boards and reporters. Legislators introduced the bill in January. The AIA Washington Council jumped on it with an unprecedented lobbying effort to move it through the legislature. “We made a lot of headway by continuing to argue that this is a wise use of funds, that building buildings to perform better will result in long-term savings to the state, and if there are additional costs upfront, they will be paid back, according to the figures we’ve seen, within a short time,” Bowman says.

Miller|Hull Partner Craig Curtis, AIA, one of two AIA Washington Council co-chairs to the AELC says he told legislators the bill should be set up in a “way people can succeed and not fail.” He says an important consideration was, “How do you handle it when it’s law that you must achieve this and you’ve given it your best shot and it comes back from the USGBC that you didn’t make it?” Those feelings led to the indemnification clause. He hopes these sentiments will put the pressure on the USGBC to respond to the marketplace to maintain the momentum and to ensure that the system is not “so arduous that people end up failing here.”

Added value, not added costs
“Washington State has a very diverse population politically,” explains Bruce Blackmer, FAIA, former AIA national vice president and president and CEO of Northwest Architecture. “The eastern part of the state is very conservative and the western part is very liberal.” He says he helped pull together a contingent from Spokane and Seattle, where his firm has offices, for architectural representation from the state’s diverse regions and topography. “That reassured the committee members that this is truly a bipartisan initiative that is positive not only for the profession, but for the communities in the rural areas of the eastern part of the state and the more urban areas in the west.”

The flexibility of the program and the arguments for added-value swayed many legislators, including Democratic sponsor Hans Dunshee, who chairs the House Capital Budget Committee. He says the legislation marks a new way of state spending for construction projects, now taking a holistic view to factor in life-cycle costs into the initial construction budget. “The savings over time will be significant,” he says. For taxpayers, operating expenses for these buildings are lower, by as much as 30 percent. High-performance schools result in a 20 percent increase in test scores, and at one company, he notes, the green buildings resulted in a 15 percent decline in absenteeism. In tight budget times, Dunshee says, that’s incentive enough to implement the new rules.

Frank Jarrett, Dunshee’s Republican counterpart on Capital Budget Committee, agrees. “It’s a good environmental issue and a good fiscal issue to look at life-cycle costs,” he notes. Essentially it’s using performance-based regulations instead of prescriptive-based legislation. It’s a different way of doing regulation that maintains flexibility to meet the goals.” Dunshee and Jarrett agree that the architects played a key role in giving credibility to the idea and for making the case that the new requirements are added value, not just added costs. The legislators also agree that one of the most exciting elements will be the impact of the bill on the large school construction budget and green building’s effect on student performance.

Consensus building
Bowman is proud of the end result. “This bill, the first in the country, will set a positive standard other states can follow because we worked out so many problems ahead of time. We looked at what the schools’ problems were and tried to address that. We looked at what the natural resource problems were, and we looked at the concerns of people who are just hesitant to mandate or impose a strict standard.”

Fulton “Tony” Gale, FAIA, who, along with Sturgeon, AIA, led the efforts of AIA Washington’s Sustainable Design Resource Group, says the legislation does the “right thing for the right reasons. Although some architects might have been slower to sign on to sustainable design concepts, when they could see it was getting legs across the country and around the world, they realized it was the best architecture you can produce, and the process is good for the environment, it became hard to resist.” Gale is a long-time sustainable designer who, as the city architect for Seattle, helped pass the first comprehensive sustainable building legislation in Seattle five years ago. He is now corporate architect for Starbucks.

Blackmer and Curtis both say their clients appreciate the flexibility the legislation allows. Washington’s approach is “different than those states that limit them to the LEED criteria. The fact that there are two choices that can be made to meet those minimum requirements would allow a rural district or community to apply different techniques to achieve sustainability than what may be applied in an urban area,” Blackmer says.

Honest brokers
Bowman says the AIA was able to be the “honest broker” within the process. “We were able to step in, because, in the end, to an architect, it doesn’t really matter what standard is adopted, provided we can implement it. We were able to take an honest look at what the arguments were on both sides and try to be the consensus builder.”

“If we’re talking about sustainable building, there’s not much of a sell job that has to occur at all. That’s just doing smart design,” Curtis says. “It should be less about LEED and more about doing green building, and if that’s what it takes to get us there then let’s do it, but let’s work together in a way that makes everyone feel good in the end.”

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