Celebrating Earth Day and Innovation in Green Design

Stunning! Fabulous! Classy!

We held a very impressive Earth Day celebration on the night of Wednesday April 10th. Over 120 guests attended from a wide swath of the green building industry. We had six table sponsors: Vidaris, NStar, The Green Engineer, Robinson & Cole, Bergmeyer and National Grid.

The program started with a bit of networking. One of the great things about the USGBC is it connects people from all parts of the real estate industry - from architects & engineers to facility managers and product manufacturers. Energy modelers, sustainability consultants, even lawyers! It's always a great mix and you never know who you might run in to!

Special thanks to Rachel Zsembery and the Special Events Committee for putting it all together. Much applause to Rachel (below, with Carlos Alonso-Neimeyer) and the entire Committee! GE sponsored our table settings: a mix between spring flowers and LED lightbulbs (guests could take home!) More photos are available through our media sponsor, New England Real Estate Journal NEREJ's facebook page.

We were very thankful to our venue sponsor, the Chiofaro Companies, for letting us hold the event on the main floor of Two International Place in downtown Boston. We heard from Don Chiofaro, Jr., as the owner, and from Bob Andrews, of AHA Consulting Engineers, one of our Chapter Sponsoring Partners, who discussed how the building had recently achieved LEED EB O&M Silver - a real achievement for a building that was designed and constructed in the go-go 80's.

A few of the members of the Chapter spoke, including myself, to give an overview of where we are as an organization.  People were in a good mood. I got the crowd to shout out "GREEN BUILDINGS!" whenever they heard something good from the stage. 

I'm happy to report we did indeed attain the goal of our membership drive: to bring in 100 new members by Earth Day. We have 108 new since the beginning of the year. GREEN BUILDINGS!

I also announced that we have hired a new staffer: Stephen Muzzy will start on May 6th as our Green Schools Program Manager, to faciliate green building project creation and completion at campuses across Massachusetts. GREEN BUILDINGS!

Dinner was a really good time - here we have the Green Engineer table (above) and the NStar table (below). Though many people found themselves not at the tables they were assigned to! 

Later, during the dessert, we convened the Awards Committee to present our Massachusetts Green Building of the Year award and our Innovation in Green Design awards. National Grid served as the Award Sponsor with Mark Stafford presiding. The awards were organized by Paul Brown, Carrie Havey, and Chris Liston (not pictured below). The judges were: Holly Wasilowski Samuelson of Harvard GSD, Mark Webster of SGH and Susan Buchanan of VFA. Jess Halvorson of Bank of America served as an alternate.

And the winners included: Homeowners Rehab, Inc. for the Massachusetts Green Building of the Year: their 95-97 Pine Street, Cambridge, LEED Platinum project. The judges saw this as an important model for other affordable housing projects.

Bergmeyer Associates also won for an Innovation in Green Design Award in the Building Category for their work on the Hosteling International Building on Stuart St. in Boston.

Other winners inlcuded:



Special Recognition:

Sherman Fairchild Laboratory Renovation for Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard University

Submitted by Payette. Notes: This project is an example of stellar energy performance in a lab.



Special Recognition:

One Boston Place

Submitted by CBRE.  Notes: The judges praised this project for its enthusiastic spirit of the approach to recertification under EB O&M.



Award Winning Entries – Innovation in Green Design

Winner - Product, System or Technology Category

Shady Hill School in Cambridge, MA

Submitted by Richard Burck Associates, Inc. Notes: This project skillfully handled water absorption and discharge to the aquifer.

It was a fun evening full of GREEN BUILDINGS!

-Grey Lee

Energy Disclosure is Coming to Boston

The USGBC MA Chapter is happy to promote, support and advocate for public disclosure of energy use in Boston. According to the recent proposal, over the next four years, different types and sizes of buildings will report their energy use score (using EPA's Energy Star Portfolio Manager) into a public database. The city will rate all the buildings it owns starting in 2013. The information will be used to help the city's Energy and Environment Office, led by former USGBC MA Board VP Brian Swett, to craft incentives and programs to help owners embrace energy efficiency measures. It will not be used to force anyone to do anything, just to report their building's energy use. One of our members, Chris Liston, Director of Energy and Sustainability at CBRE New England, noted that for his clients in New York, reporting for the entire year can be done in about 30 minutes. 

I went to City Hall on Thursday, March 28, to submit supportive testimony to the City Council, which will be voting on the ordinance in the near future. We believe the ordinance will lead to better building values, better tenant experiences, better building operating practices, reduced waste of energy, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, among other things. Some organizations, including Boston's Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA), came out against the ordinance, which was puzzling. Industry leaders like Partners Healthcare and Boston Properties spoke in support of the ordinance. It seemed like a lot of the opposition just didn't understand the program. It was too bad, but the USGBC MA Chapter is here to help people learn more and get more support behind the measure.

The ordinance is somewhat like telling people to go weigh themselves when you care about their health. If someone knows their weight, they might decide to start exercising or eating better. But some people just don't even want to know things. And this ordinance isn't even like telling anyone you have to go to the gym - just to get weighed!

Boston's Mayor Menino has announced an Energy Disclosure Ordinance. 

The establishment of this requirement will “provide information to owners, residents, and prospective buyers and tenants, and, through education and the operations of the market, create incentives to participate in energy efficiency programs.” 

Energy efficiency in existing buildings is the single most important component of the City's plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020. 

New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities have enacted energy reporting and
disclosure requirements in their jurisdictions.

Leading by example, Boston would annually disclose its energy and water use in all of its facilities starting with 2012 building data. In following years, the ordinance would apply to non-residential buildings greater than 25,000 square feet and residential buildings 25 units or more. The proposed roll out schedule for reporting requirements is as follows:

• Non-residential buildings 50,000 square feet or more in 2014
• Residential buildings with 50 units or more in 2015
• Non-residential buildings 25,000 square feet or more in 2016
• Residential buildings with 25 units or more in 2017

In addition to reporting energy and water use, buildings may be required to conduct energy audits or other evaluations every five years to identify opportunities for energy efficiency investments.  Buildings in the top tier of energy performance or already taking significant efficiency actions will be exempted from this requirement.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions through investments in energy efficiency is the largest component of the Mayor’s Climate Action Plan. Mayor Menino has established Boston as a national leader in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting a clean energy economy through initiatives such as Renew Boston and the first in the nation green building standards for private developments. To further inspire action, Mayor Menino has launched Greenovate Boston, a new sustainability movement to ensure a greener, healthier and more prosperous future for the City. 

More information is at the City of Boston website. 

Annual Meeting of Fun

What a great Annual Meeting on Monday night! Thanks again to Rachel Zsembery, Dee Spiro, Katya Carman and Carlos Alonso-Niemeyer for putting together such a fabulous evening! Thanks to everyone who came early and stayed late to help make it all happen. Thank you to Andrea Love and Payette Associates for providing their Practice Room as a great hall to gather in.

[above: Kathy Arthur-Tyler of our Green Schools Committee (also of NStar, one of our sponsors!]

Thanks indeed to this wonderful community we have where even with snow and sleet and rain (all at the same time) (and rush-hour!) we had a full capacity crowd. 

Thank you to Brian Swett [below] for making such an awesome presentation about the ambitious goals of the City of Boston and for reaching out to us to help partner with them as they grow their efforts - certainly we can help bring proven models of success to other communities in Massachusetts. 

Congratulations to the new and renewed Board Members and thank you to all the great candidates.

And now the work continues. I know some of the committee volunteers made connections to new helpers. As you heard, for me, the priorities are Community, Capacity and Advocacy - which means getting more members, bringing in new sponsoring partners and focusing on specific policy projects. The advocacy is really the most important thing we can do as an organization. What are we doing? I believe we can choose one or two of the USGBC campaign issues  and in my conversations some of you have heard I think that those can be Greening the MLS and Energy Reporting going statewide. With our Green Schools strategic investment grant, that will be a focus in the coming months. And, finally, pertinent to current events, we need to respond to the wild community development opportunities and building projects that are the future Casinos of Massachusetts.

[me with active volunteers: Andrea Love, Emily Greenstein, Dee Spiro, Phoebe Beierle, and Jim Newman]

I was really psyched to hear about the awesome work going on in the committees - Green Residential, Green Schools, RASOC, Education, Communications, Membership, Special Events and Emerging Professionals. I look forward to our future advocacy team. I am heartened by the West Branch and the Central Mass group with their successful and upcoming events. We've got a lot of great stuff going on!

Take a look at the website - there are new stories up there and I have been building it out more and more (with our Communications Associate Zak) every week. Please stay tuned to our social media spaces: facebook and our LinkedIn group - plenty of news and discussion there.

[Hi Phoebe!]

So you can see, we are moving right along - new people in the ranks, old-timers coming back into the fold, and a lot of work to tackle. As we mentioned last night: Massachusetts is #4 in the country in terms of LEED certified space created (per capita) in 2012. Not that LEED is everything to us (it's just our biggest horse in the market-transformation team), but 101 projects earned the status last year, taking us to just shy of 400 certified projects, total, up til the end of 2012. This means a lot of us, and our peers who aren't quite yet members, are working on a lot of green building projects and we are really changing the built environment. We really are changing the carbon intensity of our communities. We really are making the world a better place. I'm proud to work for you all and I look forward to cultivating this momentum for even more victories in the coming months and years!

Thanks again for being part of the USGBC MA Chapter! See you at the next event!

Advancing Sustainability with the BSA

I attended a great meeting this morning with the Boston Society of Architects' Committee for the Advancement of Sustianability at the invitation of Vernon Woodward and Ken Fisher, co-chairs.

I had a chance to introduce myself to the 15 or so attendees and describe a bit about the Chapter and where we are in terms of cultivating our community,  building our capacity and advocating for green building friendly state and local regulations.

One of the main points we discussed was the Coming of the Casinos to the state. Julie Taylor, of Noble & Wickersham, provided a great overview of the collaboration between AIA MA, BSA and ACEC. She was holding the draft white paper for the Gaming Commission regarding design standards and an outlined design review process, which the commission had asked them to produce. This was as follow-up to the “Promoting Sustainability and Strengthening Communities: Design Excellence for Massachusetts Casinos,” forum held on Dec. 12 last year (which many USGBC MA members attended).

Julie reviewed the State's charge to the Commission and how design professionals can help weigh in on the casinos. Many in attendance hoped that the process would result in casinos that could support sustainability goals for their host communities. I asked Julie what would be the one priority that peer associations could push for, and she said getting renewable energy into these casinos, since they really will be energy hogs one way or another. You can read more about the forum here, and stay tuned to John Nunnari (ED of the Mass. AIA) who chimed in considerably with Julie, as he is also one of the white paper authors, to keep track of this process.

We also heard from Carolyn Sarno, from NEEP (Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnership) speaking a bit about the base building code and also the stretch code for the state. It sounds like a lot of things were waiting for the recent fall's election, and now, are just stuck in bureaucratic backlog. It may be one thing our Chapter could specifically advocate for: asserting for the stretch code and demanding the state issue appropriate regulations for green communities as per Green Communities Act of 2008.

I look forward to promoting good green policy at the state and local levels! Let me know what you'd like to see us move forward on. The USGBC (national) has a great list to work on, but we need to think locally, strategically, and creatively, to help move the levers of influence throughout Massachusetts.

See you soon! - Grey

PS - the image on the right side of the photo is what? It's probably obvious, even if it looks like some kind of mini-monster from this angle...