March 25, 2005Arizona’s Scottsdale City Council unanimously approved a green building resolution on Tuesday, becoming the country’s first city to adopt such a high environmental standard for new city buildings and remodels.
“Scottsdale has always had a real keen interest and concern for the environment,” Mayor Mary Manross said. “The advantages and benefits of this project are long term, which is what sustainability is all about.”
Any new Scottsdale construction is required to achieve gold-level certification from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Program, regulated under the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Green Building Council. There are four levels of LEED ratings; while other U.S. cities have adopted building practices to conform to lower levels of environmental design, under the gold level, Scottsdale will be constructing new buildings under the second-highest rating possible.
The city’s first official municipal LEED green-certified building will be the Scottsdale
Senior Center, expected to open at the end of the year. Because “the east and west sides of a building are notorious for heat gain,” said Scottsdale Green Building Manager Anthony Floyd, most of the center’s windows will face north, letting in indirect sunlight, but minimizing exposure to the desert area’s scorching direct sunlight. Air-conditioners will run less, in turn dropping power consumption, while the indirect ambient light will help suppress electricity usage. A 30-kilowatt solar electric system will generate 20 percent of the building’s energy needs.
Scottsdale is no stranger to environmental design. While the city officially embraced LEED certification this week, the Scottsdale Green Building Program has been growing since 1998. Last year, the area saw a boom in environmental design—of the 469 green building permits issued since 1998, 239 of them were handed out in 2004, accounting for 21 percent of all new single-family resident construction.
While the Scottsdale City Council anticipates that environmentally designed buildings will initially cost 2 percent more than conventional construction, the city thinks a building’s increased energy efficiency will payback the extra outlay within two years.
“I think clearly we’ll be a model across the nation,” Mayor Manross said. “This is a movement for more sustainable development, and it’s spreading across the nation.”
