Fix it now

Cross-posted to PoHo blog:

By Ben Fry

Our buildings pretty much suck. Too many of them are monuments of energy inefficiency. They suck too much electricity off the power grid and water out of the ground. Construction materials often travel far to the work site, sucking fuel out of the tanks of big rigs. Many were built using harmful chemicals, which sucks.

The Pasco County school system has joined the small but growing ranks of those trying to do something about it.

Gulf Trace Elementary in Holiday became the first K-12 public school in Florida to be certified as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Silver by the U.S. Green Building Council.

“We were requested (by Pasco County schools) to build green,” said Joshua Bomstein, vice president of business development for Creative Contractors, Inc., who built the school.

Creative Contractors made some minor changes to the original design to make the school greener. The overall cost of the school was only one percent higher than the budget for the original design.

“We delivered a school that was far greener than if we didn’t make those changes,” said Bomstein.

During construction, about 80 percent of the site’s construction waste was recycled and around one-quarter of the school was made from recycled materials. Workers used different bins to collect waste materials, like concrete, scrap metal and drywall, Bomstein said. The drywall was finely ground and mixed into the soil after testing revealed it was environmentally safe.

For long-term benefits, the school uses 40 percent less water than an average building by using dual flush toilets, low-flow sinks and showers, and landscaping with water-wise plants, Bomstein said. Even the school’s carpeting is (environmentally) green: it was made from recycled windshields.

“To build the first K-12 school in the state to reach LEEDs silver really means something,” Bomstein said.

Gulf Trace is one more building in Tampa Bay that is sucking up less. Now on to the rest of them.

Creative Loafing is about to come out with 100 green technologies you can use now to go green. However, while green technology may be all the rage, local governments don’t really want you using green technologies. The reason is simple: governments like to spend money, and one of the local government’s largest sources of income is taxes on utilities. Unknown to most residents is that every time you buy a gallon of gas, turn on a light, or flush a toilet, the government charges you a utility tax, and the more you use, the more revenue goverment collects in utility taxes.

For example, Tampa took in nearly $11 million in gas tax, $26 million electric taxes, and $3.4 million in water taxes, for a total of more than $40 million for fiscal year 2007. What makes matters even worse is that these taxes are based upon price, so the more you pay at the pump or the more you pay to TECO, the more revenue the City collects. This places the City in the awkward position of wanting utilities to charge residents as much as possible so City revenues grow in step.

The unfortunate consequences of this scenario are that it creates a perverse reward system for government to want its taxpayers to pay more and more for utilities, while at the same time it discourages residents from adopting green technology. The government is the largest consumer of energy in the United States. If there was a large demand from federal, state and local governments for green technologies more and more companies would produce these products, ultimately driving down price and making them more available and affordable to the ordinary consumer.

Ultimately what we end up with is a bunch of politicians who talk up green technology but ultimately don’t implement any of the technologies, or they use these technologies in such a limited way that the demand for the products is negligible because of cost. For example, if Tampa replaced all of its street lights with LED street lights, the city would save close to $6 million a year. That is $6 million it would not have to collect in taxes, not to mention the environmental benefits the upgrades would produce. Did you know that Tampa is building a new parks and recreation building that won’t be LEED-certified? If any building was going to be environmentally friendly, don’t you would think it would be the parks building? Did you know that Tampa has not replaced any of it existing office lighting systems with LED bulbs?

So if you believe in green technology you should call or write to your local government and demand that they adopt green technology. You should call your state legislature and tell them that they should exclude green improvements from property taxes and tell them to FIX IT NOW.

All of the green technologies I mention above don’t cost jobs; they could be funded from the capital improvement budget (which is not property tax revenue) and would ultimately save the city millions of dollars a year that could be given back to the taxpayers.

For the record energy-wise, because I am often asked, I drive a Mini Cooper (I get about 25 miles to the gallon) and my office uses high-efficiency lighting. On most days you don’t have to put on a single light in our offices because our window design allows sufficient light into the office during the day. The coatings on our windows allow light to enter but does not heat the office. In addition, we use programmable thermostats and an on-demand electric hot water system for our restroom. Each of these systems was installed to make our office energy efficient and results in thousands of dollars of savings a year. So whether you believe in saving the planet or just saving money, green technology can work for you.

Bonus Tracks: download the city’s utility tax revenue and local option gas tax fund documents. (in Adobe Acrobat .pdf files)