'Green' buildings catch on in South Hampton Roads

When it opens in 2010, Virginia Beach’s Renaissance Academy will use kitchen water heated by solar panels and feature a rooftop garden over one wing.

Lamberts Point Community Center in Norfolk, slated to open late next year, will boast large roof overhangs to block the hot Southern sunlight, and underneath its parking lot large filters will clean rain runoff before releasing it into sewers.

Both buildings – and roughly two dozen others either under construction or planned for South Hampton Roads – will be certified as environmentally friendly by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Going green has become the latest trend in government and commercial construction.

While the buildings are more expensive to create, the added costs are recouped in long-term savings on electric, heating and water bills, proponents say.

“It’s not a passing fancy,” said Tony Arnold, director of Virginia Beach schools’ Office of Facilities

Planning and Construction. “It pays itself back operationally. But environmentally, it’s what we need to be doing.”

South Hampton Roads currently has seven buildings certified through the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, rules set by the Green Building Council. The nonprofit council, which has chapters nationwide, promotes environmentally friendly construction.

Its rules require everything from more energy efficiency to using recycled materials for construction. Buildings are rated on a point scale and can get credit for small things, such as locating near a public transportation line, to big projects, such as heating with geothermal wells.

Craig Cope is blunt about why the extra work is worth it.

“Buildings are hogs,” said Cope, vice president of Liberty Property Trust, a nationwide builder and manager of office and warehouse space. Liberty has built one green-certified office in Chesapeake and is at work on its second.

Buildings create nearly 40 percent of all greenhouse gases and use 40 percent of all energy, Cope said. That means while everyone has focused on fuel efficiency in vehicles, their homes, schools and offices have sucked up more power and released more harmful emissions.

“Everybody realizes that there’s something to this,” he said. “This is just one step to help alleviate that situation.”

Virginia Beach opened the state’s first green-certified school, Hermitage Elementary, in 2005.

Waterless urinals and flush toilets that use recycled rainwater mean less water consumption, and its green construction required 10 percent less electricity than nongreen elementary schools, said Tim Cole, the system’s sustainable schools project manager.

The school system is building Renaissance Academy, Virginia Beach Middle School, Windsor Oaks Elementary, Great Neck Middle School and a bus garage to meet the LEED standards.

In the case of Renaissance Academy, which will house middle and high school students, green construction will add $1.3 million in costs to the $65 million project. The school system has projected that it will recoup those expenses in the first 13 years of operation, Arnold said.

“For someone to go out and build as cheap a building as they can, but to still have all these high maintenance and utility costs, is really irresponsible,” Cole said. “It should just be the way we do business.”

Like the school system’s other projects, Renaissance will feature a computer kiosk in the lobby so guests and students can monitor everything from rainwater reserves in the holding basin to energy usage in the building. Students will be able to look out onto the rooftop garden, a feature that helps cool the building and control rain runoff, and see solar panels that will put energy back into the local grid.

“We want the building to be a teaching instrument as well,” Cole said. “The kids will eventually take this stuff home with them.”

The cities of Chesapeake, Suffolk and Norfolk, along with the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, all are planning their first green-certified public buildings .

In Chesapeake, construction on the 6th Precinct police station in Hickory begins this summer. Councilwoman Rebecca Adams hopes it will be the first of many environmentally friendly construction projects in her city.

Last June, Chesapeake’s City Council unanimously agreed that all new publicly funded buildings would be LEED-certified. Adams said there could be later measures to encourage private developers to make the same choices.

Roanoke, Charlottesville, Arlington and other Virginia cities offer incentives such as tax breaks and expedited permitting for developers who build green.

“We wanted the public sector to lead,” Adams said. “Green has just exploded, particularly in the last 12 to 18 months. The very fact that people are talking about it, thinking about it is a good thing.”

Meghan Hoyer, (757) 446-2293, meghan.hoyer@pilotonline.com