LACCD Procurement Decisions Build Sustainable Campuses

The L.A. Community College District is currently engaged in an almost $2.5 billion building program across its nine campuses and two satellites. What is the status of that new building and modernization program?

We are making great progress. We have completed 167 projects and we currently have 236 more in progress. We have 17 brand new LEED-certified buildings in construction. We've already opened one LEED-ceertified building, and a couple will open this fall. We have construction going at every college. It's amazing progress.

What distinguishes your planning process and the programming of your facility needs from that of decentralized K-12 education systems?

We practice shared governance, which means that our faculties, students, and staff participate in the planning process for their facilities. For each of the projects we establish a user committee. The committee meets with the architects that they select; they go through the selection process and bring the architectural team on board. The architect and engineers facilitate the planning and design of the facility and its environment, but ultimately the people who are going to move into the building get to participate in the design and development of the final project, as contrasted with a more administrative kind of process that you would see in a K-12 environment.

From our earlier interviews, it's clear that you brought the Community College District a set of sustainability principles that you wanted to incorporate into Prop A/AA projects. What has characterized LACCD's investment in those principles? How have they rolled out?

A very pleasant surprise when I came to LACCD was the commitment that the Board of Trustees had made to sustainability and following LEED standards.

A related concept was that the board wanted to explore alternative energy concepts. The goal was to generate 25 percent of our energy from alternate sources with at least 10 percent from photovoltaics.

We got the first bond in 2001. In 2002, in response to feedback from the community, the board adopted the green policy, which makes it one of the oldest green policies around in institutions across the United States. Then in 2003, the board got the second bond issue, giving us the $2.5 billion. When I arrived in 2003, my charge was to implement that program.

One idea that the district wanted was for each of these design teams to have someone who had expertise in LEED, so we asked that a LEED-approved professional certified person be on each design team. In 2002, there were 14 people certified in LEED in the L.A. area. Our last count is now between 400-500. We think our program accomplished a lot of that.

The other thing that's been going on is that, from 2002 to today, the amount of materials available for use in sustainable construction has changed, and we've actually been stimulating some of that change in the marketplace. Because we have so much money and we can buy things in significant bulk, we can really command responsive performance and participate in changing the marketplace.

One example is in the area of furniture buying. We put out a bid for products produced from 100 percent recyclable materials. All of our products-bookshelves, chairs, desks, and couches, whatever we're buying-had to be 100 percent recyclable. We challenged the marketplace, saying we wanted a 15-year fully unlimited warranty on any product we bought, which they'd never done before.

The recent example we had is in the carpet area. We put out a bid for carpeting, and we said: 1) the carpet needed to be recyclable, 100 percent back into carpet when it was done and 2) that we wanted the carpet made out of recycled materials to the maximum extent possible. As of a couple of months ago, the technology did not allow you to put many recycled materials into the carpet face itself. We had Interface, Lees Carpet, and Tandus competing for this $83 million contract, and all three of them really wanted the contract because they wanted to claim the most sustainable carpet contract in the world. It was very contentious, but ultimately Tandus won, and the final decision was simply based on low price; they met the specifications we had set out and they offered us a low price. The price turned out to be half of the amount we're paying for carpet today.

One of your missions is to generate energy on site at your campuses. How do you accomplish that mission?

We've taken the initial board-driven guidance and expanded that in radical way. It's been an evolutionary kind of thing over the last five years that's been the product of a lot of good minds. We've adopted an energy strategic plan that really represents a paradigm shift.

There are basically four parts to the plan. The first is the idea of moving into a very active central plant environment. Most of our buildings were built in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, and they were heated and cooled, if they were cooled at all, by rooftop or window units, but not typically served by a central plant. Now we're investing the money in building a central plant that runs on a sustainable technology and provides a distribution system for hot and cold water to heat and cool the buildings. It will save us, we think, all by itself, probably 50 percent of energy load. The sustainable technology on the central plant is something called the Sun Chiller Heat Tube.

The second element is to look at how we use energy at the colleges. We're involved in a comprehensive demand-management reduction program. We're looking at every single energy-consuming feature at the college, whether it's light bulbs or fans or motors or pumps or outdoor lighting-anything that uses energy, we're retrofitting to the best and latest, state of the art. I describe that as squeezing out every single watt and therm that we can, and that's what we're about.

The third part of the strategy is the one that is really cutting edge-the idea of installing major photovoltaic and wind-driven capability at the colleges. I add wind-driven because the technology has changed there again. In the case of wind-driven, there's a new technology out that brings wind generation down to an architectural scale, with the idea that you can put tiny fans on the edge of a building that generate 4 kilowatts. If you have a hundred of those, it's 400 kilowatts. If you add the photovoltaic capability to that as well, that's going to meet high energy demand.

But the thing that we've added that's really remarkable is the idea of energy storage, because the challenge for photovoltaics and wind energy has been the idea that they're not stable-if it gets cloudy or if the wind dies down and you want them to continue producing energy, they can't. So you need to have some storage capability to level the load and meet the load that you've got.

We've looked at a number of interesting storage technologies, but the one that will probably be the key is the idea of storing hydrogen gas in a safe way. What we'll be doing is using the extra energy that we produce from photovoltaic and wind to split water through electrolysis, producing oxygen and hydrogen. Our colleges typically run on two to three megawatts, so we just need to store enough hydrogen to cover that load. During the day, we'll have photovoltaic and wind going on; at night, the wind will continue. Then we'll be storing the energy.

The ultimate goal, and I think this is going to happen for us by the end of 2008, is to be off the grid at all of our colleges and all of our satellites.

Much of the frustration engendered in the public sector while advancing sustainable technologies as part of construction are the barriers caused by the separation of capital budgeting and operational budgeting. What has the Community College District done to blur that line and to achieve a return on the capital investment of the building projects?

The reality for the district, initially, was pursuing these ideas as a sustainable goal, and we came to realize that there is economic benefit if we apply our capital dollars in the right way. There's the classic issue of separation between the operating side of the house and the capital side of the house, and we've found a way to integrate those so we get a return on investment, and that drives our strategy.

So, part of the formulation of this concept was realizing that we had a problem: under our bond program, we were going to build 3 million new square feet of space. We currently have 5 million square feet of space. But under the state funding formula, we get no more money for operations and maintenance. So with that extra 3 million square feet of space, we would also have an energy bill, a maintenance bill, and a custodial bill-that's a huge amount of money.

The classic choice the public sector has made in this circumstance is to engage in deferred maintenance-the idea that you build this stuff and don't maintain it; you don't clean it. Pretty soon it degrades and it's crummy again, and then you have to go back to the voters again and ask for more money for new buildings.

So, if you just take care of the stuff up front, it lasts longer. We design it to last 50-100 years, but with the way we typically maintain it in the public sector, after 20-30 years we need a new building because the thing has gotten so messed up. We realized we needed to come up with a way of addressing that operating budget issue.

At the same time, we looked at our energy budget and said, as a district, we're spending about $9 million a year on energy. You can compare that to other entities where they spend a lot more money on energy, but $9 million a year is about $1 million a year per college, and if could find a way to free up that $9 million, which is operating budget money, we could use that to meet the demand we have for custodians and maintenance.

So we started putting those ideas together and said that if we could find a way to leverage our capital dollars to ultimately eliminate our energy bill, we would find a huge savings that would allow us to address the maintenance operations issue. That became a conscious strategy. We started saying that we were going to use our capital dollars in a way that would ultimately reduce cost on the operating side.

Are you not, as facilities manager of the colleges, subject to being challenged politically and in the press if LACCD's capital projects are not consistently on time or under budget? Does anyone notice if, as a result of intelligent environmental planning and green construction practices, there are long-term savings from campus operations?

It's definitely the case that it is a complex program. People have a hard time understanding the intricacy, the elements that go into it, the nature of the planning process. There was an expectation early on that if people passed the bond issue, the next day there would be big yellow tractors running around, building things. That's not the reality of the construction process. There is planning that one needs to go through in terms of master planning efforts. In California, we have to work with the Division of State Architect to review building design, which is a time-consuming process. Ultimately, we get a really great product, but it is time-consuming. So, absolutely, the public looks at this and believes that we've taken too long and we're not using the money effectively. I would dispute that we're not using the money effectively. I think we're doing some remarkable things to provide significant, long-standing return for the public.

Have we taken a long time? Yes. It's taken awhile to get to the point we're at now, though we always knew we'd get here. At this point, we're spending $10 million a week. We have steel going up on every campus. We have concrete pouring all over the place. We have trenches open. It's difficult and challenging to work and learn at the colleges when all this noise and activity is taking place, but in a couple years that will be done, and we will have transformed the environment into something people really like.