S.B. East Valley Cities Talk of Building ‘Green’

By Naomi Kresge, The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif.

Mar. 9–REDLANDS — Representatives of several East Valley cities convened Thursday to discuss how to make buildings greener and neighborhoods more environmentally friendly.

Redlands Mayor Jon Harrison called the meeting, saying he wants Redlands to join Riverside, which adopted a green policy last month, in promoting energy- and water-efficient development.

“You can’t wait three or four months,” said Grand Terrace Councilwoman Lee Ann Garcia. “If we don’t move work quickly a lot of things are going to happen without this.”

Green development could mean building structures that don’t use much energy or water and are made from environmentally friendly materials, speakers said Thursday. It also could mean designing neighborhoods to be compact and oriented toward the street so residents can more easily walk or bicycle.

Mary Tucker, a supervisor in the city of San Jose’s environmental-services department, spoke at the Redlands session and in an afternoon meeting in Riverside. Other speakers in Redlands were Eric Shamp, a Redlands planning commissioner and sustainable-design director for HMC Architects, and Susan Lien Longville, director of the Water Resources Institute at Cal State San Bernardino.

San Jose requires that all new city buildings be certified under the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design ratings system. Since beginning the program in 2001, the city has built a LEED-certified library, is awaiting certification on a second project, and is working on 10 more buildings, Tucker said.

The next step is to promote green-building practices in the private sector, Tucker said.

In San Bernardino and Riverside counties, the idea of green-building practices has begun to take hold in the past year, said Pasqual Gutierrez, president of the Inland California chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Garcia said she hopes to incorporate environmentally friendly rules into the update of Grand Terrace’s general plan, which will spell out land-use rules for the next decade.

“I think ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ need to be key words,” Garcia said.

WHAT IS LEED CERTIFICATION? The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — or LEED — rating system is a national standard for measuring how environmentally sensitive a building is. Buildings can earn points in several categories:

–Water savings

–Energy efficiency

–Materials selection

–Indoor environmental quality

SOURCE: U.S. Green Building Council

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