This week, the DJC ran an excellent article from Arthur H. Rotstein with the Associated Press called “Commercial projects in Tucscon must start harvesting rainwater.” The article says that the Arizona city has enacted the nation’s first municipal rainwater harvesting ordinance for commercial projects. The ordinance requires developers building new business, corporate or commercial structures to supply half of the water needed for landscaping from harvested rainwater starting next year.

Apparently, landscaping accounts for about 40 percent of water use in commercial

Water

development and for 45 percent of household water consumption in Tucson. That. Is. Crazy.

The article also mentions that a half-dozen other communities in Arizona are looking at replicating the approach, and that rural Santa Fe County in New Mexico has required harvesting using cisterns or similar structures for commercial and residential development since last year.

Which brings me to the next question: why isn’t this a requirement everywhere? Water is cheap, yes. But even though it is cheap, it still costs money. If Tucscon - which the article says gets 12 inches of rain a year - requires rainwater harvesting, why don’t we? (Other than little details like the state owning the rain that drops down from the sky….) 

Now I know Tucson and Seattle are very different. I know Tucson uses so much water on landscaping because the city is in a desert, which means for most anything to grow, it is going to need extra water. But the underlying principal is the same. Water is a free resource. When water falls on the ground, it flows along roadways, picking up dirty icky things like metals and nutrients, eventually ending up in a water body like the Puget Sound, where it

The new LOTT Alliance project in Olympia will be all about water treatment and water conservation. Lisa Dennis-Perez of LOTT said the more conservation there is, the more the organization can delay the need to build additional water treatment plants.

does real damage or at a treatment plant, where it goes through an extensive process to get clean. So why don’t we, as a country, require that at least some of that water is captured and used for something productive?

It just seems like a really wasted resource.

Where am I wrong here? Please tell me why this would not work.

By the way, water is going to become an even greater issue of importance as more people move to the Pacific Northwest. I wrote this article a couple weeks ago that discusses the challenges between the desire to get off the water grid and traditional infrastructure.

In that story, a number of experts from our region discussed where we are going with water treatment and the difficulties that lie ahead. It covers a range of opinions but all speakers could agree on one thing: water needs to be more expensive for change to happen.

Kurt Unger of the Department of Ecology pretty much spoke for the crowd when he said “Water is too damn cheap… We need to assess a fee on water to enable so many more things to happen.”

The honors have been doled out. The party’s done. And AIA’s What Makes It Green is over for another year. To read my article in the DJC, click here.

There have been some interesting blog postings on this year’s ceremony. Dan Bertolet’s self-described rant at hugeasscity talks about the title of the awards, and whether, after all this time, we still don’t know what makes it green. Dominic Holden at The Stranger also weighed in on the point of the awards here. The AIA Seattle COTE also live-blogged the process (go here if you want a full list of winners). 

Of the ten projects that won, it surprises me that six are in Washington. Two are in Seattle. If we’re really looking at the greenest of the green, I would expect a wider range of geographic locations (considering the competition was open to designers and architects in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, Montana, Guam, Hawaii, Hong Kong and Japan). 

This year’s project winners included one project in Leavenworth, one in Woodinville, two in Seattle, one in Olympia, one on San Juan Island, one in Victoria, B.C., one in Billings, Mont., one in Portland and one in Denver.

By way of comparison, last year’s winners included one two from Seattle, one in Tacoma, one in Issaquah, one in Bremerton, one in Billings, Mont., one in Corvallis, Ore., one in Portland, one in Salem and one in Bend. 

(Incidentally, both winners in Billings went to the same architecture firm - High Plains Architects).

But here’s the thing: an awards process is only as good as the entries it receives. And from what I’ve heard, it takes a lot of time and effort to put a project entry together. So what can you do?

I don’t have the answer. But I do have winning project pictures. Here are a few of them: enjoy!

Miller Hull's Building #35, Natural Sciences Building at Puget Sound Community College in Olympia

Anna Howlen of D + A Studio's The San Juan Channel House on San Juan Island

High Plains Architects' Klos Building in Billings

When it rains in Seattle (as it often does) water flows along city streets and sidewalks, picking up toxins, before it is sent to a storm drain and eventually ends up in Puget Sound. This is the largest polluter of the Sound, sending 52 million pounds of pollutants into it every year.  That’s a conservative estimate but it’s nothing new. 

What is new is a map, produced by a team of GIS students from the University of Washington that shows where the storm drains - that send the water into Puget Sound - are. Turns out there are 4,500 public manmade storm drains, according to the team. The map was produced for People for Puget Sound, a nonprofit that advocates for healthy policies for the sound. The map also includes 2,123 natural drainages that receive inputs from the watershed system of additional drains, and 297 storm drains from the Washington State Department of Transportaion and 70 bridges. Industrial and private drains were not included in the project.

What poisons end up in the sound? Yummy things like copper, zinc, mercury, flame retardants, PAHs, and petroleum hydrocarbons. Some of these pollutants, like phthalates, which are found in plastic bottles and packaging, get dissolved in stormwater, making them hard to remove, if not impossible.  Pleasant.

Why should we care? Because, on a very base level, the Puget Sound is a huge economic driver that helps support our local economy. Not to mention the environmental aspects. 

So what does the image look like? Here it is…

Courtesy People for Puget Sound

Bruce Wishart, policy director for People for Puget Sound, said the map shows the enormity of the stormwater problem which impacts the sound.

Heather Trim, urban bays and toxics program manager for the organization, said the students went well beyond their class project to create a terrific map that advances knowledge of stormwater inputs. “We have been told by agencies that it would be years before we could get this map and yet the students have produced this tremendous resource.”

How about it readers, is this image a tad surprising? Or is it what you would have expected?

This week, I wrote an article in the DJC on Bellevue Towers, its developer, Gerding Edlen, and what the project represents for Bellevue.

Bellevue Towers is a two-tower luxury condo project with 539 units. According to

Bellevue Towers

Mike Brennan, director of Bellevue’s Development Services Department, it is the most prominent green building in Bellevue and the first multifamily high-rise that has gone for LEED certification in the city. It is targeting LEED gold and is supposedly the largest LEED-certified residential project in the Northwest, according to press materials. It is also the first project Gerding Edlen has done in the Puget Sound region.

That’s a lot of firsts. I’m wondering what this means for Bellevue.

Bellevue tends to have a mixed reputation when it comes to green buildings. In my wanderings, I’ve heard about city codes that make it difficult for projects to do low impact development, and green techniques that relate to stormwater. I’ve also heard disappointed reactions that the city wasn’t more receptive to green building earlier.  (For a reaction on how Bellevue has been MIA, see the comments to a previous post regarding Kirkland here.)

But I wonder if that is changing.

Bellevue is the first city in the Puget Sound region to have a Gerding Edlen development. Gerding Edlen, Portland’s premier green developer, is known internationally for its work. I’m sure Seattle and other cities would have appreciated one of its projects.

Phil Beyl, principal in charge of Bellevue Towers with architect GBD, said the city welcomed aggressive sustainable techniques “with open arms.” Working on this project was exciting for him, precisely because he felt like he was bringing something new to the city: “We’ve been able to bring to Bellevue an elevated level of sustainability that now I think has raised the bar quite a bit higher… and that’s very exciting.”

Brennan said Bellevue is hoping this building will serve as an example and bring other green development to the city (though he also was unsure whether it actually would or not).

Incidentally, there are only two LEED certified buildings in Bellevue, according to the USGBC’s registry. But there are 24 that are registered. Then again, some of the projects that are awaiting certification like the Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center (wrote about it a year ago here in the DJC) are pretty darn interesting. 

Then there’s my own experience with people that read this blog.

I like to track where blog readers come from, and believe me, there’s been a dramatic shift. Last summer, I was surprised by how little readers I had from Bellevue (one here and there but virtually none). I even e-mailed certain city representatives to get them to read, but readers from Bellevue remained flat.

In the last two months, something changed. Now, Bellevue is consistently the third rated city, in cities that read this blog. (Behind Seattle, and then either Portland or New York, depending on the day.)

What the heck is going on?

Did something shift or did a whole lot of people from Bellevue start reading this blog for no reason? Was it the economy? Was it the change in presidents? I’m stumped.

What do you think? Is Bellevue getting - or going to be getting greener? Has anything changed or is this really just one LEED project? Comment below or answer my poll at right.

For more on Gerding Edlen, click the tab ‘Gerding Edlen’ below. Or check out SkyscraperCity and look under Bellevue Development or Bellevue Towers.

Remember that time, last July or August, when you caught a view of the Puget Sound out of the corner of your eye… maybe above Pike Place Market. Maybe crossing a ferry to Bainbridge. Maybe at Discovery Park. And you just thought to yourself ‘Wow.’

Hold that memory in your head. Now imagine what this region would be without Puget Sound. If you voted for the Pike Place Market property tax levy because of the

Puget Sound

 market’s intrinsic value to this community, then imagine how much more intrinsic is that body of water that is an environmental and economic driver of the Pacific Northwest.

Guess what, it’s sick. It’s really, really sick. So sick, the Puget Sound Partnership has spent the last 18 months figuring out what it would take to cure it with its draft action agenda. But hold your horses, the document is still only a draft and is ready to change based on your comments.

If you care about the sound… or would like to have future memories with the sound in it, I’d read my story in the DJC tomorrow, check the action agenda out here, and start investigating the issue and how you can make a difference. It’s worth it.