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Lean green municipal machine : New community center solidifies Portola Valley's claim to environmental leadership

by Dave Boyce

With a brand new and notably green community center that includes a library, Town Hall, community hall and maintenance facility, the Portola Valley Town Council has made good on its stated ambition to establish the town as an environmental leader.

Many communities, including Portola Valley, Atherton, Woodside and Menlo Park, have joined regional coalitions dedicated to combating global warming, and many have formed committees to consider steps that might significantly move a community toward that goal.

But as significant steps go, it's hard to do better than green construction. Buildings consume 70 percent of the nation's electricity, 40 percent of its raw materials and 12 percent of its potable water, and generate 39 percent of its carbon dioxide emissions and 30 percent of its waste, according to the U.S. Green Building Council.

Portola Valley has taken a big step away from that trend. The Town Center project, with its four buildings and a maintenance shed, for example, totals 18,500 square feet of covered floor area plus a concrete plaza. Attention to green details in the making of this complex, which officially opened on Sept. 14, translated to savings of 140 metric tons of carbon dioxide, reducing by a third the greenhouse gas emissions typical for such an endeavor, chief architect Larry Strain said.

The recipe for the concrete, normally a major emission source, reduced emissions by half, Mr. Strain said.

Instead of CO2-intensive Portland cement, the center's concrete uses manufacturing byproducts: slag from steel making and ash from coal-fired power plants. The aggregate rock in the concrete is pulverized material recycled from the 1950s-era school that the new complex replaced. No concrete was trucked in and no rock debris was trucked out, Mr. Strain said.

The school buildings were taken apart — deconstructed — rather than demolished so as to harvest as much reusable material as possible.

Deconstruction added a few weeks to the schedule, and may have permeated the air with a conservation ethic. Well into the project, a subcontractor, spying wooden crates that had recently held roofing panels, salvaged the crates for wood to trim windows in the new complex, Town Councilman Ted Driscoll said.

Mr. Driscoll, a four-time mayor and one of many key players in this multi-year effort, recently led The Almanac on a tour of the site and agreed to an interview, as did other residents with other views of the project.

But first, a look at what the town has achieved.

Wood is good

The new complex has been paved, roofed, paneled, floored and fenestrated (there are windows). Included in all that are 1,318 tons of concrete, 77 tons of steel, 50 tons of insulation, 434 square meters of double-paned insulated glass and 155 tons of wood, according to preliminary calculations provided by Mr. Strain.

As noted, the material for the concrete was locally acquired. The complex's many wooden elements also carry that distinction.

The interior paneling, all from the former school, shows its original nail holes. The pale slats that cover the ceiling tiles were 2-by-4s in the school. The butcher-block-like counters in Town Hall and the library were cut from the huge laminated beams that spanned the ceiling of the school's multi-purpose room.

"We're saving a substantial amount of money with reclaimed wood," Mr. Driscoll said. "That was wood we'd have had to buy (but) we already owned it."

It's one thing to reuse lumber, but finding a local source for a hardwood floor? In what Mr. Driscoll called a first for the area, the town found enough local eucalyptus to make new floor boards for the main room of the community hall, with the boards milled locally.

How local can you get? Several trunks from trees felled on site have been stripped of their bark, quartered lengthwise, and placed around steel beams to form tree-like columns in the community hall and library. They create "a more rustic appearance," Mr. Driscoll said in a list he published of the complex's green features.

Although not ready for opening day, slats of durable Alaskan yellow cedar will shade the exteriors of the library, Town Hall and community hall. The town had budgeted $50,000 for new slats, but a competitive bid turned up reclaimed Alaskan cedar that filled the bill for $12,000, Mr. Driscoll said.

Also reclaimed, from a Northern California water tank, is all of the exterior redwood paneling on the three main buildings, Mr. Driscoll said.

What new wood there is in the complex is used for structural beams and comes from forests managed for sustainable harvesting.

Self-sufficiency

Late in the project, the Town Council debated the question of how to store fresh water for the Town Center should a catastrophic earthquake cut the supply line.

No one wanted the headache of a large tank, either above or below ground, but it seemed inevitable. Public Works Director Howard Young solved the problem by sending the water through a length of 2-foot-diameter pipe with a manual cut-off valve at one end, Mr. Driscoll said. It's always filled with 2,500 gallons of fresh water and needed only a simple ditch to bury it out of sight.

When that quake does strike, the town will be better prepared now that the Town Hall is no longer in a fault zone, is reinforced for "immediate occupancy," and will be furnished with equipment for running an emergency operations center.

The electricity to run the place will be supplied by the sun via the 70-kilowatt solar-panel array mounted on the library and community hall roofs. To reduce the need for lights, the buildings have copious natural lighting.

Some of that solar power will go to the parking lot, where there will be four plug-in receptacles for electric vehicles, Mr. Driscoll said.

In the winter, under-floor heating systems will warm Town Hall and the library, where a wall-mounted touch-screen computer will track utility usage in real time, he said. This "dashboard" will also show data from the homemade seismograph in the next room.

The buildings are naturally ventilated, with upper and lower working windows. In the library, two concrete-encased south-facing alcoves are designed to capture and radiate the day's heat at night, and retain the night's coolness in the mornings.

Setting an example

Some 506 of Portola Valley's residents contributed a total of $17 million to the completion of the new complex. Now that it's finished, what's in it for them?

Mr. Driscoll responded to that question first by focusing on the benefits of a seismically reinforced Town Hall and its robustness relative to the former school that had been built to a building code in place 60 years ago.

He also noted that the Town Center is unlikely to have electric bills, which could mean a lower utility user tax rate starting in 2009. The new playing fields are now regulation size, and the community hall has "a first-class kitchen," he added.

Portola Valley advertises itself as a friend of the environment. This new complex, which should earn a gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council and may earn platinum, brings that message home, Mr. Driscoll said.

"I think there's an opportunity to lead by example here," he said. "We're very interested in being pioneers. Frankly, if not here, where?"

To that end, a speaker series on green topics is coming to Portola Valley, starting with an Oct. 13 speech by environmental activist Amory Lovins; the series is co-sponsored by the town and the Friends of Sausal Creek, Mr. Driscoll said.

"We're not anxious to become the Disneyland of green buildings," he noted. "On the other hand, we are anxious to do this."

Other speakers could include sustainability architect Bill McDonough, Al Gore and green entrepreneur Paul Hawken, resident Linda Yates said in an e-mail message.

No accolades, thanks

Receiving a high mark from the U.S. Green Building Council involves a check-off list that awards points for green features. The effort requires careful calculations by the architect and added around $100,000 to the cost, said associate architect Jim Goring.

It's all a bit much for Councilman Richard Merk, who regularly opposed pursuing a green building rating for the complex.

Asked for an update on his feelings now that the project is complete, he replied: "I still feel that way. ... It was billed as an educational thing. If you want to educate someone, show them the solar panels and show them the (electricity) meter running backwards."

The town doesn't need a $60,000 dashboard that shows how much water, gas and electricity is being used in each building, he said, adding, "These are bells and whistles and gadgets."

Green building ratings, he said, tend to be a "big deal" for architects in search of green bona fides. "It's like a get-out-of-jail-free card."

Asked to comment, Mr. Goring laughed, and then, after noting the paperwork burden of the process, said: "It seems kind of silly, but not all of it is. It really does draw attention to the project. That's valuable."

It also requires an independent agent to visit the site and validate that the end product is what it claims to be. "Believe it or not, that doesn't happen very often," he said.

"People tend to be a bit more rigorous about these things when they're accountable to someone else," he added. "(Certification) is a stick and a carrot to help clients and architects do the right thing instead of just talking about it."

Doubts resolved

Portola Valley resident Bernie Bayuk had early doubts about the project, particularly what it would cost taxpayers.

His mind changed, he said, after sensing that there might be enough in donations to fund it. He later made two donations himself, he said.

"I feel that this Town Council (which included Kirke Comstock, George Comstock and Ed Davis) had guts and was bold," he said in a recent phone interview. "The Town Council knew things I didn't know.

"There was always the risk that the taxpayers, and this is in my view, that the taxpayers would be stuck for millions of dollars to complete the project," he said. "They persevered over years and brought this about. My views are totally different now."

The opposition was occasionally vigorous, in part due to the difficulty of proving to residents the peril of using the former school complex, which was situated over seismic faults, Mr. Driscoll said. "Earthquakes don't have a constituency because they happen on a repeat cycle that's longer than a human life," he said.

The Almanac asked major donor and former mayor Bill Lane whether the opposing voices were disappointing in a town he helped to establish in 1964.

"Oh no," Mr. Lane said. "I think that's democracy. I think that was great. I think that was well-handled by whoever was chairing the meetings. I love working at the grass roots."

"I'm not only thrilled for my own and (my wife) Jean's personal hopes and wishes but, I think as much as anything else, that the whole town got behind it. It's so community-oriented. The whole town can be proud of it."

"I think that Town Center is going to be a knock-out," he added, noting that he is supporting the campaign to free about 280 feet of Sausal Creek from an underground culvert and channel it to a new creek bed. "(The creek) certainly captures the green issue."