Where History Meets Green

Luckily, the majority of the 34 points needed for a LEED-EB certification can come from operational and maintenance changes. “We’ve been working on it since the beginning of the year,” McCormick says. “I actually was very pleased to see that an older building really can attain LEED certification without spending a fortune. A lot of it is just having policies and plans in place, so that you do things in a manner that is environmentally friendly and energy-saving. The U.S. Green Building Council has really started to place a huge emphasis on green cleaning—the way you clean your building and the chemicals you use.”

Of course, historic buildings are restricted in the structural changes they can make. But they also have some built-in advantages, such as their tendency to be located in densely populated urban areas.

“We have so much public transportation and parking around us,” McCormick says. “That really is helpful in some of the points as well. We negotiated with the Lifetime Fitness across the street [for use of their showers] to encourage Butler Square tenants to ride their bikes to work. We literally went from two bikers to 25, and they continue to ride.”

The tenants have been key to the LEED effort. Butler Square houses 45 to 50 businesses, employing a total of 1,110 people, and many are enthusiastically buying into the greening effort. Recycling programs are in full swing, and a couple of the businesses are even considering pursuing LEED-CI, the equivalent program for commercial interiors, within their own spaces.

NorthMarq is currently in its LEED performance period, three months that are the mandatory block of time when buildings seeking certification measure their efforts against the standard. Once the basic certification is accomplished, McCormick says her company plans to seek the next higher LEED category, the silver level.

“There will be a lot more infrastructure changes then,” she says. “We are looking into recapturing our wastewater and things like that that will take a lot more work to do. We’re even looking at the possibility of a green roof.”

Here, again, the tenants are a major part of the effort. Butler Square is pursuing LEED certification with the help of a “green team” committee consisting of several building tenants, contractors, vendors, and NorthMarq staff. One tenant, a civil engineer, has drawn up a prospective roof plan featuring native plants and a reflective rooftop patio for the tenants’ use. Solar power is another option that’s on the table.

McCormick believes the greening of Butler Square is not only an environmentally responsible thing to do, but also a smart investment for the long term. “Obviously, when you figure out what you want to do, you have to balance it with what your payback is going to be on your energy savings,” she says. “On a lot of the larger items that we’ve looked at, the payback is anything from two years to ten years. With rising utility costs—and the potential of rising water costs in the future—this is all very appealing.”