A watershed headquarters goes
green with LEED.
On the approach to the northeastern outskirts of Baltimore, MD, half-rented strip-malls and defunct car dealerships alternate with stretches of modest row homes and mom-and-pop convenience stores. Well-kept porches sport a rainbow assortment of hanging flowers. On the tiny lawns, irises and day lilies jostle for a glimpse of summer sun, while a few feet away, cars, transit buses, and delivery trucks rush by, following historic Route 1 from the city center to the farthest suburbs.
Amid the din of traffic along Baltimore’s Belair Road corridor, however, it’s not unusual, when the weather is nice, to see children playing jump rope or riding bicycles on a side street; a block over, teenage boys might be seen running intense football scrimmages over the blacktop.
Through the center of it all flows Herring Run, ensconced within a strip of urban woodland that would have done the Olmstead brothers proud.
But it hasn’t always been that way.
During the 1970s, “It was basically a ditch running through fields,” says Sarah Bur, who sits on the Herring Run Watershed Association’s (HRWA’s) board of directors. “The Park has changed a lot as a result of the work of the Herring Run Watershed Association. The riparian buffer was all planted by the association over a number of years.”
The association serves to protect a 41-square-mile watershed while helping to educate 50 watershed communities in the care of their water resources. Two blocks south of the stream, near the crest of a rise that falls to its bank, you’ll find the row home that houses HRWA’s headquarters. The organization recently received Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold Certification for its newly renovated headquarters. Mary Roby, the group’s executive director, says it was not only dream come true, but a chance to put in practice what the association has been preaching over more than a decade.
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Photo: Mary Roby
The HRWA headquarters building before renovation began |
On the scorching mid-June afternoon when I visited the headquarters building, the thermostat in the foyer read a comfortable 76 degrees. Roby apologized for the chill, explaining that Baltimore’s mayor, Sheila Dixon, had just adjourned a press conference in the next room announcing a federal stimulus-fund grant for a citywide weatherization program. With 60 guests crowding the meeting space, Roby says, she thought it best to cool things down a bit. But lately, she adds, such crowds are becoming commonplace around the office. Since receiving LEED certification, “We’re kind of the go-to green building,” she says. “If somebody has a green program or event they want to announce, and they want to do it in a green building, they can
come here.
“We’ve had architects, landscape architects, members of the Green Building Council, business people, community people—people are very keen on what’s going on in this building.”
House Hunting
Roby had the group’s community centered-orientation in mind in 2005, when the association began the search for a new location for its headquarters. HRWA had lost its lease on a building along busy Harford Road, just two blocks from the stream. “We spent several months looking for a place to rent along the Harford Road–Belair Road corridor,” she recalls. “We wanted to be on a major thoroughfare within the watershed, but couldn’t find anything that met our needs. Everything was either too small or too expensive, or there was some problem.”
Eventually, the association found a building at the corner of Belair Road and Pelham Avenue—fortuitously, again just a stone’s throw from the creek. The building had formerly housed a small industrial bakery that supplied pizza shells for restaurants. Although structurally sound, the two-story row house required considerable work to fulfill the group’s needs. Nevertheless, HRWA purchased the building, the staff moved in and resumed work, and Roby began planning the renovation.
Aside from a businesslike front office, there was little about the building to suit it to a community-focused watershed group. The mechanical, plumbing, and electrical systems were inefficient, outmoded, and decrepit. On the second floor where the staff worked, cramped and dilapidated apartments painted a dreary picture of hard times for the previous occupants. At the rear of the building, an industrial kitchen and loading bay were of dubious utility to community activists on a mission to protect the nearby stream.
Roby was worried that the building did not present a welcoming environment, nor did it reflect “what the association was all about,” she says. “We offered training workshops, and there was no real space for that.” And with a touch of irony, she notes that the row house plot, like many other lots in the neighborhood, was entirely paved or built up, rendering it virtually 100% impervious to rainwater.
A Green Consensus
“We had a community charrette in February 2005, and because we’re a watershed association, the consensus of the group was that we should have a building that focused on saving water and saving energy,” says Roby. “Everybody wanted a green roof.” And, she adds, there was one more point on which everyone agreed: “We should be LEED certified.”
“Their big issue was water,” says Darraugh Brady of Ziger Snead LLP. As lead architect on the project, she says the association wasn’t interested in “the most sophisticated systems.” Instead, they wanted the project to “demonstrate technologies that homeowners and businesses could replicate” at other locations in the neighborhood.
The group imagined a bright, airy office space in the front lobby and a general meeting and classroom space to replace the industrial kitchen in the back. Roby also wanted to avoid, as much as possible, chopping up the workspaces with either walls or cubicles.
However, within those basic parameters, Brady was asked to integrate numerous energy-efficient and environmentally friendly features that would allow the building to qualify for LEED certification—all this while keeping in mind the tight budget of a community based not-for-profit organization.
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Photo: Alain Jaramillo
Sedums growing on HRWA’s new living roof |
For Brady, the small size of the project was a change of pace. “We typically do more academic and high-end installations, so it was unique for us in terms of size,” she says. The firm’s portfolio includes among its recent projects the 61,410-square-foot Brown Center, an ultramodern glass and steel performing arts facility at Baltimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art.
“This was a tiny project for us,” she says. Brady was excited to have the opportunity to work on a LEED project and was inspired by her client’s commitment to the cause. Both, she says, helped convince her boss that the project would be more than worth the effort, in terms of the good will it would generate.
Prescott Gaylord, a builder who lives in the community, attended a few of the early design charrettes as an interested neighbor. “It was kind of neat; they had a lot of the stakeholders there,” he says. As co-owner of Baltimore Green Construction, he also noted that the group’s vision “was right up our alley.” Although he says his firm works on “anywhere from $150,000 residential rehabs to multimillion-dollar commercial new construction,” the HRWA office renovation represented his firm’s “sweet spot in terms of size and complexity.”
Gaylord responded to the project request-for-proposal, and his firm was selected as general contractor on the project.
Waterproof or Living Roof
According to Gaylord, the green roof, because of the increasing popularity of the technique, was “probably one of the easiest parts of project.”
He explains, “You can go to a green roofing company and buy all the materials and labor. There is a lot of information out there on what kind of roofing you need underneath, what kind of support you need, what kind of slip sheets and roof barriers you need.” And, he adds, it’s even possible to find bargains. “We were able to get a good price because we were able to procure some materials that were left over from a very large job.”
From an architectural standpoint, aside from the need to sister each of the building’s rafters to bear the load of the membrane and the growth medium, Brady agrees that the living roof posed few significant challenges.
But Gaylord cautions that, regardless of the roofing system being installed, working on small roofs can present some challenging situations. The most important consideration is safety, he says. “With any number of people moving about on a small roof with no rails,” safety can never be taken for granted.
Mike Furbish, president of the Furbish Company, which installed the HRWA’s living roof, points out that small projects can pose interesting logistical challenges as well. With no room in the budget for a crane to hoist materials up to the roof, he says, his workers had to fashion a pulley system using rope, ladder, and pail to get materials to the work site.
After installing the membranes and growth medium, Furbish opted to populate the green roof using multiple species of sedums, which he says provide reliable, drought-tolerant, year-round ground cover. By the time planting began, in late autumn of 2006, Furbish could see a few flakes of snow wafting over the roof as crews put in the seedlings. Though a hard freeze would have made planting impossible, he says this fluke of the weather was not of serious concern for the viability of the plants. “We pay particular attention to getting rapid growth,” he notes, but he considers it advantageous to get the plants in before winter sets in, so they can become “acclimated” to the growth medium in order to be ready to take advantage of the entire growing season the following spring.
Furbish says the typical living roof requires very little maintenance. “You might occasionally pull some weeds or do some pruning—maybe deadheading some flower stalks—but it’s pretty minor stuff,” although he adds that the intensity of the maintenance effort depends on the client. “If the client is trying to achieve an aesthetic look, they might be very particular about volunteer plants showing up. But if you’re really interested in groundcover, stormwater management, and biodiversity, you sort of welcome anything that comes in, as long as it can thrive in conditions on the roof.” Invasive species, he says, are usually not a long-term worry. “We have a very shallow granular growth media, a lot of things that start off as a little seedlings really don’t have the infrastructure of growth media to support them, and they’ll die off over time.”
If the purpose of the roof is to “encourage habitat creation and biodiversity,” he says, “you’re not overly concerned about having something start from bird droppings or windblown seed—you actually sort of welcome it.”
Overall, he says, green roofs can offer significant performance advantages over traditional roofing systems.
“The industry is changing rapidly; a couple of years ago it would have been considered counterintuitive to hold water on a roof. The reality is exactly the opposite. Membranes, even good ones, decay over time. The living roof protects them, giving your roof a much longer lifespan. And the growth medium contains very little organic material; it’s long-term viable for 50 to 60 years.”
Catchment-22
In contrast to the straightforward approach taken with the living roof, Gaylord says the team “had to be more tenacious” on other parts of the project. The rainwater harvesting system that provides the water to flush the toilets provides a good illustration of that effort.
For the catchment system, he says, “We had to do a good amount of research. In Baltimore City, frankly, there isn’t another one that we know of. We had to figure out what code would allow, what the inspectors wanted to allow, what systems were available, and what we had to do.”
As Gaylord discovered, municipal code requires very high-quality standards for water coming off the living roof “before we flush the toilet with it.” Nevertheless, the basic system his team employed is fairly simple: Runoff from the living roof is channeled through a sediment filter and sent for storage in a 480-gallon cistern on the building’s lower level. From there, it is pumped to the toilets as needed. In the event of a power failure, which would disable the pumps, or if the cistern were to drain below 6% of capacity, an automated control valve would switch to the municipal water supply. Finally, at the end of the line, a placard next to the commode advises visitors to disregard the slight brown tint of the water. However, somewhere in the middle, Gaylord says, things got a little more complicated.
“The rainwater actually goes through a UV filter and a carbon filter before it’s allowed to go through to the toilet,” he explains. “That took a bit of doing, and it’s more expensive than it really should have been. It’s great for a demonstration project, but there’s not really a good reason to run it through so much filtration.” The explanation, he says, is that up until now, “The code didn’t conceive of this kind of thing.”
Although power outages caused by storms are unpredictable, Roby says, thanks to low-flow toilets and the system’s efficiency in harvesting rainfall, the tank fills quickly and has hovered between 100% and 45% capacity, even during dry spells. She says that, so far, there has never been a need to switch over to city water for flushing.
And she says she is not at all concerned by the water’s fluctuating hue, because it’s a sign of a healthy living roof. According to Roby, the color of the water varies from season to season, “depending on which types of sedums are in bloom.”
Cutting Corners
In addition to installing two small rain gardens featuring native plants and treating stormwater from the property’s footprint, HRWA took the bold step of providing treatment for offsite runoff collected from the nearby roadway. The concept, based on the Portland, OR, Stormwater Planter, represented another first in the city for a privately owned project.
According to Gaylord, getting the planters built also required a fair amount of legwork. “This isn’t a huge multimillion-dollar construction project, so we didn’t have the benefit of being able to commission an engineering study about how many gallons per minute are going to come through or how many rain events average over the year,” he says. “We mostly had to go out, look at the street during the rain—look at where water goes—and plan the planters and curb cuts accordingly.”
Mike Novotny, a water resources engineer from the Center for Watershed Protection, a national think tank, volunteered his expertise on a site visit to help delineate the drainage area for the stormwater planter. He says this field assessment led to some of the concept ideas for the location, sizing, and depth of the planter.
“The best time to be out there is during a rainstorm, to see where the water is actually going. When it’s dry, you can look at a stain or a spill and say ‘It looks like it was going that way,’ but you’re never quite sure until that rainstorm happens.”
With the concept finalized and committed to paper, however, getting approval from city officials to install the curb cut and planter proved to be “a long slog,” says Gaylord. “To their credit, nobody thought it was unreasonable; it was just, ‘I don’t know if I’m allowed to approve this or not. Go talk to some other office.’ And the other office might say, ‘I don’t know if I’m allowed to approve this either. I have nothing to judge this against; please go talk to someone else.’ It had more to do with it being new than anything else.”
Eventually the planter was approved, and Gaylord says code officials who have since seen the practice in action on the site couldn’t be more pleased. “They have asked about it and are trying to apply it in other places,” he notes. For his part, Gaylord says that if he had it do over again, he might look into some minor refinements: “Maybe smooth the road out a little bit differently, let it gully out a little bit more smoothly, and maybe put a grate on it for garbage. Other than that, it’s working very well; I can certainly see the water direct into it,” he says.
Racking Up the Points
Along with his design advice on the stormwater planter, Novotny provided one other essential service to HRWA during the LEED certification process: He ran the water-quality numbers. “There is a wide range of computations and evidence that you have to submit to LEED to get your certification. These come down to using established modeling techniques and published BMP [best management practices] pollutant removal efficiencies and runoff reduction efficiencies” to predict how the system will perform, he explains.
During the certification process, the applicant must demonstrate “that the one- and two-year peaks do not exceed their predevelopment condition,” he says, and that the treatment meets the “governing local water-quality treatment standards.”
Brady argues those were probably tough targets to miss. “It was a really bad situation, so anything we did made it better. The stats on these green roofs are that they suck up 40% to 50% of your normal rain events, and then we’re collecting the rest of it in a cistern—there are overflows, obviously, but by and large the water that was being dumped to the concrete alley in the back of the building is significantly reduced.
“By the time we got done with the green roof on both the upper and the lower roof, the creative garden space, and a couple of tree pits and bioswales, we had increased the pervious surface to something like 55%, which is pretty amazing in a tight urban site,” she adds.
With the figures in hand, Novotny says, it was “a matter of convincing the folks at LEED that the data sources that we used and the computations that we set forth met their requirements—and apparently they did.”
Rounding out the LEED scorecard, Brady delivered a bevy of simple energy-efficient technologies. “They didn’t have gobs of money to spend on lots of sophisticated technology,” she acknowledges. “There are no photovoltaics on the building; the heating and cooling system is real simple, but a highly efficient Energy Star–rated forced-air system. It’s the kind you could put in a home.” Other improvements range from low-E windows and L-shaped steel awnings on southwest exposures to shelter workspaces from intense solar gain to tubular skylights, which provide excellent natural illumination even in interior spaces such as bathrooms and hallways.
The bus stop out in front of the building, in combination with handicapped-accessible showers, bike racks, and lockers, encourage staff members to leave their cars at home and helped HRWA run up corresponding LEED transportation, accessibility, and connectivity credits. The showers and lockers, Roby says, have a dual use: “A lot of the work we do is in the streams, and people get muddy. When they come back, they’ve got a place to get cleaned up.”
Encouraged by the LEED process, Brady says, contractors are also “waking up on the demolition portion of their projects and reusing materials” rather than hauling load after expensive load to the landfill. Though they betray no clue of their well-traveled history, she points out that the door jambs, fittings, and moldings for the new office were milled from lumber recovered during demolition.
Choosing to Save
Gaylord says that for comparable buildings, building green “costs no more on average” than not building green. “It all comes down to what the owner’s priorities are. For example, the Herring Run Watershed Association chose to spend money on a catchment to collect rainwater to flush their toilets. Another similar building may have chosen to spend the same money on a fountain in the front foyer. It’s not that one is more expensive; it’s that people make different decisions and have different priorities.”
Brady agrees: “If you’re just trying to get LEED certified, or LEED Silver, you can very easily do it with very little increase in cost, and you’ll get a payback in one or two years.”
But she says the decision-making process itself can play a significant role in controlling costs. By getting agreement on the Herring Run project’s priorities early on through a charrette, she says, the entire team, including owners, contractors, architects, and engineers, were able to avoid the costly spectacle of working at cross purposes later in the project. “Having everybody at the table right off the bat is one of the ways LEED can end up not costing additional money,” she says.
Embracing the Green
Gaylord says Baltimore City officials are very much in favor of green initiatives, and after seeing the example of what HRWA has achieved, “They are looking at ways to make it easier for the next people.”
Bill Stack, who heads Baltimore Department of Public Works Water Quality Division, believes that “environmental site design techniques,” such as those employed in the HRWA renovation project, are “the future of stormwater management.”
Stack, who has recently been placed in charge of an effort to consolidate the city’s stormwater management activities, says one of his top priorities will be to eliminate the burdensome administrative impediments that innovative environmental site design projects have to negotiate while seeking approval. “Not only do communities have a hard time trying to get permission to implement these environmental site design development packages, the development community also has a difficult time. There are hurdles, but our mission is to identify those hurdles and eliminate them as best we can.”
Walking the Walk
“I don’t think there was a great deal of realization of how complicated it would be to achieve LEED certification,” says Roby.
Nevertheless, Brady says the project succeeded beyond all expectation. “They wanted a LEED-certified building. We actually got them a [LEED] Gold building, which is pretty amazing, given that we had a tight budget. I never thought we’d get over Silver, but we ended up with Gold, which is wonderful.”
At a cost of around $600,000 for the purchase and renovation of the building, Bur says the project was well worth it. After spending an entire day on a community service retreat at HRWA headquarters, she comments, “It’s a space that embraces you and makes you feel like you want to be productive and connected. It’s an exciting building. To me, we’re walking the walk. The building where we have our offices and conduct our educational programs speaks about water conservation and stormwater management directly. The building has its own story to tell. I love the fact that it’s a very traditional Baltimore building—a row house that’s like thousands of other structures in Baltimore. Homeowners could do some pieces of what we’ve done.
“It’s an educational tool for kids and adults, and also a growing community resource,” she adds.
For Roby, organizing the city’s first LEED Gold project represents just one step toward a greener future for the entire city. “I think it was back six or seven years ago, when the Sustainability Commission was just getting started, I said, ‘Baltimore has the potential to be the greenest city on the East Coast.’ People just laughed at me, but I think it’s true. We can achieve that.”