We're discussing green building in the Las Vegas Valley, past, present and future.

That's this week on Nevada Week.

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(Kipp Ortenburger) Our state has written into law the overarching goal of a 100% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, reaching net zero by 2050.

Complicating matters to reach that goal, Clark County alone is projected to grow by 750,000 by that same year, 2050, and growth on that scale of course means more residential and commercial building in the valley and, of course, that means more emissions.

Now, related to this, evidence of how these emissions affect lower-income residents more so than the general population is getting a lot more attention.

And finally, let's not forget that the construction industry is one of the main indicators driving our local economy.

So the question is how and where can we build responsibly with environmental, economic and equitable balance?

Well, on today's show we'll explore that balance and take a look back on our valley's green building over the last two decades.

We'll also explore the future and how green building fits into the statewide climate strategy and city and county municipal master plans.

To help us better understand all of this, please welcome Kristen Averyt, Nevada State Climate Policy coordinator; Justin Jones, Clark County Commissioner for District F, and Marco Velotta, city planner for the City of Las Vegas.

Well, Kristen, Marco and Commissioner Jones, thank you so much for joining us.

We really appreciate it.

Kristen, thank you so much for being back on our show.

I want to start with you.

You were part of a Nevada Independent opinion article that came out in April of 2020 right around Earth Day, and in that article, I want to read a quote: "Strong climate action at the state "and local level will benefit the health "of our most vulnerable populations "while establishing a stronger, "more resilient economy for all Nevadans."

When we're talking about climate action, something that really stands out to me is there is this intersection to some of these much bigger topics that we've been covering on the show here, of course the justice conversation and of course economic diversification and development.

I wanted to just get your perspective.

Where does green building fit into those larger conversations?

And I don't want you necessarily to talk about all the intersectionality there, but let's talk specifically about the climate aspects and more specific what our state goals are and how green building fits into that.

(Kristen Averyt) All right.

Thank you for the question, and thank you for having me on again.

So when it comes to our greenhouse gas emissions in the state and really across the U.S., 70% of all emissions come from our urban areas, so we really need to be thinking about how we're building in our cities and what our green buildings will actually look like moving forward.

We need to be thinking about energy efficiency, and we need to be thinking again more broadly about how we approach-- how we approach planning.

In general when we talk about climate change, it's our minority communities, it's indigenous populations, and it's low-income households that will bear the brunt of the impacts of climate change and stand the most to benefit from action on climate mitigation.

So it's really important that we pay attention to green buildings more broadly.

-Can you explain that a little bit more from a scientific perspective?

The assumption is of course if we've got greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, it affects everybody equally.

Why is it affecting these vulnerable populations that you mentioned more so than the general population or anywhere else on the globe?

-So I'll give you one example.

There's actually research that shows that those that are exposed to poor air quality are more likely to essentially experience morbidity and mortality related to extreme heat.

And in general across the U.S. and specifically in the Las Vegas area, it's low-income communities as well as minority communities that experience a greater exposure to poor air quality.

-And we want to mention the island effect is something we might talk about a little later.

I just wanted to give a little bit of background on that.

The urban interface of Las Vegas has one of the highest growing temperatures over the last 50 years of anywhere in the nation, six degrees.

The average temperature has increased over the last 50 years.

That's a significant amount and I'm assuming, Kristen, what your point is here is that is happening in the urban interface where a lot of these vulnerable populations are living.

-Absolutely.

So the planet's warming, of course Nevada, we've warmed by about two degrees since the beginning of the 21st century.

But if you look at our urban areas, both Reno and Las Vegas, they've warmed an additional four degrees in Reno and five degrees in Las Vegas on top of what we've experienced with global warming.

And that additional warming that we've experienced, it's because of the urban heat island effect.

It's the way that we build and what we build our environment and our urban environment out of that's creating that situation.

And unfortunately at a given moment, there can be a 10-degree difference in one part of our city versus another part, and in general, the poorest communities and the poorest households live in the hottest parts of town particularly in Las Vegas and North Las Vegas.

-Commissioner Jones and Marco, both of you, I want to bring you into the conversation here.

Let's talk about the other element of this, that economic resiliency conversation here.

Construction of course is a major economic driver for the entire Las Vegas Valley, and as I mentioned in the intro, our population is not looking to decrease-- quite the opposite-- it's looking to increase exponentially over the next 50 years, and of course that means a lot more building.

Commissioner, let's start with you.

Just on the county level of policymaking here, where does green building fit into these larger conversations, trying to balance economic drivers like construction with some of the justice conversations we're having, and then of course trying to reach what our statewide climate goals are.

(Justin Jones) I think it's really about not only what you build but also where you build it, and this really gets into this conversation about sprawl, about transit-oriented development and about urban planning.

So like the City of Las Vegas, the County started its master planning process last year, and this year is really kind of a big one for the County where we're going to finish up our master plan which will really shape where development goes and how development goes over the next 20-plus years.

But we're also rewriting our development code, and that really gets into where and what do things look like over the next 20 years.

And on top of that, we're also tackling the issue of climate change in our climate action planning.

All these things sort of interface with each other to address not only what types of buildings go up but how we build them and do it in an environmentally sustainable way.

-Marco, same question.

Of course let's even go that level even lower beyond policy of course is the planning, as Commissioner Jones just mentioned, and Las Vegas particularly is in a really interesting position being that we hear of LEED-certified buildings, and LEED being Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

But there's also a category for cities and communities, and Las Vegas is one of those communities that has been certified as gold, one of the highest levels.

Tell us a little bit maybe about the planning that you have done over the last 10 to 20 years that has led to that and kind of where planning then really balances that economic piece and the construction piece responsibly with some of our larger climate goals.

(Marco Velotta) Sure, thank you.

So our city council has been a proponent of sustainability for the last 15 years, and we really focused in on LEED certification for municipal buildings, which we've done with the construction of our new city hall and most recently, our new fire station and municipal court building.

Leading by example has really helped take us to that next level.

You mentioned the LEED for Cities program.

That was something that we did to assess where we stood with respect to our greenhouse gas emissions, our built environment, our natural environment.

We used that to plan for the next 30 years with our 2050 master plan, which our city council will be considering here coming up in May, to really chart the course for how we build and how we develop and really focusing in, as Commissioner Jones said, where we can do transit-oriented development, where we can reduce vehicle miles traveled, where we can build better green buildings and focus in on areas like East Las Vegas where we have a high concentration of Latinos and also low or median-income populations where we don't have good canopy coverage and high temperatures.

That plan will help us get to the next level in finding solutions for those communities, and that's really what LEED for Cities was about is showing us where we can go for the future.

-And Kristen, overall we've talked about a lot of elements, but greenhouse gas emissions comes up a lot.

I know that is a major piece of the statewide strategy as well.

I mean, when we are really focusing on the impact of climate change, is that really kind of the top-level factor that we really are trying to reduce across the board?

-I think the way I would characterize it is there are multiple issues that we need to address, and we need to consider them all.

So when we're talking about climate mitigation, in other words, just reducing greenhouse gases, we can't necessarily say that's mutually exclusive relative to climate adaptation; that is, how we deal with the impacts.

So yes, we might want to for example build a LEED-certified building, but we do need to consider transportation because yes, it might be a net-zero building, but if everybody has to drive a long way to get there, on the whole you might actually increase emissions.

Similarly, we need to be thinking about okay, if I'm building somewhere, how is that impacting the area?

Am I building in a place that might be prone to, for example, flood?

That is something we always think about, drought and water resource availability on that side, so we need to be thinking about flood exposure also.

So we need to be thinking about the entire picture of what might be happening from both a climate adaptation and a climate mitigation perspective.

-Well, green building in general of course isn't a new concept to Las Vegas or the Las Vegas Valley.

We have hundreds of LEED-certified buildings and then in thousands and thousands more retrofits, they're using green technology in some way, shape or form.

We had an opportunity to take a trip out and look at one of those gold-certified LEED buildings, the Molasky Corporate Center.

We went out there to take a look at what operation has been like for this building over the last 13 years since that building opened in 2007.

Let's take a look at that.

In the early 2000s, green buildings were sprouting up across Southern Nevada, and the Molasky Corporate Center was one of them.

Irwin Molasky and his family helped create the largest privately owned and operated LEED gold-certified, class A office building in the southwest United States.

(Richard Worthington) The family decided to build a LEED gold building at a cost that was about $4-1/2 to $5 million more than a code-compliant building, so that was a higher up-front cost.

The resulting operations of the building over the last 11 or 12 years has been a building that operates at a much lower cost.

Molasky's corporate headquarters incorporated many ecofriendly elements.

-The major elements are that it's an environmentally sustainable design, mitigates the use of water, electricity, and then maximizes human elements like daylighting.

So our windows are taller, allowing more sunlight in, and natural light is much healthier for the body than artificial light.

Energy consumption being as low as possible is another major concept.

Using recyclable materials, 95% of this building's steel is recycled steel.

Making sure that no volatile organic compounds, VOCs, are introduced in the building to help us manage the air quality.

That's another major concept.

Sewer rates are driven by the amount of water that goes into the sewer pipe, and we've minimized that.

We recycle water for our landscaping.

From recycled denim material for wall insulation and energy-efficient equipment to recycling programs and access to alternative transportation, Molasky's corporate headquarters has gone green in a big way.

I'm incredibly proud of this project.

Even though it's a lot harder to do a LEED gold building versus when we did this one, it's really a shining example of what this industry is capable of, and I think a lot of buildings followed suit looking at ours and thinking this is the new term.

This is a new standard for the industry, if you will, in terms of office buildings.

The Molasky Group of Companies is still building green.

It's currently working on facilities for the Veterans Affairs Administration, all of which will meet gold standards.

For Nevada Week, I'm Heather Caputo.

Thank you, Heather, we appreciate that.

I want to just highlight one quote that Richard Worthington made there: "It's harder to do a LEED gold building."

And you know, learning lessons, I think it's advanced to where we are right now.

Commissioner Jones, let's talk about the policy side of this.

First off you get an idea, and I know you weren't on the commission in 2005 when they were planning this building itself, but do you see that policy is allowing green building a lot more-- I don't know what the word is-- liberty, ease, to be able to build the way that buildings need to be built, but also still reach some of these LEED-certified aspects?

-I think the policies really allow for it now but don't do as well in terms of encouraging it, and I think that's really where we're headed right now at both the federal, state and local level is to make sure that we have incentives for builders and for developers to build these green buildings.

I think there's also the aspect of demand.

Ten years ago there probably wasn't a consumer demand for these types of buildings, but you really see a younger population who cares about what type of building they live, work or play in.

I've certainly seen it out in my area of town with multifamily and commercial complexes which, as with the Molasky Center, are going that direction because that's what the people demand.

I think you're only going to see that more as we go forward.

People want EV-ready type buildings.

They want to make sure the place that they live has solar panels on top of it so they are harnessing the sun's energy for the place they live, and I think that's really where we're headed.

-Marco, let's get your perspective there, that transition to just a higher demand for green buildings in general, and then maybe how that's affecting the private construction industry and how readily accepting they are, or motivated to be able to build green buildings.

-I think we've been really fortunate in Nevada to have a lot of that foundational policy help get us in the right trajectory.

You know, things like NV Energy's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy incentive programs really helped kick off getting renewable energy out into the marketplace, and you saw thousands of green jobs grow as a result of that.

Getting rooftop solar onto people's houses and doing, you know, simple things like replacing their light fixtures with LEDs or compact fluorescent lights, that really helped take things to the next level.

I think going forward we're going to see more of that with the next iteration of policy to really kickstart some of the green building industry.

Things like community solar, and as Commissioner Jones mentioned, EV readiness, solar readiness, adopting new energy codes to get us more efficient and greener buildings at all different sectors of the built environment, residential, commercial, industrial and municipal.

I think we'll be able to ultimately get to those things that mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and get a cleaner environment as a result of those things.

-And you mentioned EV readiness specifically.

What is that?

-Electric vehicle readiness, so installation of electric vehicle charging stations.

It's easier to do that with new construction, but we have at the City installed charging stations at our facilities that have been really well used.

-Can you give us an idea again, as you mentioned before, a multitude of buildings within the city, government buildings that are green and have been green for some time built many years ago.

Return on investment here, cost savings maybe that you've been able to incur, or maybe if you have been able to audit the environmental impact on something like greenhouse gas emissions, can you give us an idea of what the impact has been?

-Yes, absolutely.

We've had a lot of success with these initial investments going back to the Recovery Act, you know, 10 years ago.

We were able to replace thousands of streetlights with LED technology, we put solar at 40 different city facilities, and we took our NV Energy electric costs down from $15 million a year to $9 million this last year.

I mean, we've had that cumulative savings as a result of doing those energy efficiency measures and renewable energy projects and, as a result, you know, we wanted to take it to the next level so we did innovative things like renewable energy agreements with NV Energy and replacing our electric retail load with renewable energy for pretty much every single facility we have.

That's paid off, you know, tremendously over the last decade since we've been doing that, and other municipalities across the state now, County, Henderson, North Las Vegas and Northern Nevada have all started to take advantage of some of those things as well.

-That challenge is something, Commissioner Jones, I want to get to in just a second about we're dealing with multiple municipalities here all trying to reach the same goals.

I'll put that on hold just for a second.

Kristen, I want to come back to you.

Let's talk a little bit more specific about the state climate strategy that we have in place related to green buildings.

Of course we can't cover everything on the show, but for you, is there a specific strategy or policy that's included in that document that you think really should be top of mind when we're talking about green building as a key strategy moving forward?

-So our approach, it's helpful to know what our approach to the strategy was, and it was really about setting up frameworks and processes so that way we could move forward to collectively consider all of the issues that are at play, and very importantly and relevant to this conversation is ensuring that we have a platform.

We really set up the governance structure such that we can have discussions across different levels of governance, so our municipalities, our counties, the state, the feds, to design a suite of policies that can be harmonized, so that way we can achieve and maximize our greenhouse gas reductions while also ensuring that we're creating climate-resilient communities.

So to that end, this broader discussion around urban planning, it has to incorporate things like transportation, it needs to consider public health, it needs to consider environmental justice issues, and of course what are the impacts to this community?

Whether it's do we have the water resources to support further development, and do we need to think about what are those near-term impacts?

What are the air quality implications of wildfire and exposure of our communities?

There's a lot to consider, and it takes a lot of people at the table to have these difficult conversations.

If climate change was easy in addressing it, we would have done it by now but it's not, and we have an opportunity here to harmonize how we're all moving forward together.

-Yes, great point.

Commissioner Jones, great segue into what I wanted to ask you.

I mean, that is exactly it.

There's so many stakeholders at the table, and so much of something like a framework that has been presented by the state gets down to the municipal level.

You are where the policy needs to be happening and taking place, and of course that's you, that's the City of Las Vegas, that's the City of Henderson, North Las Vegas, et cetera, et cetera.

How do you guys get together then and make sure collectively you're making policy that is a policy that is beneficial valleywide, and maybe let's take something specific that Kristen mentioned, new versus existing, you know, either retrofitting buildings and really focusing more on that strategy aspect or looking at where growth and the sprawl aspect of this is really going to sit.

-Well, I think we have regional bodies like the RTC, SNWA and other agencies that allow for that type of coordination whether it be transportation or water infrastructure, and we all work very well together in making sure that we address those those needs.

Climate change is one of those where obviously the City of Las Vegas can do all it needs and the County can do all it needs, and frankly the state can do all it needs, but we're not going to solve it unless we work together.

Same thing goes for things like the urban heat island effect.

Any one of the jurisdictions can do the best it can, but it's not going to solve the broader issue without collaboration.

So we definitely have those opportunities and we're all working together when it comes to transit and when it comes to transportation.

Just one example, obviously when it comes to transit, it's incredibly important to have coordination across boundaries.

Boulder Highway, for example, is a street that crosses three different jurisdictions, and as a result of cooperation between the City of Las Vegas, City of Henderson and the County, we're able to redesign Boulder Highway to make sure it really meets the policy goals of complete streets and allows for better transit, and that's just one example of the collaboration that needs to happen at all levels to make sure we address built environment and greenhouse gas emissions broadly.

-A great example; I appreciate you sharing that.

Marco, I want to get to another specific of the plan itself, something that I know the public has been aware of, and that is this move from natural gas, potentially, especially in heating, water heating and air heating and things like that, to electric and how that might affect of course, as you mentioned, new building not so much, but retrofitting of old buildings and things that might be key.

How realistic or how feasible do you think that is just within the city of Las Vegas?

-It's a very difficult question.

You know, so far-- I mean, we have a natural gas utility that's pretty much well connected throughout the valley and, you know, we have that infrastructure that's in place.

I think over the long term, you might see a lot more of a push from, you know, the national or from the federal level to electrify major appliances and major types of equipment, but at a certain point, there's going to have to be a serious conversation and consideration of what are the trade-offs to go from gas-fired heating or appliances to completely electric, because there is considerable debate about what that is and then what we do with the additional infrastructure to do that.

So it definitely will take time, and I think it will definitely have to be one of those things that come from not only private industry but also from a code and regulatory standpoint to see what we'll need to do to make those things happen for the consumer and for industry in general.

-Well, thank you, as always, for joining us this week on Nevada Week.

Now, for any of the resources that we've discussed on this show, please visit our website at vegaspbs.org/nevada-week.

You can also always find us on social media at @nevadaweek.

Thanks again, and we'll see you next week.

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