News Brief

Building Better Buildings: A Blueprint for Sustainable State Facilities

by the California Sustainable Building Task Force and the State and Consumer Services Agency, December 2001. Available free as a 75-page Adobe Acrobat™ PDF file from

www.ciwmb.ca.gov/greenbuilding/blueprint/.

As in most things, when it comes to green building initiatives, California is out in front of the rest of the country. Driven by aggressive action on the part of Air Quality Management Districts and statewide recycling mandates, various agencies have been supporting green initiatives for years. Following the recent state energy crisis, California’s Title 24 energy code was revised, making it the toughest in the nation by far. Linking these and other agendas are two Executive Orders by Governor Gray Davis: D-16-00 on sustainable state facilities and D-46-01 on siting state offices.

As the first report implementing D-16-00,

Building Better Buildings summarizes existing state initiatives that support green building, lays out the challenges that are preventing greater success, and makes a series of recommendations for overcoming those challenges. The ten recommendations are each broken down into a handful of fairly specific “recommended actions.”

The summaries of existing programs alone make

Building Better Buildings a great resource. While the recommendations are not surprising—moving from first cost to life-cycle cost as a basis for decisions, for example, and supporting energy modeling and integrated design—having them spelled out and justified so clearly is invaluable.

Published March 1, 2002

(2002, March 1). Building Better Buildings: A Blueprint for Sustainable State Facilities. Retrieved from https://www.buildinggreen.com/newsbrief/building-better-buildings-blueprint-sustainable-state-facilities

Add new comment

To post a comment, you need to register for a BuildingGreen Basic membership (free) or login to your existing profile.