New city hall will sport a greenish tint

The new Post Falls City Hall building will be green, no matter what color the walls. Gold-certified green.

Following a decade-old national trend that has recently become more popular in this region, Post Falls has decided to construct its new facility using more sustainable, efficient and healthy building practices.

The U.S. Green Building Council has a rating system that credits buildings for things such as using renewable energy sources, reusing building material and having a design that takes advantage of natural light.

“Those all seem like obvious goals for every building to have,” said Post Falls planning director Gary Young. “But very rarely do I think they are all considered in an integrated design approach.”

The city is aiming for the middle certification level: gold. “Gold” buildings are judged by the Green Building Council to be more environmentally friendly than those certified as “silver,” but are not so expensive as buildings that meet all of the qualifications to be certified at the “platinum” level.

“We’re looking to design a city hall that people can be proud of,” Young said. He and other city officials want the building to be a model in the community and encourage others to construct green buildings.

The existing city hall is composed of several buildings, some of which weren’t constructed with the current use in mind, Young said, as he sat in his office where fire trucks were previously stored. It’s also become cramped as the city has grown, and has suffered from mold and other air quality issues.

In contrast, the new city hall and civic center will be one 36,000-square-foot building, which will make the cooling and heating systems more efficient. The building’s design will take advantage of daylight and geothermal energy.

The city plans to reuse storm water for toilets and for irrigating landscaping, which will be composed of drought-tolerant native plants. The city will avoid materials that give off toxic gases, such as glues in some furniture and chemical dyes in some carpets. Employees working in green buildings are more productive and take fewer sick days, say Young and other green-building advocates.

Construction may start as early as next spring, and will probably take a year.

The cost upfront will be more than for a conventional building. More sophisticated equipment is purchased and more time is spent in the design processing, so the design costs are increased by 3 to 10 percent, Young said. But, he added, those costs will be recovered over time by energy savings.

The city is hoping to get $2 million in grants to knock off the estimated $7 million total cost. The benefit of constructing a green building while it’s still a relatively new movement is that several grants are available and not as many municipalities and organizations are vying for them, Young said.

The Ada County Courthouse in Boise is the only Idaho building listed as green-certified by the U.S. Green Building Council. Developers of the Spokane Convention Center and Spokane’s Saranac Hotel renovation project are working to qualify them as green buildings.

Green buildings are catching on in this area, said Thomas Angell, president of the Inland chapter of the Northwest EcoBuilding Guild, an educational organization. It’s taken a while, he said, because companies often look at the bottom line when deciding how to do things.

“We need to have more long-range goals,” Angell said, such as managing resources correctly, like maintaining the health of forests by selective logging and using renewable energy sources. He also emphasized the importance of using locally available materials – such as straw bales, which are renewable and thermally efficient – to cut down on transportation costs and ensure fair employment practices were used.

Angell disputes claims that those involved in green building are “tree huggers.”

“Green building is all about a balance,” he said, “between people, prosperity and the planet.”