Miami Dade County Moving Forward, Sustainable Buildings Program

Abstract

As a leader in public sector sustainability efforts, Miami Dade County has adopted several measures that directly impact the built environment and promote sustainability throughout its operations. In the past few years, the Board of County Commissioners approved the Sustainable Buildings Ordinance (O-07-65) and its associated implementing order (IO-8-8), which established the Sustainable Buildings Program and required that all new county-owned, county-financed, and county-operated buildings meet the appropriate standard under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system.To further support and streamline the Sustainable Buildings Program, the Office of Sustainability (OOS) recently embarked on a project to integrate sustainability into the capital improvements process (S-CIP). The resulting guidelines and recommendations will be incorporated into the Implementing Order (IO 8-8). In addition, OOS has set up S-CIP training modules to acquaint the directors of capital departments, OCI staff and sustainable buildings committee members with the new S-CIP guidelines.Miami Dade County Moving Forward, Sustainable Buildings ProgramAll authorsPatricia Gómez, Ben Moore & Claudia Regojohttps://doi.org/10.1080/10485236.2014.10781521Published online:08 January 2014Display full sizeThe Internal Services Department (ISD) trades shop facility is the first facility built under the Sustainable Buildings Ordinance and implementing order mandates to receive LEED certification at the silver level from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). According to the USGBC post-occupancy research, data collected have shown that LEED certified office buildings use an average of 25-30% less energy than conventional office buildings. Thus, a 100,000-sq-ft office building can save over one million dollars and 15 million pounds of CO2 during its lifetime (20 years). Cumulative to date, there are over 2,000,000 sq ft of new or renovated green space planned for the county that will meet maximum sustainable measures or become certified under the LEED rating system (31 qualifying projects and six additional non-qualifying projects). This translates to energy savings of around $20,000,000 in the next 20 years and a reduction of around 300,000,000 lbs of CO2. Some of the upcoming LEED projects include the Marlins Stadium, the Children's Courthouse, the ISD West Lot, the Northeast Library, the Miami Art Museum and the Miami Science Museum.