November 28th, 2007
“We currently have 130 that are going toward LEED certification, and we should have a lot of them certified very soon, within the next six months or so,” environmental commissioner Suzanne Malec-McKenna says. But she says the proof is already in the pudding, citing the Chicago Center for Green Technology as the first municipal platinum-LEED rehab in the nation (a nice twist, considering the center sits on a former illegal dump site; see picture above). She adds that Mayor Daley has made the environment a priority since he entered City Hall in 1989.
Some other examples of Chicago’s efforts:
- The city formed a Department of the Environment (DOE) in 1992 and immediately began breaking up concrete in schoolyards and converting existing “hot” sites into parks – including Daley’s controversial handling of the Meigs Field airport closing, which the City replaced with a park. (For details of Daley’s extraordinary move on Meigs, see Wikepedia’s entry on Meigs Field.)
- The Chicago DOE upped illegal dumping fines from $50 to $2500. Offending construction companies also can lose their vehicle and have their business license suspended.
- Chicago’s circa 1911 City Hall installed a rooftop garden in 2000, sa
ving 11 percent in annual energy costs. Malec-McKenna says a recent thermal photo showed that “on a 74-degree overcast day, the roof’s temperature was 74 degrees, while a nearby (non-city) government building that has a black tar roof was over 150 degrees.”
Though the roof is not typically accessible to the public, it serves as a demonstration project for builders. (See picture right, courtesy of the Conservation Design Forum, Elmhurst, Ill., landscape architects for the project.)
- The city currently has planted or has in progress more than 4 million square feet of rooftop gardens and plans more.
- City vehicles are forbidden to idle more than 5 minutes.
