Top environmental designation goes to Tacoma's tallest building

Tacoma’s tallest building is trendsetting once again.

Built 41 years ago as downtown’s first modern high-rise, Wells Fargo Plaza now is home to the city’s first public electric car charging stations. It has a building-wide food-composting program. And it’s managing its power bill by using fewer, better lightbulbs and an extensive system of dimmers and motion detectors.

These efforts and more have earned it a top environmental designation, the first of its kind in Tacoma.

For Unico Properties, which owns and manages the Plaza and dozens of other office buildings in the western U.S., going green isn’t just a value statement. It’s a business decision.

“This is the future of commercial real estate,” Brett Phillips, Unico’s director of sustainability, said in a recent interview. “Tenants are looking for it, and will continue to expect it.”

The capital project at Wells Fargo Plaza, at South 12th Street and Pacific Avenue, is just shy of $1 million, he said. It’s one of only a handful of million-dollar green projects Unico’s done since 2005.

In July, Wells Fargo Plaza was certified as having met the criteria for LEED Silver for Existing Buildings. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. It’s an international green building certification system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council as a way to measure and promote sustainable building.

More than 400 projects in Washington have some sort of LEED certification, including 15 in Tacoma. A prominent example of another LEED building is just across Pacific Avenue from Wells Fargo Plaza. Pacific Plaza was built using LEED standards and has various green features including rainwater capture and a roof covered in grass.

Unico built one of the first LEED projects in Tacoma -- a medical office building by Allenmore Hospital. Wells Fargo Plaza is the first in the city to earn the existing building designation. It’s a measure of how to run more efficiently, which allows less power and water use as well as improves air quality.

“You don’t necessarily have to modify the building if you change the way you’re living,” said Dale Anderson, a principle at Tacoma design and consulting firm BCRA and an expert on LEED. “You can make it a healthier building without having to replace every (piece of) carpet and paint.”

At Wells Fargo Plaza, earning the LEED-EB certificate was the result of changing dozens of little things that added up to big results.

• Technicians replaced 22 of the building’s toilets and all of the building’s faucets with low-flow devices, which helped reduce water use by almost half. The building also is testing dual-flush kits – devices that adjust water use depending on what’s being flushed.

• Fourteen floor mats at eight entrances ensure that the floor is cleaner, which means inside air is cleaner.

• Installation of 449 motion detectors, timers and daylight sensors in the building and the parking garage ensure that little to no light is wasted.

• And on the building’s bank level, where floor-to-ceiling windows let in natural light, 1,928 light bulbs have been replaced with 236 LED fixtures that are guaranteed not to burn out for at least five years.

That lighting retrofit is being financed partially through Tacoma Public Utilities, which operates under state-mandated conservation targets. One of the ways it meets those goals is through incentive programs for energy efficient upgrades.

Peter Meyer, a conservation manager at TPU, said the utility’s incentives program also keeps rates down for customers in the long run by reducing demand. Meyer said the Wells Fargo project is one of the larger ones, and its incentive is almost $219,000.

Upgrades to light fixtures is “one of the most cost-effective strategies that businesses can look at,” Meyer said. “We’re doing hundreds of lighting projects right now with many businesses.” Federal standards go into effect next year that phase out the kind of light fixtures that Wells Fargo and many other businesses use.

BCRA’s Anderson said better building management doesn’t have to be expensive, as Unico has shown.

“The perception you come across often is unless I spend a lot of money, I won’t see the effects,” he said. “You don’t have to spend a lot. And no one has a lot in this economy.”

Another experiment at the Plaza is food composting. Unico has partnered with DM Recycling, a division of Waste Management, on a weekly pickup of composted food waste.

Alyssa Illich, Plaza tenant services coordinator, said the project has been running for about a year and produces at least 30 gallons a week. Illich said two restaurants inside the Plaza now are participating, so she expects the amount to increase.

Inside the Wells Fargo garage off A Street, two Blink charging stations for electric cars are available to anyone, for free. They are the first public charging stations in Tacoma, but many more are expected to come online in the next few weeks. Eight are being installed in the customer parking lot near TPU’s headquarters on South 35th Street and Union Avenue. TPU plans two more in Old Town, and the City of Tacoma is planning a dozen more throughout downtown.

Unico says it has invested $10 million since 2005 in efficiency projects in the Puget Sound region. In the past three years, it estimates it has saved $1.8 million a year in energy costs across its portfolio.

Saving money on operating expenses is good for tenants, though it’s not enough to have a big impact on rents. Phillips said the investments in green technology is a competitive move.

Unico properties in “Portland, Seattle, even Spokane are coming a long way on sustainable operations in real estate. Tacoma is trying to catch up,” he said. “If you can identify your market in a certain way, you can attract businesses. That’s important not just for our building but for the market.”

Kathleen Cooper: 253-597-8546
kathleen.cooper@thenewstribune.com