Who? Josh Bomstein of Tampa, director of business development for Creative Contractors of Clearwater.
Sphere of influence: Florida's development community and government leaders in West Central Florida, where Bomstein works to convince builders and their clients to go "green" with cost-effective construction techniques. The son of a prominent civic leader in Clearwater, Bomstein moved away for college and ended up living in California, where he was first exposed to the green-building movement.
How he makes a difference: As the incoming president of the Gulf Coast Chapter of the Florida Green Building Council, the 36-year-old Bomstein has become a passionate advocate for voluntarily adopting better construction practices in the private sector to save money and energy. His council chapter hosts Smart Sustainable Tampa Bay annually (it is coming up in February), a two-day conference to spread the word about the economics of "cool roofs," low-E coated windows and better insulation.
CL: How did you sell your CEO on the whole idea of going green?
Bomstein: Well, the CEO is a progressive guy.
Who also happens to be your father?
Who also happens to be my father. The company has always had a mantra, I guess somewhat stolen from Spike Lee, to do the right thing. When you think about what doing the right thing really means in construction, it also means thinking about the environment in which we build and how we build. The CEO embraced it and was all for it.
Actually, [he] had a number of years ago … done an energy efficiency prototypical home for a homebuilder that he worked for. So he was no stranger to green building. They didn't have the name for it, and it wasn't cost effective or practical back then. That is what has changed.
How much can a commercial building save over time?
A building we built a couple of years ago, the Dunedin Community Center … was built to be 28 percent more efficient than the standard energy code. That 28 percent was projected to save about $35,000 a year in utility costs, just energy costs. Water isn't added. It's also going to save a few more thousand dollars a year, because it's more than 20 percent more efficient in water.
How?
Low-flow fixtures, flow restrictors in the showers and aerators in the sinks. It was pretty typical. Standard toilets, standard sinks. You go into the bathroom, it looks like any other bathroom. We didn't use exotic technologies. That's the great thing about these green-building strategies — they are very easy to achieve.
How much have you seen the acceptance change?
I'll put it this way: When I first started in business development with an owner, if green was brought up in a discussion with the owner, it was 90 percent of the time me bringing it up. Now, I don't have to bring it up. Almost every project we are involved in, early on during pre-construction, green is at least talked about, whether they are going to seek to certify the building or not.
Should the government mandate these improvements?
I don't think they should mandate it. They should update their own codes to be more green and more eco-friendly. I definitely think they should incentivize the private sector, whether it's with density bonuses or fast-track permitting or reduced permit fees to incentivize the private sector to build green. And I do think they should build their own buildings to green certification. They should be a role model in that way.
What is the state of acceptance of these ideas in the industry overall, because it seems that it is more advanced in the commercial side than in residential construction?
I don't know why it hasn't taken off as quickly on the homebuilding side. It's taken off really big in commercial for a host of reasons. A lot of commercial construction companies understand that this is the way things are going to be. This is not a fad or a trend. This is a movement. It's about 'fessing up and deciding you are going to do the right thing. And yes, it's harder to make a concerted effort to recycle all the waste we create on job sites, but it is the right thing to do, and we should do it.
Is there one thing that you would like to see done if you had the power to make it happen?
We need to embrace and practice smart growth and good urban planning, high-density cores with mass transit. That's not something we can do overnight. But embracing and saying we're going to practice smart growth, we could do, which we haven't done.
I'm all for development. I'm a builder, and I want to continue building. But there's a good way and a bad way of doing these things. I want to see us do it a good way and a smart way. Portland and Vancouver and Seattle have all embraced this very well. They've become role models, and they've experienced high economic growth, good econ development, cultural development. All of this stuff is tied together. It's not just buildings. It's a cultural shift in some ways. We're trying to create a better place and a better sense of place and more respect for the place. And all those things have a holistically good effect on the community in which we live.
This article appears in Dec 12-18, 2007.