Tax-credit on green GA agenda

GREEN THUMB: Architect Ken Filarski of the Rhode Island Green Building Council shows off some eco-friendly homes he has designed in Providence. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL PERSSON
GREEN THUMB: Architect Ken Filarski of the Rhode Island Green Building Council shows off some eco-friendly homes he has designed in Providence. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL PERSSON

Kenneth J. Filarski is the new chairman of the Rhode Island Green Building Council, which aims to promote sustainable development. He’s worked as an architect and planner in the state for the past 37 years. His specialty is building design and construction. He discusses the organization’s financial health and the state of environmentally friendly development in Rhode Island.

PBN: Tight finances led the council’s executive director to resign in 2011. Can you tell us about the organization’s health today?
FILARSKI: With all organizations, and especially nonprofits, it’s not just about the purpose of the organization, but how they support themselves. I think the Rhode Island Green Building Council got off the track just a little bit. We forgot for a couple of blinks of an eye what we were trying to do. Momentum needed to be maintained, but we got it back. The Rhode Island Green Building Council will be moving forward with the intent to connect, collaborate, cooperate and coordinate with other organizations in the private sector and the nonprofit sector. We will also look to build partnerships with the cities and towns in Rhode Island. Sustainability is holistic and our approaches to achieving sustainability need to be holistic.

PBN: Will the organization be hiring a new director anytime soon?
FILARSKI: No, I don’t foresee that. There are some green-building councils that have full-time staff, and some that don’t. It may come sometime, but I don’t see it in the near future. The Rhode Island economy is still tough. We’re going to continue with a part-time coordinator. Having a director in the past was a good idea. It helped us lay down a foundation. At the time there was a lot of fast growth, but suddenly the economy went in a different direction and we didn’t have the finances and the resources we had before. PBN: Tell us some of the good things Rhode Island has done to promote green construction?
FILARSKI: Rhode Island is a good planning state. Land Use 2025, the state’s plan for conservation and development, sets the tone for doing things that are green and sustainable in a large way. It establishes growth centers. It says that growth and development should occur where it is now or has been, in brownfields, for example. That’s good because it reduces the amount of travel people have to do, which means they’ll use less fossil fuel and there will be fewer carbon emissions.
A few sessions ago, the state also enacted the Rhode Island Green Buildings Act, which states that any public agency that renovates an existing building or constructs a new one has to comply with a number of green standards, such as the LEED system – that’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design system established by the U..S Green Building Council – or the Green Globes performance rating system. And the state Department of Education has adopted the Comprehensive High Performance Schools guidelines for school-building projects.

PBN: Now tell us some things the Ocean State should be doing.
FILARSKI: Gov. Chafee’s budget – articles 22 and 23 – calls for reinstituting the state’s tax-credit program for renovating historic buildings, and there are bills in the House and Senate that include those proposals as legislation. Existing building stock represents embodied energy, and there are studies that verify less energy is used when you renovate an existing building rather than construct a new one.

PBN: Can you give us some examples of green Rhode Island projects?
FILARSKI: There are a lot of them. There are over 170 projects in Rhode Island that were guided by LEED standards. Universities and colleges have been at the forefront, especially Brown, the University of Rhode Island, and Johnson & Wales University. In the private sector there’s Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island, with their building downtown, and Taco with their innovation center in Cranston. CVS has done a lot with their headquarters in Woonsocket. There’s FM Global’s headquarters in Johnston, some work done at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, and the Narragansett Bay Commission’s operations building. TD Bank has developed a LEED-certified prototype for buildings in Rhode Island and nationally.

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PBN: Can you give us examples where more could have been done to make a project green?
FILARSKI: A specific example would be the Masonic Temple, which has become a Providence hotel. The renovation was a lost opportunity.
A more general example would be almost any affordable housing. I worked on the Federal Hill East Redevelopment project a few years ago. That’s 21 affordable homes. As far as I know, it was the first true affordable-housing effort in Rhode Island. There were no solar panels or anything exotic, but they were so well-built they received a four-star energy rating. It was a good, compact plan, with the right surface-area-to-volume to be energy efficient. That’s why I say affordable housing could be done better, especially with the products available today. •

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