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Green Building

• Ashland Youth Center
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Green Lease

Alameda County leases close to 1 million square feet of space in over 30 commercial buildings, housing a variety of County departments. As part of our Climate Action Plan for Government Services and Operations, implementing sustainability strategies and initiatives in our leased spaces provides an opportunity to reduce a significant amount of the County's energy use. Integrating these strategies in leased facilities also ensures that staff and clients who use these buildings enjoy the same benefits of green buildings that are prioritized in our County-owned properties.

How We Did It:

• We researched public sector best practices and identified which strategies would have the greatest impact for Alameda County.
• We engaged key stakeholders within the General Services Agency to better understand the opportunities and challenges for integrating sustainability into leased spaces.
• We created a Sustainability Commitment to accompany all new RFPs that are released to the marketplace. Completion of the Sustainability Commitment is required part of all responses to an RFP.

Challenges:

• Property owners and managers don't always have the same commitment to sustainability as the County. To ensure the County starts negotiations from a strong position, we use our own lease agreements and include the Sustainability Commitment. This safeguards against property owners who are not willing to update buildings and integrate sustainable strategies in the operations and maintenance of County occupied spaces.
• Market availability of cost-competitive solutions is a primary concern. To overcome this, we focused on sustainability initiatives that are in many cases cost-competitive and have a tiered approach to implementation.

Resources:

• The Sustainability Commitment is used to assess buildings existing sustainability initiatives and a building owner's willingness to perform updates. It accompanies a Request for Proposal. All building owners/managers must fill out the Sustainability Commitment in their proposals.
• The Sustainability Initiatives Menu provides the Real Property Management team with a list of possible sustainability initiatives that can be integrated into new leases or lease renewal negotiations.
• Resource Guide is a compilation of the resources we used while creating our tools. This list contains the websites, articles and documents we found most useful during development. (Note: the list is not comprehensive of all green lease resources available.)