By Steve Moddemeyer
If I were a developer and owned 20 square miles of dense urban land, nearly one out of every three acres in town, you can bet I would have some sort of strategy about what I might do with it. But if I were a city, in fact, almost any city in the world, I would also own about a third of all the land in the city, but I would let each city department own a slice of it, and battle it out, project by project over who gets to build what, when, and where. Maybe the Transportation folks would have the upper hand, as the vast majority of this land is street rights-of-way. But even they would still have to negotiate with the energy company for energy corridors, the drainage and sewer utilities for their needs. But who holds the integrated view? Who thinks about how this land should balance our needs for mobility, utility, open space, habitat, and urban beauty?
The Follow the money. Certainly good advice from Deep Throat to Woodward and Bernstein in the Watergate break-in fiasco.
Sustainable Infrastructure in Seattle – Strategies for Integrated Capital Investments
Seattle spends over $650 million a year in capital dollars to build things, renew things and repair things. Yet the priorities for how, where, and why it is spent is divided up between numerous city departments – each with their own mission, strategies, priorities, and funding streams.
Some staff at the City of Seattle are beginning to think that some small percentage of that spending might be more effective or even more sustainable if it were directed towards integrated outcomes – outcomes that may be multi-departmental or require multiple streams of dedicated funds. Can we provide more value to the community, the environment, and the economy per dollar spent by using sustainability and asset management tools?
To test this idea we have launched an experiment where we have selected upcoming capital projects that could benefit from a more robust choice of alternatives. For example, Seattle Center is a 73-acre campus just north of Seattle’s downtown that is currently considering major renovation strategies. Much of the site is paved roofs or walkways, but there is virtually no traffic flow on Center grounds. Thus we have 73 acres of pretty clean stormwater that immediately flows into the Denny Way Combined Sewer Overflow Facility – a huge pipe designed to hold both sewage and stormwater runoff for later treatment at the West Point Treatment Plant. Meanwhile, about a mile away, just upstream of the east end of the Denny Way CSO pipe, highly polluted runoff from Seattle’s Capitol Hill arterials flows unimpeded straight into nearby Lake Union. Hmmm. Any chance we could use the clean Seattle Center water for water features, toilet flushing or irrigation and get some of the polluted Capital Hill water into the CSO facility?
As part of the Sustainable Infrastructure initiative, we will be doing an economic analysis of this and other alternatives. If we can show that costs are justified, it may be possible to redirect funds from Seattle Public Utilities water quality budget towards the Seattle Center redevelopment.
That’s a nice example, but can we make projects like this a normal part of doing business in the city? Certainly, Seattle Center would not be thinking about combined sewer overflow pipes and certainly Seattle Public Utilities would not be thinking about the Seattle Center as a tool to treat water quality from Seattle’s Capital Hill. So what can we do to make these kinds of outcomes routine?
This is always a problem with out-of-the-box ideas. They not only require someone to think of it, but it requires the people who normally implement projects to find a way to fit it into their work program, budget, and timeframes. And often these kinds of ideas require changing processes, procedures, rules, policies or careful coordination between departments… in other words, a ton of unanticipated extra work. Not to mention that these kinds of coordinated projects can take extra time that can delay a project. And while projects get delayed all the time, there is constant pressure on project managers to meet the budget and meet the timeline. Any new idea that complicates that is not going to be greeted warmly.
One avenue being explored is the capital budgeting process. Most Seattle capital departments have capital budgets that extend several years into the future. Projects one year out are pretty firm, but projects three years out may still have quite a bit of project development and design work to be completed before it is ready for construction. Can we target those Year 3 projects that have the potential to be more sustainable? Can we take the project as envisioned and test other, more sustainable alternatives? Can we apply full life cycle costing and triple bottom line analyses to each of these alternatives and compare them dollars to dollars? In Seattle, we are going to try.
Another issue with this approach is solving problems. Many urban capital projects are already exceedingly complicated and difficult. Adding untested or unfamiliar aspects to projects raises the “risk cost” to the project. A good economic analysis will factor in the risk and compare it to the possible benefits that may or may not be quantifiable.