Sustainable Infrastructure in Seattle: Leveraging Capital for Sustainable Outcomes

Steve Moddemeyer

The Game is Changing

Cities are going to have to adapt if we are going to address the game-changing issues of climate change, urban growth, and spiralling infrastructure costs.  Just doing more of more-of-the-same is not going to get us out of this situation.  It is time to step back and reassess how we conduct our business, what tools we employ, and thoughtfully consider next steps.  We must reduce green house gas emissions.  It is no longer acceptable to presume that the atmosphere can continue to absorb our waste products.  We must start adapting our water, sewer and drainage systems to the increasing uncertainty in local climate variability and sea level rise.  We cannot just hope that good intentions to control our emissions will make the impacts of climate change go away.  We must accommodate accelerating urban growth.  But we must accommodate it in a new way that builds upon and replaces our current infrastructure systems with new integrated infrastructure that provides multiple services cost-effectively.   We cannot continue to build huge centralized infrastructure systems that only do one thing for a whole lot of money.

The City of Seattle is committed to addressing these issues.  Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has received global praise for his authorship of the US Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement that has the support of over 840 mayors representing more than 80 million US citizens (US Conference of Mayors, 2005).  In this agreement, the mayors commit to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets. Seattle is adopted a number of new programs to implement this agreement.  Seattle Public Utilities is actively exploring a portfolio of alternative approaches to climate adaptation with the city’s water supply, storm water systems, and wastewater systems.  Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development (DPD) is instituting an array of strategies for green building, growth management, and sustainable infrastructure.  While this paper is focusing on DPD’s Sustainable Infrastructure Initiative, it is only one element of a strategic city--wide commitment to seriously address our climate, growth, and sustainability challenges.       

These challenges highlight the need for sustainable infrastructure strategies with three central themes: 1) develop economies of scope - where every possible infrastructure investment must do more work across multiple lines of business; 2) nest decentralized solutions into centralized systems - where cost effective semi-autonomous water and energy systems provide services and  manage and buffer demands on centralized systems while increasing their reliability; and, 3) use triple-bottom-line economics to compare and generate alternatives - where alternatives are not only generated from within a line of business but are more broadly generated based on an integrated strategy to deliver the full range of city services.  Implementing these themes is a transition that is intended to help cities move from the old centralized model of infrastructure to a new paradigm that decentralizes and integrates urban services both for new growth and in existing central cities.

This paper begins with a series of sustainable infrastructure pilots that are being tested in Seattle.  It then identifies early recommendations based upon these pilots.  It closes with a call for a new paradigm for urban infrastructure services.

Sustainable Infrastructure in Seattle

The Sustainable Infrastructure Initiative is working within existing governmental processes to make the case for an integrated approach to capital spending.  It is based on the idea that this spending can deliver more value for money spent by looking across lines of business, considering decentralized alternatives to current practice, and by applying robust economic analyses to these alternatives.

The City of Seattle owns over 30% of the land inside the city limits but has no integrated plan to manage this resource for sustainability.  Each year the City spends more than $650 million in capital to build, renew and repair our infrastructure.  Yet the priorities for how, where and why this money is spent are divided up between numerous city departments, each with its own mission, strategies, priorities and funding streams (see Figure 1.1). This means that a city-wide perspective suffers because departmental priorities can supplant city-wide priorities.  We believe that a sustainable infrastructure approach to capital spending might be more effective and sustainable if it were directed toward integrated outcomes — outcomes that not only address expected levels of service, but also explicitly add value to the community, the environment and the economy.  We define sustainable infrastructure as a decision-making framework for capital spending that links the principles of asset management to an interest in green outcomes with an understanding that the most effective capital investments may require us to integrate efforts across departmental silos and lines of business.

City departments have idiosyncratic methods for prioritizing, evaluating, and implementing capital projects.  This leads to wide variation in quality of decision-making.  It also means that many quantifiable benefits are not examined, evaluated, nor captured.  For example, the City of Seattle’s planned reinvestment in Seattle Center’s 74- acres could play a significant role in cleaning up the water quality of nearby Lake Union but only if Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) and Seattle Center collaborate.  However, absent the Sustainable Infrastructure Initiative, neither department would have been expected to investigate this shared opportunity to optimize city investments. (See Seattle Center Water Swap discussion below.)

All city land, staff, and funding resources should be considered in toto for a whole-cities approach to infrastructure.   With this approach, departmental priorities are considered with other departments’ infrastructure needs to get more value for the money they spend.  If this becomes routine, these values will contribute to other city departments and the public well-being can compound year after year.  Urban infrastructure planners and designers must broaden alternatives considered by convening expert teams from multiple disciplines to develop integrated alternatives for consideration.  Then they must apply robust economic analyses to these alternatives. The barriers to an integrated approach are profound including single-purpose funding streams which can discourage collaboration, inertia of past practice, existing regulations, and a general lack of awareness of or expectation for integrated solutions.  Partnering with city planners responsible for land use and urban design is an avenue to push ahead progressive and integrated infrastructure practices.  The City of Seattle Sustainable Infrastructure Initiative is exploring these concepts with a series of pilot projects, collaborations between departments, and new ordinances designed to hardwire sustainability into land use codes (Seattle Green Factor, 2007; Seattle Downtown Zoning, 2007).

Pilot Projects

Seattle’s Sustainable Infrastructure Initiative has selected a handful of upcoming capital projects that might benefit from a more integrated approach. To assess this and the other selected projects members of the Seattle city staff are conducting “triple bottom line” (community, economy, environment) analyses of alternative solutions. These comparisons will address near-term capital costs, long-term operations and maintenance, and non-quantified community and environmental values.  These pilots are discussed below.

Seattle Center water swap

The 74-acre Seattle Center (see Figure 1.2) is considering major renovations (Seattle Center Century 21 Master Plan, 2008). Impervious surfaces blanket this former World’s Fair site including both rooftops and walkways with virtually no auto or truck traffic. Thus, when it rains, almost this entire site produces fairly clean stormwater flows. Unfortunately, these flows are then mixed with sewage in a combined sewer overflow (CSO) facility — a huge pipe where both sewage and stormwater runoff are held for later treatment at the wastewater treatment plant. Meanwhile, just a few blocks to the east of that same CSO pipe, highly polluted runoff from the streets of Seattle’s Capitol Hill flows into nearby Lake Union with no water-quality treatment. This raised the question: Can we use the clean Seattle Center stormwater for water features, toilet flushing, cooling or irrigation, and route the polluted Capitol Hill water into the CSO facility? Early results suggest the answer is yes; there may be opportunities for significant reductions in water use at the Seattle Center, and valuable storm water quality treatment savings if we use this strategy.  Additionally, there can be significant reduction in costs for Seattle Center as their potable water costs and sewer treatment costs are lowered by more onsite use of rainwater for non-potable uses such as irrigation, water features, and toilet flushing.  Additional water strategies to be considered include onsite wastewater treatment and reuse, use of geo-exchange or ground source heating and cooling to lower energy costs for new buildings, as well as a landscape plan that maximizes the green infrastructure services of landscapes, green roofs, water features, and vegetated walls.

Port electrification to control emissions and improve health

Another sustainable infrastructure pilot project is evaluating the potential for reducing green house gas emissions by providing electrification to container ships in port.  When these ocean-going vessels are tied to the dock to unload their containers, they use auxiliary generation for the ship’s lights, heat, navigation, and refrigeration.  While only in the Seattle port a few hours to a few days at most, these auxiliary engines churn out 50,000 tons of green house gas equivalents each year.  These emissions are matched by an equal amount of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulphur oxides (SOx) which cause smog.  These emissions could be reduced with fuel switching, but could be nearly completely removed if Seattle were to connect these ships to the City’s hydro-power electricity system.  In fact the costs for Seattle’s electric power would be considerably less expensive to use than the fuel the ships now burn for this purpose.  On the face of it, this sort of transition is attractive, yet there have been issues to be addressed.  First, Seattle City Light sells all power in excess of its customers’ needs to supply cities and industry up and down the west coast of North America.   If Seattle sells that power to the ships instead, then that much less “green” power will be available on the grid.  And if anyone else on the grid was planning on using that power, they will instead buy it from another source.  And that other source could be a coal-fired power plant.  The net benefit to the planet of reduction of green house gases would then be modest because the unregulated emissions from the ships would be partially offset by increased emissions from a regulated shore-side facility.  Second, the cost to extend the power lines out to the edge of the dock is significant.  It is estimated that costs would be around $5 million US per berth just to extend the service.  As demand grows an additional $20 million US or more may be required to increase the capacity of the substation that feeds the port facilities.  Also, most ships do not currently have the wiring to plug in at the dock.  Costs could be as high as $800,000 per ship.

Why consider this strategy with only modest green house gas savings and high capital costs to achieve it?  Well there may be other reasons to consider it - specifically air quality impacts to human health and land use policies in Seattle. 

Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development has adopted land use policies that effectively direct that 50% of Seattle’s population growth is to be accommodated in just 10% of the city’s land base.  And that land base is downtown Seattle or “Center City”.  Center City, with 50,000 current residents and an anticipated 33,000 more by 2024 is directly downwind of the port facilities.  So while the planet may have modest benefit from port electrification, people who breathe in Seattle’s dense and growing urban core might prefer and benefit from removing the NOx and SOx emitted by ships at the port.  

By way of example, the California Air Resources Board has determined that risk from these “hoteling” emissions in the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach ranges from 50 to 200 of cases of cancer per million people with an affected population of over 200,000. (California Air Resources Board, 2006)  Affected populations live up to 10 miles away.  Based on all port emissions, the Air Resources Board has determined that on a yearly average there are dozens of premature deaths for ages 30 and older, hundreds of asthma attacks, and thousands of work days lost.  This does not suggest that Seattle has numbers anywhere near this high because the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach is significantly larger than Seattle and the affected population is higher as well.  But it does suggest that there could be local impacts to human health due to containership hotelling.  It is safe to assume that removing 50,000 tons of NOx and SOx from Seattle’s air would benefit human health and improve the city’s liveability.  (See below for Seattle Times map based on EPA data that suggests Port operations may be affecting human health and air quality,)

So should Seattle just spend the money to extend the power to the ships to protect our growing population and be done with it?  Perhaps, but then again, is undergrounding the power to the edge of the dock for $5 million per berth the only way to get power to the ships?  Are there other alternatives that may be more cost effective?  For example, in California, Wittmar DFMU Cold Ironing System (TM) is proposing to place a liquefied natural gas generator on a barge to provide energy to the ships.  Because liquefied natural gas has lower emissions than diesel fuels, the vendor predicts there will be a significant reduction in pollutants and less up-front costs to provide the service than undergrounding.   Another option is to use large 1 megawatt and 5 megawatt lithium iron batteries to power the ships once they tie to the dock.  These batteries do not suffer from the explosion potential of lithium ion batteries.  These lithium iron batteries are built in shipping containers and can be easily moved to and from ships as they arrive and depart.  And batteries can be charged at off peak times thus levelling peak demands that typically drive infrastructure costs.  But how do the upfront capital costs for batteries or liquefied natural gas fired barges compare with the traditional undergrounding costs?

Using underground areaways for stormwater control

Seattle’s historic core is honey-combed with areaways - remnant underground storage areas beneath some city streets and sidewalks.   Stormwater that flows from Seattle’s Third and Fourth Avenues could be stored within these areaways, potentially removing hundreds of thousand of gallons of runoff before it is released to our combined sewer, which overflows to Elliott Bay during big storms. Can these areaways serve as cisterns for water features and irrigation, or will substandard soils and frail, century-old construction limit our ability to use this strategy to create water features and urban amenities while protecting water quality?

New park can also treat stormwater

A former transit park-and-ride lot has recently been sold to the City of Seattle for a future park. On the edge of the park is a stormwater line that drains hundreds of acres of residential storm runoff into Thornton Creek, a local salmon stream. Can we integrate a stormwater facility into the design of the park so that the use of the park is enlivened by water and new wetland habitat while also improving the water quality in this important salmon stream?

Street improvements that save money and increase livability

Linden Avenue North is an unimproved street in Seattle’s northernmost area of the city that has attracted more than 1,700 new residents in the last five years.  The street lacks consistent sidewalks, organized parking, formal drainage, and roadway markings and serves as a major transmission corridor for power supply in the region.  For at least ten years, residents along this street have been asking for improvements.  Finally, funds to build the street have been included in the city’s recently adopted capital budget program.  Construction could start as early as 2009 with most improvements several years later. The city pulled together an expert team representing roadway design, water, drainage, sewer, power, urban design, land use planning, neighborhood relations, and finance. Using this integrated approach, we have determined that there are credible choices to be considered that can make the project more sustainable. The design for the street can put the drainage facilities underground and out of sight, or for the same or less money install innovative and highly attractive vegetated swales for drainage.  The street engineers can pave the median strip or design the middle of the street to be a vegetated boulevard for less cost, lower drainage requirements, and decreased green house gas and mercury emissions due to the need for less new concrete.  The power utility could approach the neighborhood in 7-10 years and announce that they need to redesign the streets and sidewalks to accommodate a new transmission line, or they could work with the street designers today to avoid expensive future relocation costs. 

Reservoir site for urban agriculture

To meet water-quality and safety standards, Seattle is putting covers over water-supply reservoirs in the city. These covers may be built strong enough to support two or three feet of soil. Investigations are beginning to consider commercial scale urban farming to create local food for local residents while accommodating normal utility maintenance and operations.

Recommendations

These pilots are still being explored and final results are not complete.  However, in developing them, a number or recommendations and lessons learned are already apparent.  We share them below recognizing that these insights may change or need to be amended.

Consider all city land, staff, and funding resources in toto for a whole-city systems approach to infrastructure

Seattle owns a highly interconnected network of roads, open spaces, parks, public property, and utility corridors that provide multiple services to city residents.  However, these networks have not been optimized to address the diversity of community needs. Roads are more than habitat for automobiles, trucks and buses - they must also become fully participating elements of the city’s open space network.  In a sustainable city, roads would also provide human habitat, street side vegetation and paving that cleans the water and cools the air.  Parks are not only recreation facilities but in a sustainable city they may host temporary uses such as stormwater control during extreme events.  Power line corridors and covered water reservoirs not only serve their utility function but in a more sustainable city can serve as places for urban agriculture. For example, back in 1923 Seattle’s water officials got this right at Volunteer Park in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.  The water department created a reservoir for water supply that continues to serve as an aesthetic element of one of Seattle’s most beloved parks. Reflections from this pool of water reflect Seattle’s iconic Space Needle skyline.  However, for decades after, we forgot this insight and increasingly focused on narrow criteria used to judge alternatives for infrastructure investments.  We marginalized non-quantified values such as the need for a beautiful, liveable, and sustainable city.  Externalities like these didn’t show up in project pro formas.  And even today, city capital investments tend to focus on a single line of business with no expectation or requirement to look at the full range of city services that may be served by any investment. 

Expect that investments in one infrastructure system could and should have multiple triple bottom line benefits

Enlightened infrastructure investments will deliver system robustness, liveability and cost control.  When investments in one infrastructure system routinely provide multiple benefits, then cities can get more value for the money they spend and these out-of-kind benefits accrue and compound year after year.  The Linden pilot project described above is demonstrating that sustainability benefits may accrue to the neighborhood through alternative drainage and paving techniques.  And by pulling together a broadly representative team, the City was able to avoid future expenditures by accommodating these and other infrastructure conflicts.  The new sustainable infrastructure street design saves millions of dollars of avoided costs through strategic early coordination.  The city is able to achieve more value for the money it spends because the integrated planning team also focused on the quality of the pedestrian environment and the maximization of landscape areas.  This focus will compound year after year as property values (and thus property taxes) increase because of the attractiveness and quality of the final project.
               

Broaden the alternatives considered beyond the traditional discipline

Another key element of a sustainable infrastructure approach is to consider a braoder range of alternatives.  Seattle Public Utilities Triple Bottom Line Guidebook  (SPU, 2005)  identifies the appropriate range of alternatives to consider such as capital-intensive vs. operations and maintenance; centralized vs. decentralized, department-alone vs. collaboration; traditional vs. natural/green; supply enhancement vs. demand management; city staff vs. contracted performance.  When reviewing these alternatives there is an off-ramp for elimination of inferior alternatives that do not require more in depth analysis for an accurate determination.  Where quantitative information is not available for environmental or community costs and benefits, we recommend using qualitative values.

The port electrification example above highlights this issue.  By only looking at power utility issues, the human health impacts of non-utility uses were not included in the analysis.  By the same token, the land use planning department did not factor in air pollution concerns or alternatives to port and utility operations when designating Seattle’s Center City as the locus of increased population growth.  Looking at alternatives outside of a particular entity’s line of business has got to become routine in order to truly develop a triple bottom line sustainability solution for capital investments.

Consider decentralized options that can nest into existing infrastructure

In developing integrated alternatives that are consistent with sustainability, it is important to consider decentralized options that can cost-effectively nest into existing infrastructure. This is not a new idea in the utility world - certainly demand management concepts like water conservation and energy conservation are common.  These approaches shrink the ecological footprint of the infrastructure and provide as many infrastructure services on site as cost-effectively possible.  Other examples of decentralized options such as green roofs and rain gardens not only control flows and improve water quality, but they provide habitat, and urban cooling, and aesthetic relief to urban inhabitants.  On site waste water treatment can lower demands on centralized wastewater systems, reduce potable water use, and provide high quality effluent suitable for irrigation and toilet flushing.  Solar hot water heaters or geo-exchange heat pumps use the energy of the sun or the earth to provide onsite heating and cooling and remove thermal loads from centralized power distribution systems or oil and gas systems.  Onsite photovoltaics or small onsite wind turbines linked with batteries can control demand for centralized power distribution and production systems.  Indeed, even decentralized concepts like pedestrian improvements that make walking enjoyable can minimize demand for centralized transportation systems and their associated costs and environmental impacts.  There are some innate advantages of these semi-autonomous decentralized solutions that tend to work together.  While they can be implemented to meet a specific management problem (too much flow going into too small of a pipe), they can provide other significant additional out-of-kind benefits - energy savings, aesthetics, water quality, and habitat.  And because they are of a kind - they all seem to also nest well together - for example, green roofs are nice because they control flow, cool the city, offer habitat, last twice as long as a regular roof - but they also are better platforms for photovoltaics (Köhler, 2002).  The PV sits about one meter above the green roof and is more efficient because it is cooled by the roof.  And the roof does better because it is shaded from the hot sun by the panel.  And because the city is cooler, more pedestrians are likely to walk along and animate its sidewalks.  These semi-autonomous systems provide additional resilience in the event of disruption or emergency.

Over the last 9 years, Seattle is beginning to move more readily towards these nested solutions as a normal part of utility management expectation.  It is anticipated that other city departments will have similar or even quicker levels of adoption of these broadly defined decentralized/demand management options.

Convene an integrated expert team from multiple disciplines and city departments

To achieve robust alternatives analysis and to include the full array of possible infrastructure issues for capital spending, it makes sense to convene an integrated expert team from multiple disciplines and city departments.  While some individuals who are issue experts prefer to remain issue-specific in their focus, there are many others who are attracted to an interdisciplinary approach.  During Seattle’s pilot process, these interdepartmental teams are project specific.  In other jurisdictions, such as San Francisco, California, the city has a Coordinated Capital Program expert team that works across a number of issues and coordinates with project staff (Coordinated Capital Planning, City of San Francisco, 2007).  This more centralized approach should be considered if a city decides that a majority of capital spending needs to be coordinated across the city.  Another advantage to this approach is that the metrics used to measure project costs and benefits can be consistently applied across city departments.

Collaborate a year or two in advance

A key element of Seattle’s Sustainable Infrastructure approach is to encourage generation of alternatives well in advance of the actual project implementation.  If a project is already assigned to a project manager whose job is to get the project done on time and on budget, they will not have the luxury of thoughtful analysis of alternatives.  However, almost every capital project starts as an idea before it is funded.  It is at this early stage that capital coordination has the potential to pay off.  To address this problem, the Sustainable Infrastructure Initiative convened a Coordinated Capital Committee of capital department leaders.  Members were Deputy Directors or Capital Project Directors for their respective departments.  Participants were asked to come to two two-hour meetings to discuss long-term and anticipated needs for capital spending.  To focus the discussion, the Department of Finance developed a capital improvement project map that included all capital projects geo-located for all departments.  The Department of Planning and Development developed a complimentary map that included all city ownership.  (Ironically, the city’s base maps treat city streets as voids, as non-entities in the geographic information system.)  While there was a general interest in collaborating, one participant expressed a private concern that by coordinating with other departments, their department might be forced to accept a less than optimal outcome.  This represents a very real challenge to coordination and collaboration.  Perhaps one department has greater political leverage to get the outcome they desire over the objections of the others.  Sometimes departments are encrusted with years of competition that manifest as a chronic tug of war between the need for one urban service versus another.  Some staff in the trenches may perceive these conflicts as a zero-sum game where one department can only prevail if the other department loses.

To alleviate this issue,  we sought to identify emerging projects two to three years out where the solution had not already been determined and where funding was still fluid. 

Develop funding agreements to overcome funding constraints

 Other barriers to implementing an integrated approach to infrastructure are funding that is bound to certain purposes.  Funds raised for stormwater control can not be spent on recreation facilities.  And while parks departments could include drainage facilities in their parks if they choose, they may have precious few funds to apply to regional drainage when their own budgets are already tight.  Thus to do an integrated project, different departments must have the budget to participate, the time to collaborate, and the tools to make agreements for funding responsibility.

Overcome inertia of past practice

There is a certain inertia that can set in.  Experienced government employees base their expectations for future projects on past practice.  And why not?  These past practices have been successful within the established work regime.  What happens with a sustainable infrastructure approach is that the criteria for success are being broadened to include a number of additional benefits to city spending.  Not only do we need to meet our identified levels of service for our particular line of business, but we must also meet expanded criteria for sustainability and liveability.  And these expanded criteria are not well defined and raise ambiguous issues that have not been clearly spelled out in policy terms.  Furthermore, some of these criteria can bump up against regulatory boundaries that complicate coordination and collaboration. Strategies to deal with this inertia can be addressed by leadership, executive direction, and staff investment in working through issues, whether technical, operational, or policy.

Work to overcome regulations that may be barriers to innovation

As a local government entity, Seattle can work with other regulators to change the rules or change regulations if they preclude sustainable solutions.  For example, in Seattle, rainwater harvesting strategies were severely constrained by the determination by the State Department of Ecology that an expensive and onerous water rights permit was needed to legally harvest rainwater.  Many in the development community were not prepared to use rainwater harvesting while this interpretation was in effect.  To overcome this regulatory hurdle, Seattle was able to successfully negotiate a water right for much of the city.  Already major new projects, including the Gates Foundation’s world headquarters are taking advantage of this regulatory relief. 

Increase awareness of or expectation for integrated solutions

There is a growing awareness of alternatives to traditional practice, particularly in the water sector.  However, use of these alternatives is only now becoming a standard consideration for many utility engineers.  Other professionals in other departments are not aware or confident in these alternatives.  Many need to see actual projects built in their own locality before assuming that these approaches have merit.  Field trips, invited expert speakers, brown bag lunch series can be helpful.  Demonstration projects can build local confidence.  Leadership from the top can inspire risk adverse government employees to consider new alternatives. Regulators, too, must be educated to help remove potential regulatory barriers to innovation.

Partner with city planners responsible for land use, zoning, comprehensive planning, and urban design

A tool to implement progressive and integrated infrastructure practices is to collaborate with land use authorities with responsibilities for zoning, comprehensive planning and urban design.  Seattle’s comprehensive plan encourages sustainable practices but needed new land use codes to implement these practices.    Because state-wide growth management controls direct growth into existing urban areas like Seattle, there has been a decades-long shift from green field development to much more complex urban redevelopment with higher densities.  Local residents have often supported this growth as long as it generates improved amenities and open space in the neighborhood.  In the past, Seattle has approved a bond issue for open space to purchase new land for parks in the city.   However, the city beginning to also consider the role those streets can play in making a liveable city. Redevelopment in dense urban areas by its very nature can be complicated.  Developers in these settings must deal with accommodating existing infrastructure and existing neighbors who may or may not welcome new development.  Given Seattle’s progressive citizens, developers are finding that public acceptance of new growth can be increased through use of green strategies.  For example, Seattle has adopted the Seattle Green Factor, a landscape code that encourages builders to construct green roofs, porous paving, vegetated walls and rain gardens.  These practices help with drainage by catching water before it runs offs and increasing absorption and evaporation.  Although there is no accurate measurement of how much this helps, Seattle’s landscaping code allows the city to require landscaping practices such as this for the multitude of benefits that accrue to the city.  Water quality is helped, air quality improves, urban noise is attenuated, habitat increases, urban heat island is reduced, and property values increase.  Landscaping makes a city more liveable and Seattle’s Green Factor is a regulation that is representative of the Sustainable Infrastructure approach.  It is a decentralized strategy that nests into larger centralized systems.  It provides benefits not only to gardeners, but to water utility systems and even sewer systems by encouraging practices that divert some of the flow into water vapor or ground water and away from combined sewers.  It allows developers to get credit for meeting street tree and  tree protection requirements, and also can be used to help meet a project’s drainage requirements.  And it helps neighbors to be more accepting of new development as the Seattle Green Factor explicitly encourages landscaping of the public right of way.  It offers a 10 percent bonus towards meeting the requirements if landscapes are visible from the public right of way.

Require interdepartmental collaboration as a performance expectation

Accountability agreements need to emphasize that collaboration with other departments to provide multiple benefits is an expected element of departmental performance and city spending.

A New Paradigm

Vladimir Novotny calls for a new paradigm that builds and expands upon a progressive whole systems approach to water (Novotny, 2006).  This paradigm defies narrow definition, but includes designing and specifying resilient systems that build or sometimes replace existing centralized systems and nest energy-efficient and cost effective decentralised systems within.  Key concepts embedded in this paradigm can be applied equally to urban energy and transportation systems. 

Cities of the future may be oriented around “soft city” neighborhoods that use an array of decentralized strategies to absorb water and energy, use it on site, and release only minimal pollutants to pre-existing centralized systems.  Imagine the soft city where rain is absorbed into the ground.  There is no storm runoff.  Leaves and needles intercept the rain before it hits the ground.  They hold it and release it back to the atmosphere as water vapor.  The soft city comes alive when it rains.  Water features fill and move as expressive elements of the true urban renewal.  Perhaps there are fountains that only operate in the rain.  And some features on the fountain only operate if the rain exceeds a 100-year storm.  The new soft city is quiet.  Porous paving absorbs rain and sound.  Soft vegetated walls absorb sound and don’t bounce it back.  Electric cars are quiet with only the sound of wheel slap and pedestrian tones affecting the sound of wind through the trees.  The soft city is habitat.  Returned are the butterflies of lowland prairies. Nesting birds raise their young in sight of dense urban dwellings.  Rooftops absorb water and emanate green to surrounding forms.  It is cool in the soft city in the summer and buffered from the cold in the winter.  Imagine the “soft grid”.  It is made of semi-autonomous locally harvested energy.  It only uses electricity to move things.  It produces energy and recycles energy.  The soft grid has batteries to store electricity and thermal storage in the ground.  It meets base load and can buffer impacts to centralized systems as it increases urban resilience to catastrophic change. 

Summary

Seattle is well underway with Year 2 of this experiment in 2008. We have much to learn before we claim success. It is likely that some percentage of the integrated alternatives we evaluate will not pencil out. Yet for the alternatives that do, we believe Seattle will have increased value for each dollar spent. If we can successfully make this approach part of our everyday capital processes, we hope to make these processes fundamental to city-wide decision making.  By leveraging our capital spending to get sustainable outcomes, we will be making our city more sustainable every day.  While a sustainable infrastructure approach may be a start, it is important to recognize that much more work remains to be done to address the overwhelming scale of the climate change and urbanization issues facing cities..

Building a charming, sustainable city that works is what we ought to be accomplishing by leveraging every infrastructure investment for sustainable outcomes. Water utility officials working in concert with other utilities and land use entities must play a leadership role to guide and inspire an integrated approach to city infrastructure services.  If we do not create the tools and methods, if we do not build the demonstration projects, if we do not reach out to city planners, energy providers, and transportation system experts, then who will?

REFERENCES

Diesel Particulate Matter Exposure Assessment Study for the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Final Report, California Air Resources Board, April 2006 www.arb.ca.gov/regact/marine2005/portstudy0406.pdf

Köhler, M.;Schmidt, M.; Laar, M.; Wachsmann, U.; Krauter, S. Photovoltaic Panels on Greened Roofs: Positive Interaction Between Two Elements of Sustainable Architecture Rio 2, World Climate and Energy Event, 2002

Novotny, V. Cities of the Future, Wingspread, 2006

Seattle Center Century 21 Master Plan, 2008
http://seattlecenter.com/media/century21b.asp

Seattle Downtown Zoning, 2007
http://www.seattle.gov/DPD/Planning/Downtown_Zoning_Changes/Overview/

Seattle Green Factor, 2007
www.seattle.gov/dpd/greenfactor

Coordinated Capital Planning, City of San Francisco, 2007

Seattle Public Utilities, Triple Bottom Line Guidebook, 2005

U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, 2005
http://usmayors.org/climateprotection/agreement.htm