City of Houston Sustainability Manager Lisa Lin visited the University of Houston campus earlier this month to share what the City is doing to encourage and support sustainability actions.
During her March 3 presentation, which was co-hosted by the Honors College and Facilities Management, she spoke about her role in supervising and assisting with the City's various environmental programs and initiatives.
In all, 51 attendees representing Houston Airport Authority, Lone Star College, St. Edward’s University, the University of St. Thomas, CenterPoint Energy, University of Houston-Downtown, Hilton Hotel, Energy Research Park, Big Belly Solar, NASA, International Facility Management Association, as well as a number of students, faculty and staff listened as Lin talked about the various projects currently underway.
Those projects include the Houston Green Office Challenge, the Department of Education's Better Buildings Challenge, the Bike Share Program, expanding the electric vehicle charging infrastructure, benchmarking energy performance for the City's buildings, updating the Green House Gas reports, climate action planning, forming city green teams and creating behavior change programs.
Lin is a board member of the USGBC-Texas Gulf Coast chapter and is a graduate of Texas A&M University, where she earned a degree in environmental design.
In addition to touching on all these programs, her presentation concentrated on the City's success at producing LEED Gold buildings. Richard Vella from the City of Houston's General Services Department continued the presentation with a look at the LEED certified City buildings and all the "green" that has gone into their structures and finishes. Lin then introduced Chad Nobles from Siemens Corporation and Roger Flud from Schneider Electric, who both spoke on the City's use of performance contracting to finance and build several City projects with guaranteed paybacks.
During the second part of the program, Facilities Management Assistant Director and Sustainability Lead Michael Burriello acknowledged several Facilities Management personnel for their project roles in environmental and sustainable projects benefitting the University. He recognized the following Facilities Management staff members: Ray Mosley, Facilities Zone Management, for implementing the use of green cleaning products; Karl Keilbach, Electrical Services, and Jerry Bogna, Auxiliary Services, for their roles in implementing the installation of LED lighting which will save the University money; Demond Williams, Building Automation Systems lead, for his role in the installation of environmental controls capable of remote monitoring of building maintenance systems using technology; and David Banks, grounds supervisor, and Roger Warner, assistant director, for their water-saving projects.
In addition, Burriello recognized several faculty members ― Dr. Driss Benhaddou, Dr. Abdelhak Bensaoula, Dr. Medhat El Nahas, and Dr. Mohcine Madkour ― for their continued work with UH student teams and Facilities Management on the Central Plant optimization and Raspberry Pi building automation projects.
It is the continued goal of Facilities Management to ensure a quality environment for students, faculty, staff and visitors in support of the university’s mission of teaching, research and community service. To learn more about the programs and services of Facilities Management, visit the Facilities Management section of the Plant Operations website, the Plant Operations Facebook page or tweet us @uhplantops.