When capital projects are being planned and designed, community involvement is of vital importance. When a new hospital is being constructed, frequently property acquisition is involved, which leads to necessary zoning approval and the issuing of permits allowing construction to begin. Meyer describes the process and notes the importance of having the local community on board, "We set up early in the planning process, working with the neighborhood associations, an interactive and very, very transparent process of what we were planning to do. We were meeting on a regular basis with them to keep them apprised of things they were concerned about. The first year of the project was property acquisition and permits. The residential properties we acquired to get the footprint we needed had to be rezoned to commercial with a height variance and there were quite a few parcels that needed to be rezoned...so that whole process took about a year, which, relatively speaking, is pretty efficient. The city was very supportive of what we were doing."

Building Green for the Common Good


The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) is a 501 c3 non-profit organization whose web site describes its mission "To transform the way buildings and communities are designed, built, and operated, enabling an environmentally and socially responsible, healthy, and prosperous environment that improves the quality of life."

The USGBC has developed the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Rating System. Described as "an internationally recognized certification system that measures how well a building or community performs across all the metrics that matter most: energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impact."

LEED is slowly making inroads in the design and construction of health care facilities and one such project is currently taking place just a few miles from the DOTmed home office in New York City. The North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System is renovating and expanding one of the oldest buildings on their Manhasset, NY, campus, as part of a larger expansion and construction project.

Neil Rosen, AIA, LEED AP, Project Director, Department of Facilities Services for North Shore LIJ Health System, Manhasset, NY, details some easy to understand reasons their project makes both practical and environmental sense, "In an urban environment, all the dark colored materials of the buildings tend to collect the heat from the sun and radiate it back at night. That's why cities are warmer than the areas around them. If I put a white roof on my building that helps to minimize that. When you discuss water efficiency, where I now have a toilet that uses 1.6 gallons to flush, I'm now putting in toilets that have dual flush; if you are flushing liquid waste they only use 1.1 gallons per flush, solid waste uses 1.6. If you pull the handle up, it's low flow, if you push it down it's standard flow. That's the equivalent of a 1.28 gallon flush so I save 30% on my water in each of the toilets because they still flush the same amount of times, I just use them less. We get all our water from aquifers [on Long Island]; they're going to dry up, so if we don't protect our water it won't be here soon."

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