Incorporating green practices into facilities management is quickly becoming a nationwide priority, and the property management industry is no exception.
Homeowners’ associations and property management companies across the country are instituting a range of practices to make them more eco-friendly. Though it makes people feel good to be apart of a community that is proactive about saving the environment, in today’s economy, cost efficiency is what matters most. Fortunately, the latest eco-friendly practices in the property management industry increase recycling and save money. These are the types of green policies that will last.
Laguna Wood Village located in Laguna Woods, Calif., has become an industry leader in finding ways to reduce waste and save money at the same time. During the last 20 years, the community’s management staff has introduced green landscaping and paperless techniques that are quickly becoming industry trends. It has saved $20 million using these practices.
Landscape recycling
More than two decades ago, the management at Laguna Woods Village had to find a solution to the high costs associated with the disposing of the community’s 1,000 acres of ornamental landscape green waste – green waste that had to be pruned, mowed and cleaned up on a daily basis. In fact, grass, shrub and tree trimmings and other green waste added up to approximately 20 tons of waste per day. Through a major landscape-recycling and sustainable landscaping project that was initiated to save money for the community, that amount was reduced by 75 percent. Other recycling measures employed by the staff resulted in a total divergence of the community’s solid waste by more than 70 percent.
The community’s general manager Milt Johns, educated in science and botany, utilized his creativity, education and the help of a great staff to organize one of the earliest and largest composting operations in Orange County.
“Cost efficiency has always been priority-one for our residents,” said Johns. “We certainly want to recycle and reduce waste, but the driving factor was always finding a way to reuse or recycle while saving money for the community we manage.”
This effort began with an in-house composting operation to divert green waste from local landfills and to produce valuable horticultural products for use within the community. The staff ultimately created a “closed-loop,” sustainable green waste, reuse operation.
Today, this composting operation produces approximately 8,000 cubic yards of amendment each year, which is used by the landscaping department in ornamental bed to reduce weed growth and improve the soils’ physical and nutrient compositions. It is also used as potting soil in the in-house nursery, and to enrich the soil in the shared community gardens. The composting operation creates approximately $250,000 per year in cost avoidance and revenue.
The community then implemented grass-cycling processes to return nitrogen and water-rich clippings back into the lawn instead of removing them. This allowed a 40 percent reduction in fertilization needed. It also reduced the turf irrigation needs and most important, reduced the labor-related costs of mowing by 20 percent.
Any foundation shrubs that were trimmed using conventional hedge trimmers to conform to their planting spaces were evaluated next for cost savings. Few people know that plants that are sheared tend to grow back larger, which can compound the amount of green waste over time. Replacing existing labor-intensive plants with shrubbery that conformed to the right size and shape at full maturity in their planting space reduced the waste generated while pruning. The International Society of Arboriculture trained landscape crews at Laguna Woods Village so they could learn how to prune without creating more green waste. They virtually eliminated the use of annoying, gas-powered hedge trimmers.
The team at Laguna Woods Village also found a money-saving use for the community’s recycled newspapers. Instead of sending all of the papers to the recycling center, the staff reused some of them on site as a substitute for a hydro-mulch. With this process, the staff found a way to reuse the newspapers, save money and nurture the community’s newly seeded grass.
“With approximately 18,000 residents in our community, you can imagine the mountain of used newspapers we’d recycle every week. This turned out to be a good thing because we were spending thousands of dollars on hydro-mulch for slope and turf plantings. So we fed the newspapers directly into the hydro seeder and they worked perfectly as mulch,” said Johns. “The seedlings thrived, and from then on, we saved the $300 per ton we were spending on hydro-mulch.”
The community also recycles a majority of its construction debris, produced from remodeling, building refurbishment and street repair. All metal waste including thousands of community appliances are also recycled.
In another cost-cutting and waste-cutting move, the community leveraged a grant from the Federal Transit Authority to purchase biodiesel-fueled busses. These busses are used to help the community’s residents with their daily transportation needs. In 2007, more than 435,000 passenger trips were taken on this bus system. The California Association of Community Management honored this initiative with a Vision Award last year.
Laguna Woods Village may have been a trendsetter among communities with landscape recycling, but it really all started with the goal of being a conscious-fiscal agent and looking for ways to save costs. As a result of these efforts, the community has reduced its solid waste stream by over 72 percent in the last two decades and saved approximately $20 million. These efforts were recognized by the State of California with 14 consecutive WRAP (Waste Reduction Awards Program) awards. The community and staff have also been recognized by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California numerous times for their achievements in water conservation by way of advanced irrigation scheduling technology and later, computer-programmed irrigation cycles.
Going paperless
Other trends the community has introduced include techniques that reduce paper use. In 1995 Laguna Woods Village launched a website portal to cut down on the amount of paper that goes to waste. The website is a tool used to communicate information about meetings and recreational activities; access electronic documents including association minutes, agendas and operating rules; and is used to market the community, hosting information on housing options and floor plans, online videos and brochures. This has saved hundreds of tons of paper, and the community is one of the first homeowners’ associations to use a system like this.
“There are many small changes a community can make that have a great impact to the budget overtime,” said Chuck Holland, vice president of management information systems for Professional Community Management of California. “Under our staff’s direction, Laguna Woods Village has reduced the consumption of tons of paper and energy from its footprint and implemented systems that reduce its budget at the same time.”
During the 2003 California Legislative Session, Laguna Woods Village staff and Professional Community Management of California lobbied Sacramento lawmakers to allow homeowners’ associations to broadcast information and news announcements over closed-circuit television stations. Their efforts were successful and the proposed language in the bill was modified to allow rule change notifications to be broadcast via community cable systems.
“Community-wide mailings for news announcements would have consumed hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper and envelopes annually,” said Johns. “By defeating this legislation we were able to save money and paper for our community and all communities state-wide.”
Other paperless techniques the community utilizes include EZ-Pay, an electronic payment tool used by 60 percent of Laguna Woods Village residents. EZ-Pay is set up to automatically deduct manor payments from a checking or savings account. This process reduces the community’s paper and postage use and saves the resident the time and money to write a check, package it and drop it off at the post office. EZ-Pay also avoids payment delays sometimes caused by post office setbacks.
Laguna Wood Village saves hundreds of sheets of paper by distributing its escrow and property transfer documents via compact disk every time a home is sold and by providing its board members digital packets for board meetings.
The community also uses an electronic time-clock system, rather than paper time sheets. All on-site employees from maintenance workers to recreation staff clock in and out through an online, paperless time card program called Ceridian. Each user types in their payroll data and saves it to a shared database, which recognizes each individual and tracks their time.
This saves paper that would be used as time cards and backup documents.
With a little thought and creativity, homeowners’ associations can become more budget-efficient as they focus on instating eco-friendly practices.
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Author : Donny Disbro
Company : Professional Community Management
Donny Disbro is the vice president of Professional Community Management of California Inc.
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