Atlanta FM Blog

Photo Submitted by Monte Townsend

At the recent Emerging Leaders event at Georgia Tech; a group of IFMA members were briefly trapped in a crowded elevator together. Good thing everyone in IFMA’s Atlanta chapter is so friendly!

Are you a Facility Manager who is currently out of work? Would you like a chance to network with your peers – to share contacts and strategies for finding that next job?

If the above statements describe you, then you should join us for IFMA Atlanta’s new FM Job Club – a monthly networking event for facility managers in career transition. Led by HR guru, Joe Carroll, this group will attempt to support you during these tough economic times.

Come to the inaugural meeting of the group on Tuesday, June 16 from 11 – 1pm. We will be meeting at Corporate Environments, located at 1636 Northeast Expy, Atlanta, GA 30329. The job club is FREE to attend. There is plenty of parking at Corporate Environments, and bring your lunch, because we will take a short break to eat and chat. Please reserve your place today on the IFMA Atlanta website:

Early on the morning of May 12, a group of facility managers converged on the Newell Rubbermaid headquarters for a tour of the facility and a lecture about the Green Globes rating system for sustainable buildings. This was one of our series of “FM Breakfasts” that are open for free to professional members – great opportunities for both networking AND education.

Calvin Lower, Newell Rubbermaid’s Sr. Manager of Property and Construction and Bobby Johnson, its Facility Manager, led us on the tour of the 355,000-square-foot, 14-story facility – and it was fantastic! The relatively new space, features an open floor-plan and lots of natural daylight. Employees are provided with free coke products, an on-site cafeteria and gym and even a small Starbucks! Mr. Lower and Mr. Johnson are doing a great job at a facility manager’s dream-gig. We are very happy they generously opened their building up to us!

The second part of the tour – the explanation of the Green Globes rating system – was equally fascinating. We’ve all heard about LEED in its various forms (New Construction, Existing Building, Commercial Interiors, etc), but Green Globes is still fairly new to those of us in the USA. Kevin Stover, Commercial Programs Consultant at Green Building Initiative, led the presentation and explained the system to us. While not yet as established in the US as it is in Canada, Green Globes is a flexible alternative to LEED which offers many of the same benefits (the two systems have 80-85% overlap) at a potentially more affordable price (the architects for Newell Rubbermaid estimate that using Green Globes certification cost the company about ¼ of the fees and documentation costs compared to what going for LEED certification would have).

It was a compelling presentation- definite food for thought for any facility manager interested in green building. Be sure to join us for our next FM Networking breakfast in June (day/location to be announced), when we look at day-cleaning.

On a recent Thursday evening, a group of Facility Managers converged upon the Centers for Disease Control to check out a very interesting exhibit called “Design for the Other 90%.” The show features design innovations that are meant to provide affordable solutions for the health, energy, water, housing, education and transportation challenges faced by people in the developing world. For facility managers, who are charged with providing safe and productive environments for the employee populations of their companies, Design for the Other 90% provided some interesting perspective. Special thanks go out to Joanne Cole, who scheduled the private, led by the exhibit’s curator. Louise Shaw.

A group photo of the Facility Managers who toured the CDC's "Design for the Other 90%" exhibit.

Have you ever thought that you would like to become a CFM but… oh gosh! Those test questions… what if you sign up and the very first question is something you can’t answer, like…“What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?” Nightmare! No, no, no, fear not – gentle reader, the CFM exam is not quite that obscure nor will this particular question ever appear on that exam. If you would like to learn what content may actually be on the CFM exam that would provide the key to open that door to CFM knowledge that would enhance your career opportunities, then the Atlanta Chapter of IFMA has an event that is definitely for you. Trivia Night on May 14th, 2009 from 6-8pm, is about as “low-stress” as you can get for picking up exam knowledge in, ahem… an appropriate university-setting while adding the proper portion of educational decorum. You can sign up here.

(Btw, to answer the question above you would have to know if it was African or European first.)

If you were to peer into a crystal ball to try to predict the future of commercial leased space in the Metro Atlanta area, what would you see? Sustainable leasing efforts will present all kinds of opportunities and challenges in the months ahead. Are you prepared to make the necessary informed decisions with regard to your company’s real estate portfolio? Building tenants, and what goes on in tenant space, are critical to the ongoing management and continual improvement of any building and it is the FM’s responsibility to know how to:

1. Maintain a green building through operations and management practices.
2. Educate brokers and prospective tenants about what it means to occupy a high performance green building.
3. Communicate the responsibilities of all parties in the ongoing efforts to keep the building green.

Enforceable Tenant Responsibilities

Terms of the lease present incentives to tenants to reduce consumption of energy, water and materials, produce less waste, recycle as much as possible, and choose energy efficient and environmentally friendly products, furnishings and office equipment. The lease should includes enforceable language, where appropriate, to ensure that the tenant complies with the building’s green practices.

Pass Through Capital Costs

What kinds of alternatives to the typical triple net lease are there, where the landlord pays for capital improvements but the tenants, who pay the utility bills, reap the benefits of energy savings. The language included in a lease gives owners the right as standard procedure to pass through to tenants any capital costs that result in lower total operating costs. New green language ensures that maintaining, managing, reporting, commissioning and re-commissioning the building to conform to a green certification or rating program and is included in the pass through costs to the tenants.

Green Certification Annotation

A Green lease should be designed to be flexible to meet the needs of the specific building’s green building practices, and therefore is rating-system neutral. It does contain additional annotation provided by experts from the organizations involved in the three rating systems predominant in the United States at this time: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ENERGY STAR® program; the Green Building Initiative’s (GBI) Green Globes™ system; and the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™. For those participating in any of these three programs how can you benefit from being in a tenant situation? Do you know?

These very questions will be the focus of the April 15th, 2009 Monthly Atlanta Chapter meeting where we will ‘Get Real About Real Estate’ with a Member Panel Discussion on the current conditions of the Atlanta market. To join in on what should prove to be a lively discussion, register here.

The Arthur M. Blank Family Office received LEED Gold Certification in 2004

It was still dark that morning and I wasn’t sure where I was heading… but the directions said to take a right onto Howell Mill Road and that The Arthur M. Blank Family Office was up the hill at the 3^rd driveway on the left. I turned into the driveway passing through magnificent stone gates to behold a shadowy silhouette of a stately French-styled Chateau reminiscent of something from the Loire Valley rather than an office building inside the Atlanta perimeter. “Wow”, was all I could think. I could vaguely pick out the figure of a man standing at the front of the drive by a neatly manicured flower bed and rolled down my window to find out where I should park. It turns out that he was the very hands-on facility manager, Jay Lanning, our host for the meeting. He was waiting there to personally direct us into the parking deck tucked-under the building. I pulled up next to Christy Jellets from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens getting out of her mini-van and we walked together into the lower level elevator lobby marveling at the indoor waterfall with mosaic-tiled background. The rest of the incredible finishes of this space where our IFMA FM Breakfast Networking Meeting was being held were equally impressive. We were guided into a salon off the main reception that could have doubled for a classic 14^th century morning room where we waited for the rest of the meeting attendees to arrive. Once everyone was assembled, Jay lead us on a guided tour of the highlights of the complex including a library, a conference room with a round Camelot-styled table, and a grand ballroom meeting space which will be the venue for the March Atlanta Chapter of IFMA monthly meeting. As we walked throughout the space, we learned about how sustainable design was interwoven into the amazing selection of materials and building systems including the green cleaning program – proving that building green can, indeed, be beautiful and cost effective.

For those of you who have not yet had the opportunity to attend one of the newest meeting formats that the Atlanta Chapter of IFMA is offering to FM professionals, this is the one venue that you don’t want to miss. Attendees network with other professional members to discuss topics ranging from sustainability to building operational protocols.

The next meeting is scheduled for March 24^th at Invesco from 7-8:30am and is limited to 20 professional members. We will tour another great space and share how Atlanta facility managers are implementing green building design.

To sign up for the next FM Networking Series:

http://www.ifmaatlanta.org/events-view.html?id=29

For more information on The Arthur M. Blank Family Office LEED Gold Certification:

http://www.blankfoundation.org/leed/index.html#features

Video of the building construction and features:

http://www.blankfoundation.org/leed/video.html