After years of work toward bringing the utility’s facility into the 21st century, Burbank Water and Power now boasts the state’s first sustainable campus. City officials will unveil on Saturday the work with a fair and dedication ceremony.
Visitors can expect to see drought resistant tree pods and plant life, buildings with “green” rooves made of vegetation and a 240-kilowatt solar panel along Burbank's Lake Street.
"It will be a good thing that [people] can come in and see the work that we have done," said BWP General Manager Ronald Davis.
The project stands in stark contrast to a decade ago when Burbank Water and Power’s Magnolia campus lacked working elevators and had unusable bathrooms.
In 2000, Davis said he had to figure out how to go about modernizing the aging site when the company’s rates were among the top three highest in a group of 10 to 12 local municipal and investor-owned utilities.
“The question became, how do you modernize when your prices are too high? So what we did was came up with a business plan to develop revenue from assets we had,” Davis said.
With a push from the Burbank City Council to make updates that met standards of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – a green building rating system created by the U.S. Green Building Council – the utility began its decade-long effort.
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Burbank’s marketing manager Jeanette Meyer said this undertaking was in no way a vanity project.
“We had to modernize and to do so in an environmentally responsible way that didn’t impact rates or our service reliability,” Meyer’s said.
Since making the re-design, BWP’s rates have gone down and the municipal utility now boasts some of the lowest rates for a local utility, Davis said.
Landscape architecture firm AHBE created the campus’ garden courtyard and green street - with its underground filtration system that captures and cleans water.
Davis said Burbank city officials were inspired by AHBE's "green" landscaping on Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles.
Residents are invited to attend the event, take guided tours. The event will be held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
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