Green Building Tours – Looscan Neighborhood Library – March 31

The Mayor’s office is starting up the Green Building Tours series for 2009 on Tuesday March 31st, at the Looscan Neighborhood Library. The tours will take place every thirty minutes from 11am to 2pm on Tuesday, March 31, and it’s completely free! Here are some details from the USGBC’s Houston Chapter website and from the City of Houston’s sad attempt at a communication platform called CitizensNet (I’ll bold some of the important details, Swamplot style):

You are invited to attend the first tour in the second year of a series of free, public tours of certified green buildings here in Houston.  The tour will take place on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, every 30 minutes from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at the Looscan Neighborhood Library, near Westheimer Road at 2510 Willowick Road, Houston, Texas 77027.  Please visit www.houstontx.gov/mayor/leedtour.pdf for more details and a map.

Green buildings save owners and users money with greater energy efficiency. They are better for our environment with more re-use of material. Ultimately, they foster a happier and healthier workplace for employees. To help us along this path, the City of Houston has put together the Mayor’s Green Building Advisory Council in partnership with companies that have led the way in green building and achieved certification of their facilities according to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building rating standards.  City staff is currently working to implement recommendations from the MGBAC to the Mayor to help accelerate green building across the city.

We very much welcome your participation in this event and your interest and support for green building efforts across Houston. For more information on the Green Building Tour, please contact Steve Stelzer at 713-535-7508 or e-mail at steve.stelzer@cityofhouston.net.

Here is a map (click for directions):

It’s really great to see Houston making an effort to educate the public about green building and the LEED standard, but putting it on a Tuesday afternoon is probably not the best way to get the whole community to show up. They should do some of these on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon for people who don’t work close by.

Also, not to be picky, but the PDF flyer for the event still says 2008 on it, and the Registration process for CitizensNet is crazy. There are 1,146 choices in the “Neighborhood Associations” combo box, but you can only view four at a time.

That said, if you can get free over your lunch hour to take a look, I think it will be an interesting tour!