Green

Washington – North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) and Ørsted announced a Project Labor Agreement (PLA) to construct the company’s U.S. offshore wind farms with an American union workforce.

A first-of-its-kind in the United States, the National Offshore Wind Agreement (NOWA) is authorized by 15 international union presidents and their local affiliates, and covers all of Ørsted’s contractors and subcontractors that will perform offshore windfarm construction from Maine down to Florida.

“The signing of this unprecedented agreement is historic for America’s workers and our energy future. NABTU’s highly trained men and women professionals have the best craft skills in the world. This partnership will not only expand tens of thousands of career opportunities for them to flourish in the energy transition but also lift up even more people into the middle-class,” said Sean McGarvey, president of NABTU. “The constant drumbeat of public support for unions being important to maintain and build the middle class helped secure this momentous achievement. We commend Ørsted, AFL-CIO President Shuler, the Biden Administration and many Congressional leaders for their help and support to make today’s signing a reality and for setting forth a new framework for middle-class job creation in all energy sectors.”

“This historic milestone is a celebration for workers, clean energy and economic opportunity,” said David Hardy, CEO of Ørsted Offshore North America. “The National Offshore Wind Agreement we signed with NABTU sets the industry standard from the beginning. We’re going to build an American offshore wind energy industry with American workers, family-sustaining wages, and robust and equitable training programs to achieve this critical vision.”

With diversity targets, local training programs, and workforce diversity performance monitoring, the NOWA is designed to foster a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce, while expanding opportunities in offshore wind to frontline communities. It establishes project-byproject Workforce Equity Committees to prioritize recruiting and retaining people of color, women, gender nonconforming people and local environmental justice communities. Washington – Stemming from extensive mitigation research, the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) is working with Fannie Mae to develop a roadmap on mitigation investment to help Americans and the nation’s built environment prepare for and better respond to the effects of climate change.

The Resilience Incentivization Roadmap 2.0 is being sponsored by Fannie Mae and supported by the NIBS Multi-Hazard Mitigation Council’s Committee on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (CFIRE).

“Banks, insurance companies, appraisers, and real estate firms all play a significant role in how buildings are procured, designed and constructed,” said Stephen T. Ayers, FAIA, interim CEO of NIBS. “How these different segments evaluate the risk associated with particular projects, technologies, and practices can have an enormous impact on whether an idea gets the funding and insurance needed to move forward to fruition.”

The goal of the Resilience Incentivization Roadmap 2.0 is to identify pathways to work with lenders to explore financial products that support resilient buildings, help developers properly evaluate risk and recognize values of resilient buildings and lower the upfront cost, collaborate with insurers to promote insurance programs that reward safer structures, and support communities to develop layered mitigation investment packages.

“The ability to estimate and communicate the value of building resiliency is vitally important to U.S. housing, especially given the current and future impact of climate change on the built environment,” said Tim Judge, chief climate officer, Fannie Mae.

In 2020, CFIRE published “A Roadmap to Resilience Incentivization,” calling for public and private incentives to owners of buildings and other infrastructure to facilitate the upgrade of existing infrastructure and better design of new infrastructure. The Resilience Incentivization Roadmap 2.0 is scheduled to be complete by summer 2023.

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looking for from their waterfront — from housing, to recreational space, to restaurants and commercial uses. This knowledge enabled the city to pass, with strong community support, a $50 million infrastructure bond that is now making the redevelopment process happen.

It’s impossible to develop a truly comprehensive and sustainable master plan without the local community. In Middletown, creating a plan that reflects and is inclusive of diverse voices and stakeholders was a fundamental goal, and we took it as a profound responsibility to understand the local context, including a complicated history of neighborhood displacement. But how can we reach the community members and involve them in a meaningful way? In order to engage, project teams have to be creative. Our team ran public workshops and created online surveys, but we also worked with the city to create a physical storefront on Main Street. Seven days a week, any community resident could come in and track the plan’s progress. This storefront holds a largescale model of the development site, and there are sketches and drawings, as well interactive activities to generate feedback. Opening up the process in such an open, transparent, and inclusive way helps residents feel that their input matters and we’ve had hundreds of participants (and growing) and gained valuable insights that continue to shape the master plan’s mix of uses, densities, and design.

The ultimate goal of a master plan process must be to facilitate and guide implementation, and project teams have to think about the ultimate potential for execution at every step. Great urban design is created when municipal oversight, private interests, and community interests come together in conversation and speak the same language. Achieving this requires real rigor in the planning process, and the ability to look past ideas that aren’t grounded in market realities or in what the community will support. There are very few shortcuts in this process, and it takes time, commitment, and a strong team to be able to have difficult conversations and reach agreements that benefit everyone. In Middletown, our project team, including collaborators Karp Strategies and Langan, has worked hard to facilitate productive dialogues with the city, the public, and the development community, with the result that development RFPs are already being prepared for parts of the waterfront.

Understanding these elements of what goes into a successful master plan process will enable project teams to help New England’s cities generate incredible value from their waterfront and brownfield sites for generations to come.

Mike Aziz, AIA, LEED AP, is a partner and the director of urban design at architecture at urban design firm Cooper Robertson.