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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Panel: It's not cheap or easy to turn green If you want to live in a truly green house in Eugene you've got to be rich, panelists at the Cascadia EcoFair said Saturday. That's because building codes and land use requirements are so complex that builders must hire a team of professionals to work through them, and the cost puts the green American dream out of reach for most homeowners, they said. "To really engage in sustainable practices becomes a bit of an elitist thing. It's not something readily accessible to the common people," said Ravi Logan, a yoga and meditation teacher who started the Dharmalaya Center in Eugene. The three-day fair on a farm north of Coburg featured a host of workshops, including the "Greening of Land Use and Building Codes" session, which 30 people attended. The workshops took place in outdoor rooms created by slinging parachute fabric over two rows of hazelnut trees. Participants sat on hay bales or rested on rugs rolled out on the orchard floor. Some members of the panel - which included the Eugene permit review manager and the city's sustainability manager - called for a "democratization" of green building laws, rules and requirements. Logan offered his experiences with the Dharmalaya Center as an example of the problems. Logan and his wife, Michele Renee, built the center behind their house on Horn Lane in the River Road area. During the past four years, it has become a gathering place where people practice yoga, take birthing classes, discuss sustainable living and engage in other activities - including the EcoFair last year. "They've created this vibrant, lively, extremely well-loved community center in their backyard," said Robert Bolman, a Eugene building consultant. The center features cutting-edge environmental practices such as a 1,000-square-foot building made with straw bale construction; storm water capture and use; bathtub, sink and washer capture and reuse; and a composting toilet. But in June, the city of Eugene shut down the center, which, in the city's view, was forbidden under land use laws. In August, the city informed Logan that he could have no more than six or eight people at his center no more than once per month - much less than the hive of activity to which he was accustomed. City permit review manager Keli Osborn said homeowners planning nonstandard living or communal situations need to go through the city's planned unit development process. "That poses an additional cost (and) the requirement to hire certain kinds of experts to help you prepare your application," she said. "Otherwise you have to comply very strictly with the standards." In a separate interview, Logan said he had $400 in the bank and not the $40,000 needed to follow the city's processes. Dharmalaya is also in hot water for violating the city's building codes. Logan captures his roof water and feeds it into a bioswale, a system of land and vegetation designed to absorb and filter rain water. Logan said there's a simple formula for figuring out how much a bioswale must hold. The city, however, required him to hire an engineer to do the calculation and send a letter to the city with the results, he said. Pleasant Hill resident Don Schneider said building codes are useful and embody the cultural knowledge of safe building. He'd hate to go back to ramshackle housing, he said. "(Still), the fact that there's these layers of city and county and state and federal and nobody can make sense of ... is simply not working for the people," he said. Logan said he knew ahead of time that some of his green building practices wouldn't pass city muster. He installed a human waste composting toilet and said it was top of the line. His ecobuilding advisors said it would never be approved - "so we went ahead and built it," he said. He also devised a way to reuse the "gray" water coming from his household drains and appliances. That, too, is forbidden. "We have a state plumbing code that won't allow that, period," Osborn said. But the city codes ought to encourage green building practices, Bolman said. "We should be doing everything we can to make those things happen at the cheapest possible rate." The city has appointed an employee to spend the next year examining ways to make green building easier, Osborn said. Public interest is growing, and someday the codes will reflect the new thinking, she said. "There is a greater consciousness in our culture - even though it doesn't always seem like it - that code officials will be responding to," she said.
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#1. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
The only green that the city cares about is your money - and how to get more of it.
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