What can designers and planners learn from Las Vegas about water, climate, transportation, and buildings? Quite a bit, if they can get past perceptions of Las Vegas, it seems. “Las Vegas is more than meets the eye,” says Marco Velotta, AICP, LEED Green Assoc. Velotta is a member of the Las Vegas Office of Sustainability. “A property tax abatement drove LEED adoption early on here,” he adds. “And the major casinos have sustainability offices and robust efforts around the topic.” He is also the guest speaker for the
COTE® Open Forum at A’19.
As a part of the Planning Department’s Long Range Planning Division, he works on citywide plans and oversees the development of the City of Las Vegas 2050 Master Plan, as well as other policies and programs and coordinates climate mitigation, reporting, and adaptation planning efforts for the City.
“People may see Las Vegas as being wasteful,” he says. “This is the desert, to be sure. We get four inches of rain each year, so we understand the need to use water judiciously.” He points out that Las Vegas shares its water source with Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Diego. “We have such a small allocation of the Colorado River that we have created a very strong approach to careful use and returning what we don’t use.” The biggest user of water in Las Vegas is single family residential. Resorts and golf courses are not the top of the list, surprisingly. The city has incentivized turf removed and other water conservation strategies.
Velotta explains that the city’s Long Range Planning efforts are guided by four issues: Equity, Innovation, Livability, and Resilience. “These are the issues that we have to pay attention to over the long term,” he says. “These touch everything: transportation, buildings, parks, and so on.”
Velotta notes that the city adopted a resolution toward Community Resilience and Net Zero Energy in 2017. And his office is currently working on a new Master Plan for the City for 2050 (with Smith Group); this is driven by the same key principles.
Hear Velotta at the AIA Conference on Architecture, COTE’s Open Forum, on Friday, June 7, from 1:00 to 3:00pm. After Velotta’s remarks, COTE will host a first of its kind Interactive Learning Session focused on the COTE Top Ten Toolkit with five tables focused on Toolkit topics and hosted by those who helped build this tool. Mike Davis will also host a table focused on advocacy. Join us!