The Chris Moeller Archives

My new corporate neighbor

The $190 million Wellmark building, which has just been erected over the course of about two years about three blocks from my home, is nearly completed and inhabitable for operation by the Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance company corporate headquarters and its roughly 1,600 Des Moines employees.

According to The Register's business reporter David Elbert, this building will be among the most "green" and efficient in Des Moines, but I'm calling "shenanigans" on that. The writer is quoting Wellmark's CEO in regards to such pronouncements, and by god, if we can't trust the company CEO about what constitutes a "green" building, I don't know who we can trust. The opinion of a true environmentalist would have been a nice edition to this story, but then this one falls on the front of the paper's Sunday "Business" section so it's not really intended to be anything other than positive corporate publicity.

The building may have received the first "Platinum" rating in the state of Iowa from the U.S. Green Building Council, but that's an entity that also heaped praise on the Sprint World Headquarters Campus in Overland Park, Kansas, and we know that's preposterous. It's sad but true that it doesn't really matter how many reusable building materials you're using or how you're redeploying rain water if you're constructing the building away from where people live. The Sprint corporate campus is simply not "green" if it's located at the corner of "119th street" and anything, and has parking lots and garages labeled A thru P. The Sprint campus was highly praised by so-called "green" builders a decade ago, but now that the company is laying off employees left and right, it's forced to sublease its empty space, and the already-sprawling Kansas City area has been stuck with yet another central business "hub."

At least Wellmark built downtown. I'll give them that. Urban in-fill development is vital for true "green" development, but one has to wonder if there's even a net gain here. If you saw the trucks hauling dirt out of the repackaged area, truck after truck, day after day, month after month, over the last two years, and then the massive construction, you were reminded of how much industrial energy is expended and how many fossil fuels are seemingly depleted to undertake such an elaborate building project, regardless of any supposed "environmental" merit. It would conceivably take decades for Wellmark to gain that back in energy efficiency. Wellmark was already living a "green" existence over in the Ruan Center, by nature of the building's greater "high-rise" verticality. Now Wellmark's operation is spread out over two long city blocks, instead of only a part of one, and the Ruan Center will sit at least partially vacant. The employees and their boss may be more physically spread out and comfortable, and that is what it is, but it's not necessarily more "efficient," or more "green." Don't call it that. They're often "opposite" attributes, in fact.

CEO John Forsyth claims the Ruan Center, because of its height, discouraged employees from walking, but walking has to be mandated for it to get done, not simply encouraged. He can boast fitness rooms and gymnasiums on-site, as other Des Moines businesses also can, but the city is not designed to encourage the use of such facilities. Most downtown workers don't live downtown. They're still slaves to their automobiles, and busy work and play schedules will keep the fitness rooms in the new Wellmark building as generally empty as the fitness rooms in other downtown buildings that already exist. Free bus passes, bicycle promotion, and special parking spaces for hybrid vehicles all sound swell too, but it's lipstick on a pig. We're not thinking big enough. As your average Wellmark employee, I might be considering buying a hybrid vehicle. A lot of people have them or are considering them. But if I do, it's going to be because of personal conviction, not because it means I can park on the first floor at work instead of on the fourth. Employees could already presumably bicycle to work when Wellmark was located in the Ruan Center just a few blocks away, and the downtown bus route is already free to all residents of Des Moines.

No, if Forsyth and his board of directors were really serious about this, they would provide incentives to their employees to make their homes downtown. That's the only "green" planning that legitimately makes a difference. Employee "wellness" would then actually improve, too, along with the air we all breath, because people get their walking in by walking to work, instead of driving there and then trying to shoehorn a "workout" into a day already made busy by having to go to work.

Is it Wellmark's fault that Des Moines is, like most American cities, car-dependent and unwalkable? No, it isn't. Not beyond their general part-of-the-corporate-whole culpability anyway. But that just goes to show why our "green" city planning can never be left to the motivations of private industry. By its nature, it has to be a collective, civic effort-- done for the greater good, not for-- forgive the heresy-- the health of a stock price. And call me a cynic, but I wouldn't trust the Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield health insurance company to lead the charge anyway. They already operate in the most inefficient industry America's got, and only a fool would buy the argument that the 5% they claim they'll now be saving on operating expenses in Des Moines will be passed directly on to you, the consumer.

The new building is just glitter.

posted by CM @ 9:49 AM