Last week I wrote of the Oberlin Project in Ohio and the lessons it might teach the planners of the new high school and the proposed performing arts center. 

The overarching message of Ohio’s Oberlin Project is that city leaders, college leaders, school district leaders and community business leaders are intimately and integrally planning a Green District in the center of Oberlin. They are planning together and will implement those plans together for the benefit of each organization and, more importantly, for the town as a whole. There are no silos, no duplications, no jealous pride of architectural authorship.  

On Vashon, we presently have people of good faith planning to spend $47.7 million to revamp the high school and more than $16 million to build a new performing arts center within a few hundred yards of each other. Add the possibility that someone may buy and re-develop the unused K2 facility, and we could see more than $100 million dollars in play to build new or re-develop old facilities within one-half mile of the intersection of Vashon Highway and Cemetery Road in the very heart of the Island.  

We will never again have this opportunity to leverage incredible resources to make a significant statement about the very nature of Vashon Island. If we follow the Oberlin lead, we have an unprecedented chance to create a “Central Vashon Green District” — singular in purpose, varied in function. But we must encourage these community leaders to work together to make it happen. Or the opportunity, once passed, will be forever squandered.

Beyond this vague call for joint planning, what do I mean?

The developers of the performing arts center and the new high school should meet regularly in structured committees to plan all phases of the project together. For example, we might imagine some of the following:

• Working together and combining resources to use a common, carbon-free heating and cooling system.

• Coordinating their projects to enable a common process of materials acquisition to cut costs and maximize the consumption of locally raised and milled lumber, taking special care to use only sustainable materials that do no harm upstream in harvesting and production or downstream in eventual disposal.

• Incorporating Vashon students into the planning of all of the facilities and designing curriculum components on subjects such as ecology, energy systems and theater design and history to maximize student benefit from the projects.

• Employing students with internships, summer jobs and even full-time jobs.

• Contracting food supplies for all the projects from local farmers.

• Exploring a single, large-volume rain-harvesting system to provide for all irrigation needs for the central Island project (both school and arts center), thus eliminating the Island’s single largest demand for water — summer irrigation of school athletic fields.

• Investing in a single large-volume “living machine” to treat waste water for irrigation and gray use, if not for potable purposes. IslandWood, an environmental education center on Bainbridge, has been operating such a system successfully for years.

• Designing walking and biking paths that allow for minimal environmentally destructive car-park areas to serve both facilities; providing an electric vehicle plug-in infrastructure to facilitate the Island’s transformation into a post-carbon Island; perhaps investing in a Paris-like fleet of bicycles, accessible by student ID, to link the high school and the arts center.

• Taking into account the possible incorporation into the K2 project of significant indoor athletic facilities, thus minimizing the capital expenditure on parallel indoor practice facilities in the high school.

• And lastly, honestly and vigorously investigating the Island’s real need for full-scale performance facilities. Is there really sufficient demand on our 10,000-person Island for two fully outfitted theaters? In the VAA’s request for a Certificate for Water Availability, for example, VAA engineers based their estimated water usage on a maximum of 10 full houses a year for the 300-seat performing arts center theater. Do we need a second full-scale theater as part of the school construction program when the VAA is projecting 10 full-houses a year? Could Vashon Island School District better use that capital for geothermal heat, perhaps to service both the school and the arts center, and/or synthetic athletic turf to minimize summer irrigation needs? And could leasing the theater for school usage produce a new stream of operating revenue for the arts center, the absence of which has doomed many a capital-intensive theater?

I have discussed these ideas with a number of people involved in the projects, and I know a few of these and other important environmentally sustainable ideas have been discussed at some level. It may turn out that a few of these ideas, some of them, many of them, most of them or even all of them prove to be unfeasible. But if the parties were to energetically explore the possibilities for cooperation, I am sure new environmentally sustainable and economically practical ideas would certainly come forward.

It’s not too late to do it together and to do it right.

— Steve Haworth is retired from CNN, where he handled corporate public relations.