Making ‘Green’ History in City of Glendale

For the past 16 years Loren Witkin has been at the helm of Glendale-based Citadel Environmental Services Inc, helping grow the company into a 50 employee enterprise with clients across all industry sectors including energy producers, aerospace firms, developers, universities, entertainment firms, retailers, financial institutions and healthcare organizations. In a growing and changing field, Citadel has progressively increased the variety of environmental services it offers, performing asbestos, lead, PCB, and universal waste surveys, indoor air quality studies and subsurface site assessments, as well as consulting on a myriad of other things. Now, in a move that could open new business opportunities for the company, Witkin has jumped head first into sustainable development. His $2.5 million project, a couple of weeks away from completion, could become Glendale’s first privately held LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified space. There are at least two high rise office space developments in downtown Glendale also vying to be first, according to Hector Gutierrez, Supervisor of Key Accounts for Glendale Water and Power. Witkin is hoping Citadel’s new offices in Glendale will achieve LEED Platinum standards, the highest ranking possible. The offices will be located in a building on Victory Boulevard, purchased by Citadel earlier this year, which was completely remodeled and refurbished with waterless urinals, solar panels and a host of environmentally friendly materials and features including glass walls, and recycled office furniture. Determined to lead by example and be at the forefront of a market that’s shifting towards sustainability, Witkin’s incursion into “green” development, has not only given him the first hand experience necessary to offer LEED consulting services for clients, but has also piqued his interest in development. Surprisingly, developing LEED projects, especially with all the financial incentives available, “is too easy,” he said. Question: How did you get into the business? Answer: I always thought I was born to be a lawyer ever since I was a knee heighted grasshopper. When I was an undergrad at UCLA I was working a lot of late nights for a law firm and one day I decided, ‘I’m going to have plenty of time to do this when I’m a lawyer’, so I quit the job. Then I realized I needed to earn a living somehow so I went to the placement center and I looked to see what job paid the most and what job didn’t require any typing. I looked on the board and found the job that paid the most, and when I looked to the left it said Asbestos Inspector. I had heard of asbestos but I didn’t know what it was. I showed up for the job interview and I was hired. That’s how I started into it. Q: So you never got your law degree? A: When it came time to graduate and enter law school (I was already enrolled in law school and ready to go) my boss at the time said, ‘Why would you want to go to law school right away, get into debt, why don’t you just stay in the environmental industry because it’s really going to be a big field?’ That was 22 years ago. I just said ‘Okay’. It didn’t take much to twist my arm. …After a few years we went on to launch Citadel. Q: How has the company’s direction changed over time? A: When we started we only handled asbestos consulting. Over time, the environmental industry opened up and there were a lot of other opportunities. The market changed and our staffing changed. As our clients asked us to do more and more we then brought in resources and people that could do more and more. So now we have three divisions: a construction services group which still handles asbestos, lead and PCBs; we have an industrial hygiene group, which handles indoor air quality, chemical exposure monitoring, safety and training; and we have an environmental geology group that handles all the subsurface issues. Q: What trends do you see in the environmental industry? A: My dad was an engineer and when I came home and I said, ‘I’m not going to law school I’m going to be an environmental consultant’ he sort of looked at me like ‘what?’ And the response was the same with everyone; they didn’t know what environmental consulting was about. They thought you must wear Birkenstocks, tie dye shirts and hug trees and save whales. Our clients knew that they needed us because regulations required us to be involved, but to them we were just a cost setter, we just cost them money. Now, because of sustainable development and because “environmental” is now getting embraced by all companies like Exxon, (when Exxon is embracing environmental, you know it’s got traction) companies recognize there’s money to be made off of having good sound environmental safety practices and having sustainable development. We’re now on the profit side of their business – lower operating costs, better employee retention, better employee moral, better employee productivity, there’s a profit side – that’s the change. Q: How have you fared in the economic recession? A: This will be the first year out of all 16 years that we won’t likely exceed our last year’s revenues. We’ve always been on a growth curve. The economy has had an impact on us because it’s had an impact on our clients. We’re very well diversified; we’re in virtually every kind of sector: education, entertainment, energy companies, retail, commercial, healthcare, we do military… So we’re still going to be profitable but not as profitable as we’ve been before. This is the first year we’ve had layoffs, and this is also the first year we’ve cut salaries- all salaried employees took a 3-5 percent pay cut. But we’re also being opportunistic about the recession, picking and plucking the best talent we can find. Just this week we hired a senior project manager who had been with another company for 11 years, and we picked up an accounting manager in Orange County that had been with another company 21 years. The company closed their operation down here, and we were able to pick her up. Q: Why did you decide to buy a building in Glendale and remodel it to Platinum LEED standards? A: One, because prices were down. Two, because we thought it would be best to own a building regardless of the economic situation. We’d rather own than lease our properties. And as we’ve been getting more into sustainable development, and consulting, we wanted to see if we could do it ourselves and get a model for it, so we thought the timing was important to do it. As an anecdotal story, one of the company vehicles we have is a Ford Expedition and it’s got a big Citadel logo on the door. When I valet parked it the valet looked at the door, and looked at me and said ‘environmental huh?’ So the point that we were being called out on by the valet, is that we’re not acting too environmentally friendly, that we’ve got to lead by example. Q: What are some of the highlights of the building? A: It’s going to be 63 percent more water efficient; it’s going to be net zero as far as energy use. We took an absolute pit of a space – a dark, dreary, ugly space in a sort of transitional neighborhood, and added daylight so now everyone, from where they are seated, from their desks, will have daylight views to the outside. I think that’s a great feature. If we’re successful in becoming a LEED Platinum space, which I’m pretty sure we are, we’re going to be the fifth space in the state of California – we’re only one of five – so that tells me that we have the ability to do creative products that differentiate ourselves from the market, that we’re substantially different from what everyone else can offer. Q: Does this take your company in a new direction? A: We’re being asked by clients to provide sustainable development consulting when it comes to LEED and this will help us understand the LEED process first hand. So rather than trying to preach something that we’ve never experienced, we now have the ability of being on the client’s side, so I think we understand the process pretty thoroughly, and we also understand the importance of having a builder that knows the process. Q: Is this you getting your fingers wet in sustainable development? A: As far as a new business line, I wouldn’t mind getting more into the development side, and developing these type of LEED buildings because I’ve seen how easy it is to do if you have the right people and we’re doing it for the same dollars as we can do conventional construction. Q: So this has been an easy process? A: I would say this is too easy. I asked Glendale Water and Power’ is this like the Nigerian scam?’ We’re really just going to give you paperwork and you’re just going to cut us a check? And they said yes. What we found is that Glendale Water and Power has a number of incentive programs. The EPA and federal government through the stimulus package have a number of incentives. So for the solar power we’re only paying for about 15 cents on the dollar. Glendale Water and Power is helping us to re-vamp our tenant space for free; they are paying for at least 15 percent of our new HVAC units, so I don’t know why companies are not taking advantage of this. We’re going to get about 25 cents on the dollar back on construction costs from incentive programs. Glendale Water and Power is going to pay us up to $50,000 in LEED incentives. If we achieve LEED Platinum, they’re going to cut us a check for $30,000. They’re going to give us $10,000 of technical assistance and $10,000 of design assistance. Q: What are your thoughts on the “Green Movement’? A: I think there is a movement but it has to make economic sense for it to catch on. It’s not going to be the Al Gores of the world that are going to be moving it forward, it’s going to be the CFOs of companies that are going to be the ones moving it forward. And to the point that they get it, and I think they are getting it, then it’s going to take off. Q. Why Glendale? A: We’ve been based in Glendale since the 1994 earthquake; we moved our office from Venice to Glendale because it was freeway accessible, it was close to the airport. When it came to looking for another space we looked all over. We wanted to stay in the tri- city area and we just ended up in Glendale. We didn’t know how friendly Glendale was in terms of the GWP, they’re one of the best utility companies to do business when it comes to ‘green’. We didn’t know that. We just got lucky.