Civil servants at a federal courthouse in Puerto Rico were left with only one bathroom on the seventh floor of a nearby structure for a year after General Services Administration officials closed all of the government building’s restrooms without giving anybody notice.
The GSA action was part of the house-keeping agency’s efforts to green hundreds of federal buildings that often disrupted employees and failed to generate promised benefits, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
Funding of $4.5 billion for the greening projects came from President Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus program in 2009.
At the Puerto Rico facility, employees said they were never told the GSA would be closing all public restrooms in the building, which would remain fully operational for an entire year.
“According to a district judge who sits at the courthouse, trials were delayed from resuming after recesses because it took attendees so long to return” from the distant bathroom, the report said.
More than half of respondents to the congressional watchdog’s inquiries said the GSA didn’t consult them on plans to renovate their buildings.
Staff at five other environmentally renovated courthouses said the agency installed energy-efficient features they hadn’t asked for and didn’t like.
For instance, at a federal courthouse in Roanoke, Va., the GSA put in lights that turned off automatically when sensors stopped detecting movement. Officials at the courthouse said the lights caused safety hazards when they made public probation areas dark while people were inside.
At the Federal Building and U.S. Custom House in Denver, the GSA installed “green” lightbulbs in historical light fixtures that had to be replaced with bulbs that actually worked with the old-fashioned technology.
Some of the GSA’s investments would take decades to pay off, but were considered permissible when the cost of other investments in the building paid off quickly enough to offset them in the eyes of the government.
For example, a $25,000 “outdoor potable water use reduction” system in a federal courthouse designed to capture condensation from the building’s outdoor heating and air vents wouldn’t provide a return on investment for 78 years but was green-lighted because the costs of other projects, like low-flow bathroom fixtures, would balance far sooner.
Employees at three courthouses told the accountability office that GSA staff couldn’t even operate the green energy systems they had just installed.
When GSA officials couldn’t figure out how to work new automatic heating and air controls, for example, “temperatures varied drastically across rooms.”
Fourteen of 22 projects completed in the 10 courthouses the watchdog reviewed “experienced schedule delays or cost overruns” due to the green projects.
But in instances where a project was estimated to come in under budget, the GSA took opportunities to expand the scope of its work.
When a contractor put in a bid to renovate a courthouse in San Antonio for $31 million that was slated to cost $50 million, the GSA performed a study to find additional green improvements it could make to the building instead of simply renovating the building at a lower cost than expected.
“As a result of the study, the project included $16 million in green upgrades and was GSA’s first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum project,” the accountability office report said.
The extra $16 million purchased the San Antonio courthouse a title that has little bearing on how much energy a building actually uses, as the Washington Examiner reported in October 2013.
Go here to read the full Government Accountability Office Report.
