Reframe

with Jeff Nichols and award nominees at the 2026 Vision Awards for Bellevue and Seattle 2030 Districts 

Sometimes the headlines make it feel like we're not making progress — but the reality on the ground tells a very different story. In this special episode of Reframe, show host Jeff Nichols looks beyond the negative news about stalled programs to bring you voices from the frontlines of real sustainability work happening right now in Seattle and Bellevue, Washington. 

Jeff attended the Bellevue and Seattle 2030 Districts Vision Awards, a major annual celebration for the building, architecture, and energy community — and sat down with many of the builders, engineers, architects, and city leaders nominated in various Vision Award categories.  

From hospitals and universities slashing energy use to the LEED certified restoration of a 135-year-old vacant downtown building — the work being done is remarkable. Most people just haven't heard about it yet. 

This episode is a reminder of the thousands of people making an impact every day, often without the recognition they deserve.  
 
Guest Segments Include: 

Reducing energy use and emissions through efficiency, electrification, and high-performance operations with: 

Innovative approaches to conserving water and improving long-term resource stewardship with: 

Transforming existing buildings to improve performance, reduce emissions, and extend asset life with: 

Reducing the carbon impact of materials and construction through thoughtful design with: 

Visionary leadership driving meaningful sustainability outcomes through strategy, policy, and collaboration with: 

The Reframe podcast is hosted by Jeff Nichols and presented by Pilotlight. If you have questions or feedback for the Reframe team, please email us: reframe@pilotlight.ai 

Creators and Guests

Host
Jeff Nichols
Jeff is the Host and Co-Producer of Reframe, founder / CEO of Pilotlight and a passionate advocate for building sustainability.
Producer
Eric Opel
Eric is Co-Producer of Reframe and Marketing Director @ Pilotlight
Producer
Robert Haskitt
Robert Haskitt is the Producer and Creator of The Reframe Podcast

What is Reframe?

Reframe is the podcast about building sustainability.

Commercial and public buildings are among the biggest producers of carbon emissions. It’s a problem of massive scale. But, for building owners, engineers and contractors, solving it may actually be more of an opportunity than a challenge. That’s what the “Reframe” podcast is all about. Join host Jeff Nichols on an exploration of the forces driving sustainability in our built environment. And meet the people who are leading the charge.

Reframe Ep.18 Stories Of Vision And Progress
Transcript

David Woodson: [00:00:00] There's a lot of negativity in the newscasts, uh, you know, for a while now. And it's nice to work in a field where you see so many great things that people are doing all over the planet, and then, uh, bring it back to what we're doing here in Seattle.

Jeff Nichols: Welcome to Reframe. This episode is a little different. You'll hear from not just one guest, but many. In our last episode, we talked about all the good work that's being done outside of the national spotlight. Sometimes if you look at the headlines, it can feel like we're not making a ton of progress, but the reality on the ground is very different.
There's actually a lot going on. Real projects, real people doing really impactful work. Recently, I went to the Vision Awards for the 2030 Districts of Seattle [00:01:00] and Bellevue here in Seattle, Washington. For builders, architects, and energy leaders in these communities, this is a big deal, with hundreds of attendees celebrating achievement across seven award categories advancing building sustainability.
I wanna introduce you to just some of those people and their impressive work. The first category was energy, and this recognized leadership in reducing energy use and emissions through efficiency, electrification, and high performance operations. I spoke with Denise Montgomery, who is a property manager at Unico, about the impact of their work with UMC to drive significant efficiencies at Overlake Medical Center.

Denise Montgomery: We are proud of our partnership and our knowledge from our sustainability teams to help Overlake just jump into this new age of bringing efficiency and sustainable measures into a medical office building. Obviously, it's not very easy to do so with running all sorts of medical [00:02:00] equipment or maintaining ability for surgery centers and such to continue to run and operate on standard schedules and not actually, uh, impact as much of our energy use.
And so taking that opportunity to partner with Overlake and UMC to reduce our EUI a great amount from 163.9 at the start, and now reducing over 34.6% in our efficiencies to our target number at 107.2. So we've done a great amount of work just to improve some of the building systems.

Jeff Nichols: Bonnie Frye Hemphill, policy and partnerships director at UMC, added more detail about the ROI of the Overlake project.

Bonnie Frye Hemphill: The easy buttons are always HVAC or lighting controls. So at Overlake, we reached even higher into the walls, beneath the floors, and beyond the pipes. Before this partnership, Overlake was looking at several tens of millions of dollars to achieve the clean building standard compliance. Working with UMC [00:03:00] and Commerce and PSE, we brought that cost down by 80%.
That's a payback in under two years.

Jeff Nichols: As we often talk about, sometimes incentives are key to progress. Armando Burdeal is the energy program delivery manager at Seattle City Light, a utility nominated for an energy award for the impact of their energy efficiency program at Seattle Children's Hospital.

Armando Berdiel Chavez: We have a, a five-year engagement with the hospital. Every year, we have an energetic baseline that we look at, and we say from all of the capital construction projects, from all of the behavioral, from all of the, uh, O&M efforts that are taken, we at the end of the year measure energy consumption at the meter, and we compare in the baseline and, oh, they are saving energy.
Let's pay the money for them saving. So we're not looking at any individual project. We're saying, "Hey, trade allies, customers, consultants, the community's involved in [00:04:00] helping save energy in this one property." From the entire portfolio of efforts, we measure at the end of the year, we see a massive amount of energy saved, and we support financially.

Jeff Nichols: The Water Award honors innovative approaches to conserving water and improving long-term resource stewardship. Mark Johnson is a principal architect at Signal Architect and Research, a Water Award nominee for their work at Georgetown Wet Weather Treatment Station.

Mark Johnson: So Georgetown is very wet, so the Duwamish River meandered back and forth for millennia, so that means the soil's very soft, it's very rich, the groundwater is very high.
This wet weather treatment station, if it wasn't there, there is half sewage and half water flowing into the river every time it rains kinda hard here, and it doesn't do that anymore. Seventy-seven million gallons of water per day are treated through that, or it has the capability to do that. So it's this thing that's, like, very quiet.
It's working really hard, [00:05:00] and it operates twenty to fifty times a year. But the measure of pollution that comes out of the river is massive over time. In the Duwamish River, the water itself is some of the cleanest in the state, but it's the bottom that has been used as an industrial kind of waste way forever.
So this is making that step and taking that responsibility to clean that water that goes into the river so that when it goes into Puget Sound and when it treats generations down the road, that it's not leaving the place worse than it found it. It's leaving it better.

Jeff Nichols: This project is fascinating. It serves an essential treatment function on the Duwamish River with unique attention to community and culture.

Mark Johnson: So what's interesting is the engineers will say that this is a geotechnical project that then has hydrology on it, and then it's civil engineering. And our job was to make it so that it was community facing, and it was a place that represented the neighborhood, [00:06:00] 'cause Georgetown, there's Georgetown Brewing.
If you need to fabricate something, make art, find an artist, find a community member, that's in Georgetown. And that's a neighborhood that's been done to for a long time, not done with. And this was one that King County really felt, let's turn that around and make a project with the community, by the community, for the community, that does all this work to save the river.
Like, this project type is typically very invisible. It's behind a razor wire fence. No one can see it. No one can access it. And this way that we turned it around, that the neighborhood said, "We wanna see it. We wanna see how it works," that really changed our position as designers and architects, that we wanna show our work.
We wanna show how it works. So King County invested in the time and the thought to make something that cost the same as something behind a razor wire fence, but it looks really good doing it. It has some of the largest artworks on public facilities in Seattle. Um, it actually has an [00:07:00] embedded artwork in it called The Theater of a Storm.
So when it rains, like the nastiest, rainiest night of the year, the people that are working there, there's this light show that shows how the facility works, and it's this really cool thing. It's like an Easter egg. And that, for many of our projects, from the smallest retreat to this big thing, has this Easter egg, that it's doing something in addition to being something.

Jeff Nichols: I met Todd Maine, the director of operations at Weber Thompson, and Angie Rivera, director of sustainability at Sellen Construction. Their companies worked together on the Cornerstone Project.

Todd Mayne: Cornerstone is participating in the city of Seattle's, uh, Living Building pilot program, which is a sustainability initiative which requires participation in ILFI's Living Building Challenge.

Jeff Nichols: That's International Living Future Institute.

Todd Mayne: What we're trying to impact is, one, it's a, this office building is located [00:08:00] in an urban neighborhood, and so we're really trying to bring a workplace to where people could actually live and work in an established neighborhood, and have that connection o- with these sustainable buildings and the initiatives that are being pursued, and seeing how they can actually impact and influence the future going forward for all our future generations.
And so we have three petal certification, and one of those was water, and that, that has five petals, and we needed to be three petal certification. What made it hard is for participation in these different initiative programs is we had to capture 100% of the rainwater that fell on our project site, and we either had to use it for non-potable uses such as irrigation or Water closet flushing.
So that meant that we have this huge cistern underneath the building, which [00:09:00] is about 270,000 gallons to meet the demand for the year for this building. 100%. Yeah, that was one of the requirements. And so it took a lot of careful planning, and then even the infrastructure took a lot of planning, and there's a lot of equipment that goes into this, managing this water.

Jeff Nichols: Angie shared more about the challenges around embodied carbon.
Angie Rivera: Well, it's a mass timber project, so that in and of itself is just something that I hope to see more of in the industry. Um, the cement that's in concrete is 8% of the world carbon emissions every year. And so if we can reduce the amount of cement and concrete that we use every year, that makes a big impact.
And wood is a naturally occurring substance and basically sequesters carbon. It's a better solution for us to decarbonize our buildings going forward. Everybody knows LEED and the materials documentation, and that is very onerous and detailed. This was [00:10:00] that multiplied by 10 because it's every product on the entire project.
And so we had a very bespoke system that we created with Weber Thompson to do all the submittals and work through every single product in order to get them disclosed at the 100 parts per million that you have to get every single product done, um, and to do the advocacy with WSP, um, to the manufacturers if there were no options to be compliant, especially MEP products.
Those have not been part of a LEED certification process yet for materials declarations and, um, transparency.

Mike Jobes: This project is so exciting to talk about for me. It's the Populus Seattle Hotel, which is an adaptive reuse of a 1907 steam supplies warehouse in Pioneer

Jeff Nichols: Square. That's Mike Jobes, a principal at Miller Hull Partnership.
Their Populus hotel project was a nominee for the Building Retrofit Award.

Mike Jobes: And it's part of the greater development called Rail Spur, [00:11:00] which everyone will know about very soon. As soon as the World Cup happens, this place is gonna be incredible. You'll hear about Rail Spur. It's a place to be from here forward, and the hotel's part of it.
I'm from Seattle. I grew up skateboarding in the alleyways of Pioneer Square. And when I went to architecture school, I did a thesis project on the alleyways of Pioneer Square and trying to get some of the action to move toward the alleys and away from the street sometimes. And this is what Rail Spur is all about.
It's three buildings that face onto a public north-south alley, which is the extension of Nord Alley, and then an east-west private passageway, which is a double-wide old rail spur from the Yesler Mill Rail. So it's a, it's a cruciform in plan. That is all every, all the action's facing into the alley. And you'll see it soon.
I mean, there's so many food and beverage options down on that ground level, and then we're gonna go up to the [00:12:00] hotel.

Jeff Nichols: Mike shared a couple of the difficult challenges he and his partners faced as they pushed the project forward.

Mike Jobes: I mean, any adaptive reuse is a, is a huge challenge because there are a lot of, uh, unforeseen conditions.
But I think if you walk around Pioneer Square, there are maps that show the old shoreline prior to th- filling it in when the mill came in. Like, white settlement cut down all the trees on the, on the hills, run them down Skid Road, Yesler, and then filled in the bay. So this, this building, which is at First and King, was on the edge of what would've been looking out at sort of brackish, sort of, you know, marshlands.
And we needed to augment the foundations for all the beautiful heavy timber columns because the seismic code is completely different from the time it was last touched. And so we had to lift the whole building up and hold it in place, repour the [00:13:00] foundations. But we found that we were at the shoreline because on the north end of the building, the foundation-bearing soil was pretty high.
By the time we got to the south, which would've been the edge of the water, it dropped off just like a shoreline, and there was seawater at the bottom of the hole. So we had to call an audible in the middle of construction and put pin piles in and all this stuff. That was a challenge, but it was a pretty interesting challenge.
And now the last cycle of, of seismic code has realized that we're in a, a basin effect, like a giant bathtub of liquefaction in that area. And so we needed to really upgrade that, that building for current code. So our structural engineers, CPL, were-- they're brilliant, and they came up with a very elegant solution to brace that building and meet current code without taking away its historic character.

Jeff Nichols: The embodied carbon category recognizes efforts to reduce the carbon impact of materials and construction through [00:14:00] thoughtful design and selection. The Metropole Building was nominated and ultimately won the award in this category. Matt Alfs is the founder and principal architect at Building Work Architects.

Matt Aalfs: We recently completed a project, um, it's called the Metropole Building, and it's an adaptive reuse, restoration, transformation of 135-year-old historic building at the edge of Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle.

Jeff Nichols: We discuss some of the goals of the Metropole project.

Matt Aalfs: We had an amazing client, um, the Satterberg Foundation.
They're a philanthropic, local philanthropic organization, and their mission is to support social justice and equity and also environmental responsibility. And so they, they commissioned us to design this project to advance those two, uh, uh, goals simultaneously: social justice in terms of the program, who's the building for And how sustainable could we make it?
So those were our two, uh, uh, charges in the design of the building.

Jeff Nichols: I asked him about some of the challenges with this project.

Matt Aalfs: The building was [00:15:00] essentially a, a ruin. It had been vacant for 17 years, open to the weather, had a tremendous amount of structural damage and just deterioration. Um, and so addressing those technical issues.
And then another one was, uh, we have a really complex mixed-use program. We have a childcare center, conference and event center, office space, a commercial kitchen, and then, um, arts and culture space, all in this tight footprint, so we had to figure out how to arrange that. And then third was just the sustainable design.
It's, uh, we, we achieved LEED Platinum. Uh, we're a certified LEED Platinum. We also have an EUI, energy use intensity, of 18, which is extremely low. It makes the building one of the lowest energy use buildings in Seattle of any building type.

Jeff Nichols: I asked Matt how he achieved such energy efficiency. The solutions were complex, but his answer was simple.

Matt Aalfs: With an amazing team. Uh, well, first of all, with an amazing client who set the vision and then, and then empowered us to proceed in those directions, and an amazing [00:16:00] team of, of architects on, at our firm, but also our consulting engineers, Ecotope. We couldn't-- They were really the mastermind of how to design the innovative mechan- HVAC system that could achieve this extremely low energy use.
Um, our lead consultant, um, our, all of our eng- structural engineers, Swenson Sayfiel J. So many players. I think we had about 13 different, uh, different, uh, designers and engineers that we, uh, c- you know, collaborated with on the project.

Jeff Nichols: The Metropole story has so many layers and aspects to it that I could almost do a whole episode on it.
Actually, I'm 100% going to do that. And finally, the leadership category, which recognizes visionary leadership driving meaningful sustainability outcomes through strategy, policy, and collaboration. I spoke with Barbara Lee, Waterfront Program Director at the Seattle Department of Transportation, about her work on the viaduct replacement.
Barbara Lee: That's definitely one of the most rewarding things, [00:17:00] having been on the program for about 10 years, is just hearing from the people of Seattle, especially folks who have lived and experienced our double-decker viaduct and what a barrier it was, basically dividing our downtown and neighborhoods from the waterfront.
But not only that, but when that viaduct came down, the amount of light that came through the east-west corridors into Pioneer Square, into our downtown, um, into, like, the market area, it was just spectacular. Like, that was something I feel like people couldn't really visualize or realize was going to happen.

Jeff Nichols: I found this fascinating. It, it's a great example of how great infrastructure improvement projects kind of spur this next level of growth, and I think we're seeing that set the stage for this revitalization of Pioneer Square.

Barbara Lee: I think a [00:18:00] lot of, of what's not visible to the public is the number of people that are involved to deliver a project like this.
Like, it's obviously transformative, and it didn't happen overnight. As you probably know, the catalyst was the Nisqually earthquake in 2001, and it damaged our seawall, and it also damaged the viaduct. And I think it started, um, at that point with leadership, like having the right leaders in place in, with all the different organizations that were involved, so obviously the state, the city, the county, and also the Port of Seattle.
So it took some time, but I think having the right people at the right time to make those decisions, 'cause they weren't easy decisions, obviously. But on- once those decisions were made, that just kinda set the wheels in motion as far as starting the [00:19:00] program, getting the funding in place, and then hearing from the people, reaching out to thousands of people, hundreds of community meetings, um, and just finding out and hearing what, what is important to the people of Seattle?
What, what should this waterfront be?

Jeff Nichols: I also met David Woodson, executive director of all things energy at the University of Washington, about their work to decarbonize the campus.

David Woodson: You know, the University of Washington has a grand plan to decarbonize the campus, uh, and really it's about decarbonizing at scale, 'cause we talked about 20 million square feet, 200-plus buildings.
Uh, you know, you don't wanna do that one building at a time. We'll be, we'll be here for a couple hundred years if we did that. Uh, and so the element is doing it at scale, decarbonize the district energy system, and when you think back to the history of the campus, um, you know, really smart decisions were made 100-plus years ago when they centralized the boilers, and they put all the tunnel systems in.
You know, part of the beauty of the campus is a lot of the fact that we don't have to dig it [00:20:00] up every time we're dealing with a utility issue with, uh, any of the piping. And, um, so yeah, so a lot of great decisions made years ago, but you know, it ran on coal way back in the day. In 1988 they switched to natural gas, and then, uh, you know, and now it's the next pivot away from fossil fuels and into going from the combustion of fossil fuels to the energy transfer using heat pumps and using it for both heating and cooling for the campus.
But- The concepts of the central plant and the concepts of having that tunnel system, you know, all still stand, and it's just having to make that next big pivot. And we're still at the early stages of the actual project and what we're going to do there. And also the size of the campus is just, it's just so large.
So making this transition, it's not an overnight project, you know, and it's not a couple million dollar project. Like it's a $1.6 billion project over 15 years. So it is a huge collective effort. [00:21:00] So, you know, part of the first barrier is getting everybody aware of what's required and why. And so one of the things we did was we developed an overall strategy and then kind of offered these tours of the power plant to make people aware of what's there today, but then ingrained in the story of, well, what would the future look like and what would change?
And when people go on the tour, it really gives a, you get a sense of like just how big the actual infrastructure is, and it helps reinforce not just the why in terms of what needs to happen, but the, you know, why it is such a large challenge to make that change.

Jeff Nichols: And finally, I spoke with Perry England, building performance strategist at McDonnell Miller, about his work helping to create the Washington State Green Bank.

Perry England: Again, it goes back to passion, right? I truly believe in what we're doing and the role that building performance plays. And it's just good [00:22:00] business. I enjoy working in the commercial real estate industry and working with building owners and managers. And commercial real estate is definitely under a lot of challenges right now, financial challenges and just the movement in the market and new standards coming at them, new compliance obligations.
And I truly believe in leveraging our public funds, converting those into kind of credit enhancement features that attract private sector money. So for a mere $20 million of public funding, we can make that spin like $60 to $100 million. That to me is the vision. That's what is going to be the catalyst for the transition to a cleaner built environment.
And that's where I currently am really passionate about as kind of one of those last crusades of my career is to be able to be a contributor to the success of what's commonly known as a green [00:23:00] bank. But in Washington state, we rebranded that as Washington Builds. And I think that's an appropriate name for that.

Jeff Nichols: These were just a few of the people I met at the VISION Awards. It was so fun meeting and talking with so many passionate folks doing work in this arena. You can hear the passion in their voices and in the way they describe their accomplishments. These are the leaders who are doing real work to advance sustainability in the built environment, work that won't make headlines or the local news.
I love learning more about the history and work that is happening in areas of the city like historic Pioneer Square. I think one of the common threads across everyone I spoke to, whether it be designer, contractor, or facility manager, was that their work was really an expression of their values. These are people who believe in their work and know that we cannot address climate change if we don't make our existing buildings even more sustainable.[00:24:00]
The other consistent theme was that all of these projects required collaboration and work across partners. Everyone I spoke with talked about the village it took to make a project happen. This wasn't about an individual effort. It was about the work of a coalition. Momentum, progress, passion, and real impact.
So much going on at the local level, all outside the national headlines, and totally different than the dire political headlines most people see most of the time. That's the reframe. Thanks for listening. Until next time.

Announcer: You've been listening to Reframe, the show about building sustainability, presented by Pilotlight.
Opinions shared by Reframe guests aren't necessarily the views of their companies. If you'd like to learn more about the podcast, the show's host, guest, or topics, check out this episode's show notes or visit pilotlight.ai/podcast. Got a question for the [00:25:00] Reframe team? Drop us a note at reframe@pilotlight.ai.
The Reframe podcast features original music by Dyaphonic. The show is produced by Robert Haskitt with Eric Opel and the show's host, Jeff Nichols. Before you go, this would be a great place to hit pause in your podcast app and then hit that little plus sign up in the corner to follow the show. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for joining us.