Related sustainable strategies include requiring all builders to build Energy Star-rated homes, requiring contractors to participate in an onsite construction waste recycling program, offering low-water-flow fixtures to homebuyers, allowing residents to grow their own vegetables in an organic community garden, preserving open space and a goal of planting 100,000 trees within Daybreak.
New Projects
Kennecott Land broke ground in late July on a new 208,000-sq-ft, multi-specialty medical clinic that will be operated by Salt Lake City-based University of Utah Medical System. It will include an eye center, cancer center, orthopedic group and 24-hour emergency room.
“What is especially nice about this project is that the light-rail transit system that is burgeoning in the Salt Lake Valley currently connects to the university’s main campus,” says McCutcheon. The new line being built also extends into and ends at Daybreak.
Another new project is called Crossing at Daybreak, a 300-unit apartment community adjacent to the South Station rail line.
Looking to the future, McCutcheon says there is a 500-acre piece of land in the center of Daybreak that Kennecott Land envisions as its town center. “We are in the early stages of planning this area,” he adds. “We have entitlement within Daybreak for up to 14 million sq ft of retail, office and industrial space. Nine million of this will be retail and office.”
Safety and Health
Kennecott Land Co. certified its environmental management system in 2005 to International Standards Organization’s 14001 standard, which addresses aspects of environmental management.
“This set a good foundation for our health and safety program as well,” says Piper Rhodes, the firm’s manager of sustainable development, health, safety and environment. “We have implemented all OSHA standards, as well as additional safety and health standards, policies and systems that are in place in Rio Tinto, which are often more restrictive than OSHA standards.”
For example, the OSHA construction-industry standard for working at heights doesn’t require a tie-off until a worker is above 8 ft. Rio Tinto requires that everyone be tied off at 6 ft or above.
In 2008, Kennecott merged its health and safety system with its environmental management system. “This is the overall program under which everything we do with our employees, contractors and subcontractors falls,” Rhodes says.
Ty McCutcheon, vice president of community development, adds that the company’s safety philosophy begins with a desire to have a zero-harm culture. “We want to send everyone home safe each night,” he says. “Employees work onsite and engage in health-safety-environment interactions, which involve chats with everyone to see if there are things we can do to help them work more safely.”
Kennecott Land utilizes the TRACK System for safety: Think through the tasks, Recognize the hazards, Assess the risks, Control the hazards, Keep safety first in all tasks.
Rhodes says Kennecott Land holds contractors and subcontractors to the same safety and health guidelines it holds itself to. “We consider their safety and health performance every bit as important as our own,” she adds. “In fact, we lump all of the hours that they work in with our own hours when it comes to computing safety performance.”
