PERFORMANCE DESIGN & COMMISSIONING
An interview with DMS Secretary Bill Lindner

	"It has to start with the owner."
	"Building commissioning is, first of all, a management tool for building owners," the young Florida architect told his distinguished national audience. "Building commissioning is how owners can make sure they get what they are paying for."
	What building owners should be paying for, he told them, is a building that is designed for long life and high performance, a building that is designed for easy maintenance and low energy bills and has been built to deliver those specified results. However, he continued, what everyone in the building business knows, is that few buildings are ever built this way.
	The speaker was Bill Lindner. The occasion was the Second National Conference on Building Commissioning, where Lindner discovered an ally, Bill Scaringe, Director of Building Construction for the State of Florida. Three years later, Lindner and Scaringe are partners in a deep reform of building practices in Florida. Lindner is Secretary of Florida's Department of Management Services (DMS) and the state's "chief landlord and builder," where he and Scaringe have been busily putting their owner-centric concept of Performance Design and Commissioning into practice.
	"Nowadays," Lindner said recently in his Tallahassee office, "I suppose I really muddy the water when I talk about commissioning because I'm not just talking about commissioning any more. I'm talking about bringing buildings to the market that are bigger, better, faster, and cheaper. And part of that is the accountability that is built into the commissioning process.
	"But we're really talking about high-performance buildings. Commissioning is one way to make sure you're actually doing what you're supposed to be doing. It measures things."
	"In the purest sense we no longer just hire commissioning agents. Our process has evolved - is still evolving. We are, in effect by osmosis, learning the commissioning process internally. So now the developer is doing the commissioning - not entirely by ourselves, because for some things you need real technical experts. But the general philosophy and practice of commissioning we're doing ourselves. We started cloning buildings in this complex (the Capital Circle Office Complex in Tallahassee), and on this last building there were over 50 different improvements that we made from things we learned on the previous building."
	"So when it comes to commissioning, I think we're probably a hybrid. Some of it we can now do internally, do it ourselves, some of it we still contract. But we keep learning new tricks and I think that's the way most large builders have to do it if they are at all successful and continually improving the quality of their product."
	How did such a revolutionary reform in building practices begin in government - the last place one usually expects to be the seed-bed of innovation?
	Lindner is probably the catalyst, certainly a big part of it - a rare "political appointee" - a professional in the field, with no further political ambitions. "He's innovative," says Florida Design Initiative Director Larry Peterson, "and he's not worried about catching the flak that comes from changing things."
	Lindner credits his management team, headed by Buildings Division Director Bill Scaringe. "It really started with a good core-group of agency professionals," Lindner said, "people who had been in the process for years and were frustrated with standard practices that weren't giving them the kind of building performance that they knew from their experience was possible."
	Can Performance Commissioning "Go Private?" Asked how many design firms are ready to provide Performance Design and Commissioning, Lindner grined. "Most of the firms that we dealt with weren't too inclined to provide the kind of full services that we were asking for. Now we're shaping RFPs (requests for proposals) for design services so that's what they provide."
	Asked if his performance design and commissioning techniques can be cloned to the private sector, he replied, "Sure. But not without resistance. The whole thing has to be driven by the owner's thirst for quality. I mean why build it any other way? Why not do it right?
	"And yet that's not the drive for many people. Especially developers. I mean I've been a developer. I've gotten those banking slips that say I'm going too slow because the construction interest rate is eating my clock and hurry up and slop that stuff up there and get this thing done. I've been there.
	"Yes, there are private developers who can afford to care about quality and be meticulous about it, but the very way most people contract for jobs insures there aren't a lot who do. It's a way of doing business that has to change. And it seems it has to start with the owner. That's what we're working on, but it won't be for every private owner any more than it is for every public agency. Every agency has a different vested interest. And we (DMS) have some advantages. We have a different kind of capital fund to maintain our buildings over a long period of time - because of the bonds. We have a bonded building program. But that's just DMS. HRS (Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services) doesn't have a bonded building program. They don't have a capital appreciation fund. Their buildings start falling apart and they can't get any money to fix them. And that's a major issue that has nothing to do with the will of the Secretary of HRS.
	"But we couldn't get the Legislature to fund a bonded building program for Corrections either - which we should have. Any building that is going to have a long shelf-life is in the bonded category. That's a real obvious thing. But we don't, so all any Secretary can do - what I'm doing with this opportunity is just do the best we can, build the best buildings we can, set the best example we can, and document the hell out of it and put it up on the Internet and let everybody see it, learn about the process, the package, the cost-benefit of it - and shoot at it if they want to, show us where there's holes. I'm not sure we have the full story yet. But it's starting to look awfully good. There's some great things to report, but it will create questions and people need to take a few shots at it and ask us if we did this or that and shake it a bit. That will help us make it better. But on the whole I think we've done a pretty good job and there aren't many private sector developers who will look at it and say we messed up."
	Asked how many projects DMS could take on and manage if his design and commissioning system caught on and a lot of state and local agencies started asking for help, Lindner said there's clearly a limit. "But we haven't reached it yet. And for those agencies that will let us - state, or local, or school boards and community colleges - we're training them to do it, teaching as we deliver the product for them. But with schools cutting back, we'll do it for them if it's less cost for them. Otherwise if they have staff we show them as we do it. We hope they just steal it. They need to take this process, these 722-odd steps including the quality control component, and if they can do it for themselves we're happy for them. I like to get as many people up-and-doing as possible. I mean, that's the ultimate strategy: self-service. You don't want to be servicing people if they have staff and you can teach them how to do it. It probably takes two or three jobs.
	"I think we're making some progress. You know, it's slow hoeing sometimes, but I think we're getting the word out."
	Jim Minter, Contributing Editor