A green future: David Dise

Transitioning a 1,000-strong vehicle fleet and a 9.29 million-square-meter property portfolio to become carbon-free by 2035 could seem like an impossible mission for someone without the right experience, resources or team.

But that’s exactly what David Dise, Director of the Montgomery County Department of General Services, based in Maryland in the United States, has been tasked with via a county council mandate. Thankfully, he has a 48-year career in local government and a series of carefully crafted private sector partnerships to work with.

"I’m having to switch over one of the largest municipal administrative public safety and transit fleets from fossil fuels to zero carbon emission vehicles," he tells The CEO Magazine.

"I’m having the same task to do with our existing portfolio of over 400 buildings, some of which, if they were people, would qualify for Medicare.

"We’re having to approach the next five-to-10 years with repairing, maintaining and improving what we’ve done while we still have some new growth and development, which we have determined will be net zero. The immediate future is in finding new ways to create a sustainable future for Montgomery County."

Collaboration is key

In an environment affected by 15 years of budget cuts,and more recent layoffs, Dise has had to learn the lesson that, "It isn’t true that you can do more with less, but when you have less, you learn to do better." That’s where collaborating with private companies has made all the difference.

"We can complain about not having enough to do what we do, or we can realize the reality and try to be more efficient with what we’re given. And to do that, we’ve engaged the private sector in a number of initiatives, both from the sustainability side as well as the construction side, privatizing some functions in our fleet management," he says.

"The old model of government, which was to just spend money until the problem is solved, or hire enough people to solve it, is untenable. So we’ve really striven to engage private industry contract resources while we’re having to reduce staff.

"We could not achieve near what we’ve achieved without that framework. There is no way we could possess the expertise in-house to achieve what we’ve done. Some of our projects are the first of their kind in the United States."

Dise gives the example of sustainable microgrid energy generation initiatives Montgomery County has developed with companies like AlphaStruxure and property development companies such as Stonebridge Property Group. The county is currently generating over 16 megawatts of electricity through photovoltaic panels on parking lot canopies, building rooftops and ground-mounted arrays, with the aim to increase this to over 30 megawatts in the future.

The innovative part, as Dise explains, is that the county doesn’t own a single one of those panels, as they all operate through power purchase agreements with its private sector vendor partners, where the county has agreed on a fixed rate for purchasing the power generated. It also recently converted its largest vehicle maintenance depot into an independent microgrid to generate hydrogen to fuel green buses.

Sustainability first

Dise is currently reviewing proposals for a US$500 million project – a fossil fuel-free maintenance depot that will be operated by the county, but owned, designed, constructed and maintained by the private partner.

"We couldn’t do this by just continually issuing straight bids and trying to find the money through bond initiatives to fund them – where do you find US$500 million or US$600 million to do that? No-one’s got that kind of checkbook just hanging around," Dise says.

"We sorted all the loose change from between the sofa cushions 10 years ago."

For all of the innovation and efficiency working with the private sector brings, there are challenges too. One of the biggest issues for Dise is not being too led by technology, but ensuring practicality remains at the forefront.

"To build a building that has a bunch of gee whiz technology is great, but if that technology and its systems are so new that no-one knows how to maintain them, or their durability is not well established, it’s counterproductive," he explains.

"We’ve learned that lesson the hard way, having to go back and replace some new technologies with good, old-fashioned durable technologies – people love to work and live and operate in a cool building, but it becomes less cool if its systems are always failing."