LA Mayor Hails New Green Hangar

BURBANK, CA-Standing inside a new 60,000-square-foot private aviation hangar unveiled at Bob Hope Airport here on Tuesday, Los Angles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa hailed the platinum LEED certified building as “the greenest aviation facility in the world.”

There’s no known competition for the world’s greenest aviation facilities, but LA’s mayor spoke with pride about the $17 million hangar, saying the facility at 3030 N. Clybourn Ave. on the west side of Bob Hope Airport is a “model for the city, the nation and the world.”

Villaraigosa

Villaraigosa, who was part of a public presentation of Hangar 25, which its designers are calling “the world’s most sustainable aircraft hangar,” stood in front of a Boeing 737 business jet that was pulled inside the hangar for a public unveiling ceremony and plugged into the facility’s self-sustaining energy grid.

Villaraigosa was flanked by Rick Fedrizzi, president and founding chairman of the US Green Building Council, Andy Meyers, president of Hangar 25 developer Duarte, CA-based Shangri-La Construction and commercial real estate maverick Tony Thompson, chairman and CEO of Irvine-based Thompson National Properties.

Thompson

Thompson was on hand to make public his firm’s partnership with Shangri-La in a new $100 million green fund. The fund will initially target “office, industrial and aviation facilities,” he said. Thompson, whose $1 billion G-Reit fund targeted the government sector, said that at some point the fund may also be applied to government buildings and projects, including school facilities. “We need to focus our interest on the best possible environmental payback,” Thompson noted, adding that beside being green the goal of the fund was to also “be black.”

Hangar 25′s builders and designers say it was built at costs relative to other aviation hangars, and that’s before government rebates for solar usage are figured into the equation.

“This cost was $275 per square foot to build,” said Meyers, who called the building price comparable to building a non-green hangar.