Director of Engineering and Development Services
City of Revelstoke
It’s not like the City to publicly praise its employees but it’s making an exception with Mike Thomas, its director of Engineering and Development Services, who has just become the first municipal employee in British Columbia to be qualified to rate civil engineering projects using the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure’s Envision rating system.
“Mr. Thomas’s achievement as an accredited Sustainability Professional helps Revelstoke to continue to be the standard of excellence for other British Columbia municipalities,” Chief Administrative Officer Tim Palmer said in a statement released on Monday. “We are privileged to have him on our leadership team.”
Envision™ is a collaborative effort between the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure and the Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Similar in nature to the LEED rating system for buildings and facilities; Envision aims to educate citizens and increase public awareness, provide a means to quantify sustainability in infrastructure, and facilitate the adoption of sustainable design for infrastructure.
“The City of Revelstoke can benefit from the Envision rating system by providing stakeholders and decision-makers with a standardised sustainability framework that can be applied to a wide range of projects, such as road works, pump stations, water and sewer pipelines, bridges, and cycleways” Thomas said in the statement. “The Envision rating system provides a sound means of measuring the benefits of innovative, sustainable infrastructure projects.”
The City of Revelstoke expects to use the Envision rating system for internal guidance and self-assessment on most civil projects, with the potential for select projects to be assessed through the formal rating process, gaining recognition for the City’s efforts toward sustainability.
Mayor David Raven congratulated Thomas on his initiative to seek out this accreditation and placing Revelstoke at the forefront of sustainable infrastructure decision-making.
“With aging infrastructure and climate risks, the City of Revelstoke is continually seeking to improve the design and delivery of infrastructure projects to protect social, economic and environmental values,” the mayor said.
