Cindy Ortega

By Nicole Lucht

Friday, Aug. 7, 2009 | 3 a.m.

Cindy Ortega is in charge of transforming MGM Mirage into the green giant of gaming — and we’re not talking about the color of the company’s flagship casino on the Strip.

She has worked for the company for 18 years, joining it straight out of college as part of a management training program. She rose through the ranks in its finance division. She had been chief financial officer for eight of MGM Mirage’s small companies.

Now she heads the company’s energy and environmental services division, whose main goal is to make the company as environmentally responsible as possible, with the massive CityCenter just one-fourth of her responsibilities.

Ortega grew up on a ranch in central Utah, a nature and conservation background that she finds applicable to leading the company through its sustainability efforts.

She speaks with In Business Las Vegas about CityCenter, the greening of MGM Mirage and the company’s energy production.

IBLV: Can you describe to me what the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification process is like?

Ortega: It’s a program that is administered by the U.S. Green Building Council, which is a third party that is reputable and can look at construction projects and measures — say, a small library against a CityCenter — all with the same yardstick. That gives outsiders and people an understanding whether or not the project is really green or whether it claims to be green.

The process for certification for us — because this is such a large project — it’s the largest project in (the Green Building Council’s) history that they’re doing. We broke the certification process down into two parts. So if you picture a construction project that started with the design, and many of the credits for LEED certification are around how a project is designed, those credits are called design credits. About a year ago we started submitting the design credits for those eight projects. We’ve completed the design certification, and CityCenter was awarded every point it went out for. That’s about 61 percent of the total. If you think about a design credit, it’s what the indoor lighting is like. Day lighting in a building makes it a better building. It’s better for the future occupants of the building. That would be a design credit. How was it designed? Was it designed with good indoor lighting? Was it designed with no indoor lighting?

Then you go into the next phase, which is called construction credits. The construction credits are around how the building is built. If you look at construction, construction’s a very hard process on the environment, mostly because you use a lot of natural resources and manufacturing things and mining and steel and cement and all of those things. Those are very harsh on the environment sometimes the way they are handled. So a construction credit would be how the project used materials. What materials did it select? How did it transport the materials? So you would get credit for being more environmental if you transported most of your materials the short way than if you transported it the long way because of the emissions in transporting materials to a site.

The construction credits — we are in the process of assembling them and putting them together. When we complete that process — around the time the project is complete — we will submit them to the U.S. Green Building Council. Now there is an iterative process — even with the design credits there was — where sometimes there is more information needed or sometimes clarifications. Once that is complete, then we will be awarded the certification for all eight projects.

What does it mean for a project to be LEED certified?

Everybody has their idea of what they do that saves the environment. We all do and we all want to. None of us are out there going: “Wow, I hope I can be really wasteful” or “Oh, I’m going to build a building that’s really terrible for the environment.”

We all, in our aspirations, want to do the right thing. But when it comes down to it, LEED certification means that an independent third party has validated your efforts.

We thought that was very important for this project because then it isn’t just us claiming that we did it. It’s somebody else. Plus the other really good thing about LEED ... is that it’s a road map that takes you along the way. You start at the first of the project in the aspirations. You sit down and say: “OK, what do we want to do on this project?” Of course, everybody wants to do everything.

What LEED does that differentiates it from other projects, in my opinion, is that when it comes time to make those choices ... such as value engineering choices — the architect goes and designs all of this, your budget is this — somewhere you have to cut things. Sometimes things like energy conservation and some of the things that aren’t as noticeable or as sexy or as glamorous, will be cut in most projects. But with a LEED project, when the project makes a decision to get a less-expensive moulder that maybe isn’t quite as efficient with electricity, it’s something that everybody knows. It’s a conscious decision. For me, in this project, one of the things we accomplished the most isn’t the certification — it’s that we remained so unwavering in our commitment to being green from when we started because I didn’t lose one credit. I kept every single credit in the aspiration, all the way through a four-year project.

What that shows is a significant priority for the company in being sustainable and a significant commitment from senior executives.

Why would a company want it?

We think — our company in particular — that being sustainable is a value system, and we believe that leadership in our companies is related to our values. For us, as a company, we believe that when we hold ourselves to a higher standard, such as caring about how far this (construction material) came, it’s harder work. It’s a higher standard. We think that makes us a leader, and also that makes our company a more successful company.

We believe it gives us a competitive advantage with our company when we do that. We can attract and retain better employees, and we think our guest customers know that.

What are the economic benefits, such as state incentives?

Let’s start with economic benefits, with a broader question of: “Is there an economic tie to environmentalism, or greening, and a business?” You can think of it in this way: Greening is almost always about conservation — almost always. It’s about using less. It’s all the stuff your mom told you. It’s really that simple. Take what you’re going to use. Don’t waste. Be mindful of things like the Earth and all the things it gives us, and understand that they are precious and they are finite.

The good thing is that there is a tie with being conservative and it’s almost always cost savings. Now, in this project and in Nevada, we have an additional benefit and it’s a tax incentive for going green. Tax incentives are put into place because a governing body wants to (encourage) a policy.

In Nevada, about six years ago in the legislative session, our leadership wanted to increase Nevada’s track record for environment. Now was that because we wanted to go green and become green? Maybe. But mostly it was because of energy efficiency. The LEED system has a heavy requirement, and a lot of points are gained for being energy efficient. If you look at energy efficiency, there is such a social benefit for everybody in the system when you design a LEED project like (CityCenter). So we have a substantial tax benefit, which we appreciate very much, and as we look backward, were the legislators right or wrong? Actually, they were right. It’s really pretty amazing. When we started this project, we needed to do waste management in a way that’s sustainable. In Nevada, at that time, there wasn’t construction waste recycling. We couldn’t get a bid that was big enough to handle CityCenter. So, we went out and we capitalized a company to buy the trucks and to increase its sorting, so it could handle CityCenter. We have other reasons to be looking at waste management. Right now we’re doing a bid for CityCenter, and guess what? There’s a market now. It’s 30 percent less than what we’re paying. So now when the next project comes along, waste management isn’t this huge premium of green.

How did going for a LEED certification change the construction process?

People talk about the cost of going green. For us the real cost of going green was in adding risk to a project. This project is a fast-tracked project. It has a very tight budget and, mostly, time, the cost of opening a day later. Many of the LEED points are very, very complex and tedious. We pursued points such as buying the right materials

We made a decision we were going to do all the clean air points — which are the hardest ones, incidentally. You have the new car smell, you have the new paint smell, the new carpet smell — that’s all bad for you. We decided to take the path less traveled, and it’s really less traveled. It just added so much time. I think I spent hundreds of hours in meetings about (for example) the manufacturer we’ve always used won’t warranty the cabinets if they don’t have urea-formaldahyde in the glue.

“OK, fine. We’ll find someone else.”

“Well, there is no one else.”

“Yes, there is.”

Those kinds of conversations. Really, I think the most difficult part of it and the hardest thing for us really was adding that level of complexity to this project that’s so complex already.

For consumers, how will the certification change their experience?

CityCenter is a mixed-use development, so we have different kinds of consumers. The first consumer who will benefit the most by what we did is the person who buys our residential offerings. Because it’s a LEED facility, each of the condos are separately ventilated and sealed, which means if your neighbor smokes, your baby doesn’t smell it.

The next one isn’t a customer in the usual sense. It’s the employee. If you look at our employees, we’re going to have about 12,000 of them. There are a variety of reasons why a LEED project is so good. Most of them have to do with indoor air quality, day lighting — those things add to employee well-being and occupant well-being. Those are statistics that we know.

Then you say, what about the customers? What are they getting out of it? Hopefully, they don’t even notice. Hopefully, we provide them with the experience we’re known for in this company, which is a superior recreational resort experience, and invisibly, we’re taking care of the environment. I think we hit that mark. I think you’ll find out we know how to hit that mark really well.

How much of an added cost is a LEED certification?

It’s hard to tell because, like I told you, the most impactive thing is risk, and it’s hard to quantify that.

Harvard and some other schools have done estimates of maybe 3 percent as an incremental cost. I would say we came in quite a lot lower than that just because they weren’t incremental costs to us. But again, the cost for us is really in the risk, in the delay it could have added, the complexity, the time the designers had to take to learn this, and so on.

Does the company expect to realize energy savings and will those make it a net economic win for MGM Mirage?

Yes, and yes.

It will be an economic win as a result of a herculean and fabulous and best you’ve ever seen effort ... by a group of about 1,000 people. If you look at Aria, Aria’s a big crystal palace sitting right in the middle of the desert, right? But Aria has earned seven energy points out of 10, on a scale. That was a significant accomplishment. That is the combination and the results of efforts of many, many people. Designers, if you talk with Cesar Pelli (Aria architect), who’s a very famous architect — he did the (Petronas Twin) Towers of Kuala Lumpur (in Malaysia) — when you talk to him and you say: “Well, how is this different from what you’ve done in other places?” (Designers) will say: “You know, they just made us reach deeper.”

If you look at the glass on Aria, it’s pretty beautiful, huh? It’s really neat, right? Well, what’s so different about it? That glass is a kind of glass that isn’t just a cheap reflective glass. It’s a high-quality glass. Part of the design around this was for Aria to get those energy points, which we got.

A big contribution to the energy points on the Aria is the fact that we are producing our own power for the baseload of the whole project. And in the production of that power, we’re taking the byproduct of that, the waste, and we’re using it to heat the water.

How are you generating the power?

We’re generating it from natural gas. If you picture that compared to the process at Apex generated from natural gas, there are two big differences. One is the transportation of it, so we didn’t have to build all the lines and wires to get it here. And the other one is that the efficiency in generating power is very low. For every unit of energy you have going in, like a natural gas unit, by the time it comes out of your plug, you really only get about 30 percent of it, so there’s that 70 percent loss. A lot of that loss goes right up in the air in heat.

Combined heat and power is a technology that the (Environmental Protection Agency) promotes. It actually has a whole division that comes and meets with big businesses like ours to promote combined heat and power because it’s a very sustainable way to get your power compared to getting it off the grid.

We’re taking that heat and we’re using it for something that we normally have to buy natural gas for, and that’s to heat our domestic hot water. We have big hot water loops instead of having these boilers powered from natural gas, we have heat coming off these turbines that heats our water for us.

And is that for all properties or CityCenter specifically?

It’s for the domestic hot water loop under the complex of CityCenter.

Where does MGM Mirage get its power from? Is it all NV Energy or does the company generate any of its own?

Same place as you. With the exception of the power we will produce here, we’ll get it right off the same plugs as you do.

Will the self-generation of power for CityCenter remain once it opens?

Yes and it’s for baseload. It’s about 9 megawatts that we generate there. We did our calculation, the way we decided how much, do we do all of it or do we do part of it? There is this wieldy formula that says what’s the most efficient use of the heat. If we have heat that we are wasting then we might as well let NV Energy waste the heat out there. We said what’s our load for heat, took the load for heat, and went backward, and that’s the amount of power that we’re producing ourselves.

What are some examples of the LEED components at CityCenter?

I told you about Aria and about big intelligence that really went into the design — that’s true everywhere. Really holding people and holding the project to a standard of design that saved electricity. CityCenter will use about 70 percent of the total energy use that a (comparable) non-LEED project would use. It’s 30 percent less electricity.

The materials are interesting. We had things that were difficult to do. It was very, very hard (but) we held ourselves to that standard. It was very hard with such a big project team.

Water always makes one of the “best of.” We introduced the idea at the luxury scale of water savings: faucets and toilets and showers and those kinds of things. We designed with a big faucet maker a faucet that’s a shower head that was the evolution of a lot of tests. We put it in Bellagio, the first evolution of it, and really tracked what guests said worked and what didn’t. It wasn’t something where we said: “Well, this is the best we can do now.” We always had the project teams strive for more. It was an evolution of better, better, better thought. That’s what I like.

What are some of the other challenges of building condo towers with LEED certification?

Probably the availability of materials. Especially on the high end, it’s interesting because wood is almost one of the most difficult things to do.

There are woods in the world that are very rare, and when things are very rare on the high-end, people want them, designers want them. They want them so that they separate their product from less-expensive products. What was difficult with the condominiums and with the designers was to really set the boundaries with the kinds of woods they couldn’t use.

If you get into a midlevel (home), often you see very rare woods that are (actually) copies of very rare woods. It looks the same as a rare wood, but it’s a copy. We had to convince the designers and the (sellers) of the residential (units) that it was better to stay away from the rare woods and use other things, and it’s just the same thing.

It’s all about leadership that makes people reach deeper. When we started, I assembled a little team of trainers who knew what they were doing and had experience in green (interior) design. What we did was we developed an awareness and education program and we went around ... to designers everywhere, including designers in other countries, and some of them we brought here, and we taught them what the difference was. They came in, they brought their beautiful designs to us. Much of CityCenter has an Earth theme to it. If you look at the Veer Towers, or all the residential (units), actually, the theme is an Earth theme. Those ideals translated into kind of the centerpiece of the property. It was really neat.

There’s a popular misconception that Bellagio’s lake gets its water from gray water, but we know that’s not true.

I know how that came about. In every rumor, there is some part of truth.

The water actually comes from wells acquired from the Dunes golf course. How much water does the lake use?

A lot less than we thought it would.

Let’s start from where that misconception probably comes from — because the water in front of Treasure Island and Mirage comes from either gray water, which at Treasure Island in particular, is cleaned from shallow aquifers and that water is nonpotable. They clean the dirty shower water and that is what is used in front of Treasure Island and the Mirage.

The Bellagio lake was an interesting enigma. It happened before I started ... here. But as I understand it —and I’m in charge of water rights, so I understand all of this — the Dunes Hotel had quite a number of water rights when we purchased it for this. Initially, those water rights were used for horticulture, which means all the well water goes to the (landscape) and for the lake. But what we found was that the calculations that were done on the evaporation of the water on the lake were way exaggerated. The lake doesn’t actually use a lot of water. I don’t know what a lot is, I don’t know exactly what the lake uses, but we do generate it from nonpotable water, which is well water. We also fuel the “O” show with the same water.

Do you know how much the golf course used?

You know, it’s interesting — I do know quite a bit about that. We had problems with the wells we dug. We had problems with silting coming in. The Dunes water watered the golf course and then it took the water out of the well, put it into this little shallow pond — this water thing — and then actually took the water out of this water thing to water the grass because there’s a lot of silting under here. That way they were able to keep the silting out of the pipes.

We’ve transferred many of those acre-feet out to Shadow Creek (Golf Course). If you look at the use of the water from the Las Vegas aquifer, the use of water has to be the same. That was a recreational use, and we’ve taken that water and are using it on another golf course.

For a hotel company, what are some of the easiest energy savings or renewable energy improvements, i.e., low-hanging fruit? What kind of changes result from it?

It’s the same as in your house. It’s the same as in a midsize business. It’s the same as in a big business. It’s fundamentals. Start with lighting — that’s the easiest, especially at a home because all you have to do is screw in a different bulb.

For us, we’ve done lighting projects. We’ve refit every (MGM) garage in the city — with the exception of the Luxor garage, (because) someday we might develop there — with different fixtures. Because lighting is improved so much, the bulbs weren’t really the whole thing. Even right now we’re doing the Bellagio garage. There is that much improvement in there that with lighting it’s a small cost and a small — in the scope of all our power — improvement.

The next thing you do in your home or small business is you do things like insulation. You look at things like is your house leaking water, is your door closing? It’s really just common sense. There are literally many things that you can do for a very low cost to decrease your power bill.

When we talk about the rest of the company, I’m going to tell you that we’ve greened all these hotels. Nobody knows that yet, we’re getting ready to tell everyone that we’ve done that. But our employee-awareness program, called Conservation Begins at Home, has touched 50,000 employees. What that program does is it clearly is focused on what people do at home. We think that is a benefit we can give our employees, and we’ve had these fairs with NV Energy and given out compact fluorescent light bulbs. We’ve had events where (NV Energy) comes in and can give away CoolShare thermostats.

The greening of the hotel rooms, what’s the status of that and how much has been done?

Lots ... when we first started — and when I was first given this position — was at the time CityCenter was beginning, and we were looking at LEED and at some (other) things. We really did a lot of studying and looked at what some companies had done well and what we thought other companies had done poorly. One of the things we wanted to avoid was jumping on some green bandwagon or talking about every little time you changed a light bulb — patting yourself on the back. We used a strategic approach and what we did is we developed a network of what you might call green teams at each of the properties. My division is really highly technical and very competent people. I have a bunch of aces who work for me.

What we did was we divided the company’s environmental impact into five areas.

Each of the properties has a strategic plan, almost 1,000 strategies, and I have hundreds and hundreds of people in the properties who are doing these things. They are fixing the moldings at the doors. They’re doing all the things you and I just talked about. In the combinations those efforts were very large. The company is down 6 percent in energy usage.

We’ve kept those efforts behind the scenes until recently, and we’ve decided now is the time to start talking about those things.

We’ve reported our carbon use in the (Carbon Disclosure Project) this year. We’ll be the first casino company to do that. That’s when you go out and you really hold yourself open and you say: “Energy and the environment are a priority for this company. This is what we’ve done, this is where we’re going and please look under the covers.”

You’ll see more. You’ll see more ability to get to information about our programs than there has been in the past.

If you look at the strategic plans of the properties, I have the capital budget for the programs that really decrease water and power usage. We’ve decreased water usage in a few ways: One big way is Bellagio introduced a (reuse) program for its linens. That’s pretty unheard of at that scale. That saves lots of water: gallons and gallons, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water over the course of a year. Each of the properties has what they’re proud of. Circus Circus was my best property last year. We replaced the clown sign. We went in and redid all the lighting in the clown sign. He’s still as great as he always was, but he uses 70 percent less electricity. He’s shining just as brightly as ever. He’s still smiling, he’s not using all that power (laughs).

The other thing that we made tremendous gains in is waste management. I think waste management is where sustainability is in 2009 and 2010. We’ve decreased the number of trips that are taken out to Apex and we’ve increased our recycling rates at all of our properties.

Once those are achieved, what are the more difficult items to do?

I’ll tell you what’s difficult to do (but first) here’s our five goal areas: 1) resource conservation, that’s water, power and gas. That’s what everybody thinks of most of the time. The second one is sustainable construction. In addition to doing CityCenter, we do all these remodels and change restaurants and all that. Those are some of our biggest environmental impacts. The third one is waste management, working on recycling. The fourth one I’ll get back to. The fifth one is communication, which is me talking to you, spreading the message, helping employees and really spreading the message of why doing environmental things is right.

No. 4 is the hardest one. It’s procurement. That’s really looking at what our company buys. If you look at that and you say: “Hmm, is this the most sustainable notebook I can have?” That is one aspect of procurement.

The next aspect of procurement is how durable is it? Am I buying something that I have to replace every year? Or am I buying something that I replace every three years? From the environment’s perspective, that’s a huge difference because the manufacturing of it isn’t as often.

Then the third one, which is extremely difficult, is the logistics behind getting it here. Do I have trucks queued up down there? Are they all sitting there idling? If you look at Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart made so many gains in just changing idling of delivery, changing the delivery of sizes. What about packaging? So, the hardest one for us is in procurement.

Are there any other interesting things this division does?

Well, we make people feel good. We have a program for the company that even in really tough times that we’ve had now, even in what Las Vegas has been through, we’ve done more with less. This is an area where people are really happy this is what the company does. I think they’re really proud of it. The employees want to support this effort and they want to embrace it.

We’re getting ready to do a children’s art contest where the employees’ children do these pictures, and you know how cute that is. I’m just really happy to be a part of that. I’m really jacked up that our company puts a lot of people to bed, gives a lot of people showers, makes a lot of meals for people, and in the process of doing that, uses natural resources. And I’m happy that we are finding ways to do that in a more responsible manner.

But I’m also happy to work in a company that really makes you feel good about what you’re doing, and you’re using less and it’s a conservative approach.

What about the People Mover monorail track that links Monte Carlo to Bellagio around CityCenter. What are the plans for that?

I don’t know what the plans are for it to go to other places, but what I do know, if you think of a concept called sustainable urban living and you look at sustainability in general, the concept in high-rise living is that it’s denser. People use their vehicles less and they’re able to get from place to place and things are accessible. We actually got accessibility points from LEED. The monorail is part of the linking, and our goal is that people who are there for their condos are able to do more without using their vehicles.

CityCenter has a giant employee parking garage. Is the company doing anything to encourage employees to carpool or use alternative forms of transportation?

We do. We have carpooling programs in some of our properties. That seems like a good idea here, doesn’t it? Especially with shift workers.

How much power does the company use per year in Las Vegas in terms of megawatt hours?

Megawatts is how big is the pipe. We’re a little over 200 megawatts. It’s about the size of 125,000 homes.

How has that changed over time?

Mostly with the technologies. The technologies are amazing that are coming out. The whole green movement has been really a driver into technology and electricity usage. We’ve also done some big, big projects that are expensive and have actually changed the way big moulders are used.

Do you expect to drive that number down?

Yes. You know, the recent (NV Energy) rate case actually penalizes large users for what’s called demand. Demand is the most that is used at that time and then you are charged for the consumption, which is in kilowatt hours. That will drive significant attention to making sure that we don’t put this demand on that system.

Where does the company’s water come from? How much does it use? Is it well water from the Las Vegas Valley Water District?

No. Now remember that well water is nonpotable so the only well water we can use is in the water feature and horticulture. It comes from the same place yours does. I don’t know how much we use.

What are the usage trends?

You know water’s interesting, because water hasn’t been as expensive and so water savings projects are more driven by companies not wanting to use the precious resource instead of cutting costs. It’s different from power. Quite a bit. Our main trends in using less water is better fixtures and quite a lot of drought-resistant horticulture. Then we have some properties, like the Luxor, that replaced much of their grass with a nongrass landscape.

Tell me about a few interesting initiatives the public would like to know about MGM Mirage and its energy or environmental initiatives.

It’s interesting to know that each of these properties have these green teams. These are grass-roots efforts that start with people getting together and doing really serious planning and really serious initiatives. The result of that is to measure our carbon output.

Then there’s this whole buying-in process (for instance) that the MGM Grand started with the green teams, I think with 20 people, and other teams started sprouting off. They had a recycling team sprout off and they named the recycling team something like Team 30 (because) they wanted to get to 30 percent recycling. That team put together a way for one of the restaurants to be waste free. Nothing is going to the landfill. They figured out a way to use everything. It’s very inspiring to use people’s ideas and people really wanting to work toward those kinds of goals and environmental responsibility for the company.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

In the beginning with CityCenter, we started out wanting to have sustainability as a central attribute because really we knew that’s where future thought was. If you think about it, in 2005, we were opening in nearly 2010, we wanted to open something that at the time was considered future-thought. I think we hit the nail with the sustainability. The company’s very happy that it did that, because I think it’s part of a suite of things that will make CityCenter such a special place. I think if we wouldn’t have done that, it would be missing and I think it would be hollow and it’s not. It’s just really neat.