Patricia Gomez, Director of Sustainability, Miami-Dade County

Patricia Gomez comes to the Miami-Dade County Office of Resilience previoulsy known as Office of Sustainability with a varied background and many years of experience working in local government. She started her work with the county in 2001 and has worked in a variety of different departments. An environmental engineer by training, she’s currently pursuing her Ph.D. in industrial engineering. As the Sustainability Program Manager, she works on the mitigation side of the resiliency work in the county.

Her office has two sides, one focused on adaptation and one on mitigation. She’s mostly focused on the mitigation side of work, and works with a Chief Resilience officer on adaptation. She works closely with the City of Miami and City of Miami Beach on projects, including the 100 Resilient Cities project, as Greater Miami and the Beaches. The cities and County are now members of a network sharing ideas and solutions to strengthen their ability to deal successfully with natural and manmade disasters and will receive technical assistance, services and tools to help solve local challenges around transportation, economic equality, sea level rise, aging infrastructure and more. Miami Dade County’s GreenPrint Sustainability Plan also ties into this effort, and updates happening to this plan will be coordinated with the 100 Resilient Cities project.

This year, Patricia is looking forward to working as a participant in the City Energy Project. After being accepted into the program last year, they are currently working on a stakeholder engagement process. She hopes it will inform the County’s development of a policy to help benchmark energy efficiency savings in it’s large buildings. Also in the policy vein, Patricia is working on updating the language around the County’s sustainable buildings program, due to its expansion since its creation in 2007.  In Miami Dade County, all government buildings must meet LEED standards for new construction and renovation.

As she reflects on her time with County, Patricia is proud of what she’s accomplished. Pointedly, she’s excited about her success in the implementation of utility management software. It has helped the county gain a better understanding about how much energy it consumes and how much money it pays for energy to the local utility. When she arrived at the county they didn’t know any of this! Because they have this information, today the Mayor is looking for ways to save on energy – and even looking to solar energy for the solution!  What’s more, the tool has been so useful that this year the County hopes to add water usage to the software and start collecting data.