Coast Landscape Management Expands Green Efforts to California Counties

Napa, Calif.-based Coast Landscape Management, one of the North Bay’s largest in its industry, is expanding into Sonoma County, as well as adding environmentally friendly and organic landscaping services for commercial properties.

Many of the North Bay’s largest commercial landscapers are based in or serve the county, and some have positioned themselves recently as experts in green landscaping practices such as water and storm water management.

However, the owners of Coast said they have the experience and know-how for Sonoma and Marin counties, where a number of the local governments have adopted green-building guidelines, tiered water rates to encourage conservation or irrigation restrictions for developments.

The Business Journal in September ranked Coast as the North Bay’s fifth-largest commercial landscaper based on 2006 revenues of $4 million. That figure grew from $2 million in 2005 to $5 million this year, according to Coast officials.

Behind the expansion and going-green effort is Lebo Newman, who owns Coast with Rob and Kelly Solomon. Mr. Newman was a founder of Redwood Landscaping, a Santa Rosa company that grew during 26 years to cover the North Bay and Sacramento. Tru-Green LandCare bought the company in 1998. “My first two clients for Redwood in maintenance were Hansel and the city of Rohnert Park,” Mr. Newman said. “Our first maintenance client is the city of Rohnert Park.”

In June, the Rohnert Park City Council awarded a nearly $124,000-a-year, three-year contract to Coast to maintain 37 acres of parks, 1.5 acres of city grounds and six acres of medians and parkways in the 20 locations in the south half of the city, according to city documents. TruGreen’s $175,500-a-year bid beat Coast for the maintenance contract for the north end.

Redwood Landscaping, founded in 1972, was an early advocate of recycling as much vegetative and other material onsite or elsewhere as possible, rather than hauling the waste to a landfill. In the first half of the 1970s as Redwood took root, Mr. Newman also operated Golden Sun Herb Farm, mailing organic plants nationwide from Forestville.

Coast does not grow its own foliage or use organic plants, but the lessons learned from Golden Sun and Redwood’s experiments with soil-plant-climate combinations, honed during the 1976-77 drought, are helping Coast suggest proper plants and turf alternatives for goals such as water reduction or meeting green-building standards for water conservation or “greenhouse gas” reduction, according to Mr. Newman. Sometimes, turf is the right tool.

“People say turf has a bad carbon footprint because of mowing, but it captures carbon out of the air,” he said. “There needs to be a blend.” Newer varieties of turf are slower growing and thus need little or no mowing, and many use less water than traditional turf.

Mr. Newman took the lessons of water conservation in landscaping, now called xeriscaping, to form Signature Landscapes for commercial properties in Reno, Nev. He and his partner in Signature, Rick Clark, then acquired residential competitor Reno Lawn and Landscape. Together the companies reported annual revenues of $10 million until the housing boom busted there two years ago.

That’s partly behind Mr. New-man’s renewed focus on Sonoma County, he said.

He and the Solomons, who started UpValley Landscape in Napa in 2001, acquired the northern part of 20-year-old Coast’s territory from Cohen Landscape Services of San Jose in December 2005. That area stretches from Walnut Creek to Sacramento and west to Sonoma County.

Part of offering more holistic approaches for commercial landscaping clients is converting Coast’s fleet of trucks and hand tools to use sustainable or more efficient fuels such as biodiesel and compressed natural gas. The company has ordered half- and three-quarter-ton, electric-fuel pickups from General Motors and is considering conversion kits for lawnmowers, leaf blowers and weed trimmers. “They cost 50 percent more, but we think it is a worthwhile option,” Mr. Newman said. “We don’t want landscape to create more carbon emissions than landscape takes out of the air.”