From Lima to Las Vegas

Jaime Cruz turned a metal seal the size of a quarter upside down one day 25 years ago, changing his life. He was a merchant marine on a ship sailing from Callao, Peru, to Beaumont, Texas. His commanding officer gave him the job of fixing a hydraulic door that wouldn’t close tight on a container piled with copper ore.

Cruz, then in his late teens, tried making new seals of different materials—Teflon, metal. Nothing worked. One day, he flipped over the original seal. The door sealed shut.

Turns out everyone else on the ship had been following a manual that had been printed with a key mistake. “It looked like I was a genius, but mostly I got lucky,” he said recently.

But so began his ascent into an engineering career that, two decades later, brought him to oversee a team of about 40 that made Las Vegas’ CityCenter one of the world’s largest group of energy-efficient, or “green” buildings. Opened in December, the $8.5 billion, 67-acre complex is the largest privately-funded construction project in U.S. history. The Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Green Building Council has granted LEED certification, a coveted seal of approval, to all six buildings on the site.

In the frenzy over CityCenter’s potential for turning around Las Vegas’ bottomed-out economy with its top-of-the charts foreclosure and unemployment rates, it would be easy to overlook Cruz’ achievement. But the engineer’s team found ways to reduce what could have been up to $40 million in annual utility bills by up to 30 percent, in the process creating innovations that will be closely watched in the hotel and resort industry for decades.

Talking to Cruz recently over a plate of arroz chaufa (fried rice) in one of Las Vegas’ few Peruvian restaurants, it becomes clear that Cruz’ life displayed a winning combination of instinct, luck and trial-and-error-tinkering since long before that day he flipped that seal on its head.

When he was 16 and a high school senior, a young cadet talked to his class about Peru’s merchant marines. The cadet was not much older than Cruz and hailed from the same barrio. He showed photographs of himself sailing the world, in places like Hawaii, Egypt. Cruz was being raised by a single mother working two jobs. He thought, “That kid’s like me and he’s been to those amazing places. That’s what I want.”

He applied, one of 18,000 competing for 300 chances at a free education and global travel. He made it. Once in the merchant marines, his stunt with the seal gained Cruz attention and a healthy dose of self-confidence. “I knew for the first time that I could solve problems,” he says. He left at 19 with an engineering degree and worked three years as a nautical engineer in Lima. By then his mother and little brother lived in Las Vegas, so he moved to the desert.

It was 1989 and Las Vegas was just starting its modern era. “I thought, ‘It should be no problem getting a job. I’m a mechanical engineer with three years experience,’” Cruz recalls. But nobody would hire him without stateside experience.

Cruz washed dishes for $3.75 an hour at a strip mall restaurant, soon moving up to prep cook and then waiter. He caught the owner’s eye, who offered to lend him money for English classes at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Cruz enrolled.

A year later, now an experienced waiter and also married, he got work at the Mirage, serving banquets. In 1993, casino owner Steve Wynn offered employees a chance at jobs in the soon-to-open Treasure Island. Asked to pick first and second choices for jobs at the new casino, Cruz again tilted at windmills, picking “A-list waiter.” These waiters worked nonstop, on-call, earning close to triple figures. Less than a dozen would be chosen. “I was thinking, ‘I’ll never get it. But why not try?’”

His second choice: the engineering department.

Cruz got the waiter’s job and took his wife out to celebrate. “I felt like I had reached the American dream—we had made it. We could get a car, a house,” Cruz recalls. By this time, he also had a one-year-old son at home.

Two weeks later, the engineering department called him. “They said, ‘We can only offer you $40,000 a year, but we can offer you a life, working normal hours,’” Cruz says. After talking things over with his wife, Cruz took the engineer’s job and didn’t look back. “As of today, I’m the only person in the history of the company who has turned down an A-list waiter job,” he says, the lines around his dark eyes crinkling in laughter.

Once again, however, his tinkering curiosity and initiative spawned opportunities.

At the time, he says, “Awareness of energy was nil. The goal was to make customers come back. But we started to try to save money on operating costs.”        

The finance department soon noticed that energy bills at Treasure Island dropped 15 percent. They asked Cruz and his colleagues to check the meters. But that was unnecessary; he told them that he had been staying after work, seeking ways to cut costs like turning down the air conditioners at night and shutting off lights in empty ballrooms.

By late 2004, MGM Mirage had become the largest employer on the Las Vegas Strip, with more than 47,000 employees, and Cruz had gained a title literally made for him: energy and environment director.

When the first meetings were held about what would become of CityCenter, it was only natural that Cruz would be put in charge of ensuring the project was energy-efficient.

The green building council was starting to take off and Nevada gave tax credits to buildings with its seal of approval. Cruz and his team aimed at their certification. At first, he says, they talked of solar panels, and “what would have been the only hotel generating that much solar power in U.S. history.” Sketches were made of panels measuring 300 feet to a side. They would go on top of Crystals, the high-end retail part of the project with interior spaces full of jutting angles, water and wood.

Within months, the panels were scaled down to 80 by 20. Finally, the team dropped the idea altogether. “It didn’t have a fast enough return,” the engineer says. In July 2007, a private company in charge of CityCenter’s energy portfolio, ControlWorks, hired Cruz to oversee the job.

On a recent visit to the complex, now full of picture-snapping tourists and locals, Cruz says the innovations he is most proud of go largely unnoticed. Standing in front of Aria casino, he turns and points to the 47-story Mandarin Oriental hotel. The engineer launches a description of a “delivery chamber that maximizes the mixture of air and water” in the hotel’s faucets, an effect which, in plain English, makes you feel as if water pressure is twice what it actually is. The end result: millions of gallons, and dollars, are conserved. “We live in a desert. We have to think of water,” Cruz explains.

Ashley Katz, spokeswoman for the U.S. Green Building Council, says these and many other details—tinted windows, reducing the need for air conditioning on 110-degree July days, a power plant on site that heats water and creates electricity—together with the sheer scale and purpose of the project, make it “unique, the first of its kind.”