About 15 years ago a proposal to put a green roof on the expansion of the Chattanooga Convention Center failed to get the support it needed from city officials.

Today, business owners and community leaders in Chattanooga are revisiting the idea of growing things on top of buildings.

“It’s exciting for me to see the attitudes change,” said Mike McGauley, who chaired the Carter Street Corp. overseeing the convention center in the early 1990s.

In the next few months, Mr. McGauley’s company, Fidelity Trust Co., will install a green roof on its building at 714 Cherry St. The company completed renovations on the building in February and ordered the plants that will occupy about 2,300 square feet on the roof.

“(Green roofing) makes your building more efficient and increases the life of the roof,” said Taylor Bowers, who is designing the Cherry Street building’s green roof.

Mr. Bowers, an architect with River Street Architecture, which also is housed in the building, said the plant of choice for the project is called sedum — a type of succulent popular in green roofing because of its weather tolerance. The sedum is being grown in Fairview, Tenn., by landscaping company Nashville Natives. It will be ready for installation some time in June.

Green roofs — made by planting different types of vegetation — provide environmental and economic benefits for the buildings they cover. These include reducing the urban heat island effect to keep heating and air conditioning costs down by regulating temperatures, said Jeff Cannon, director of green building initiative Greenspaces.

Exposure to ultra-violet rays from the sun break down roofing materials over time — typically 15 to 20 years — Mr. Cannon said.

“When you block that, the roof could last indefinitely,” he said.

In the interest of grooming an environmentally-responsible generation, Girls Preparatory School also is in the midst of installing a green roof on an existing building on its campus. The roof will be a patio that the girls will access from the new student center.

Clifford Betts is the architect on the project, something he took on despite being in semi-retirement. It was the first green roof project Mr. Betts had ever done.

“It took a lot of study and a lot of research,” said Mr. Betts, who is in his seventies.

The GPS roof, also close to 2,300 square feet, will have iris, phlox and even apple trees. The school’s green roof, funded by area businessman Greg Vital, will be part of Bowman Terrace, supported by the families and friends of Nickey and Peggy Bowman.

The school’s headmaster, Randy Tucker, said he hopes the school’s decision to install the roof sets a good example for the students.

“We are learning as we go,” he said of the process. “We ought to be good stewards where we can.”

For the owners of the Cherry Street property, putting a green roof on their three-story building in downtown just made good business sense by reducing energy costs and adding to the life of the structure’s roof. When installation is complete in June, the green roof will cost about $40,000.

Some of that cost is being offset by grant funding through Greenspaces, which allocated $200,000 for green roof systems to five business in the Chattanooga. The building initiative allocated so much of its funds that it has now put the green roof incentive money on hold to look for further funding.

But Mr. McGauley remembers a time when putting plants on the roof was seen as risky. During one City Council meeting discussing the convention center’s expansion in the 1990s, he said he remembered someone asking tongue-in-cheek, “Who is going to cut the grass?”

Now that attitudes are changing, he said it has been exciting to watch what might have been viewed as a trend over the years slowing become the norm.

“I get a lot of gratification knowing that those of us that back then, who were really trying to advance this city to be ahead of the curve, might just have been right,” Mr. McGauley said.

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