LEED Streamlining Effort Under Way

Amid the dramatic success and rapid market penetration of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED™ 2.0 Rating System, there are concerns that the extensive documentation requirements—some applications have arrived in multiple three-ring binders—are an obstacle for users. To address this concern, the Council is preparing to release an update to the Rating System with significantly simpler requirements for documentation. This update, tentatively called LEED 2.1, will also include rewording of some credits for clarification, but no substantive changes are envisioned.

Estimates and reports of the cost of documenting a LEED project vary widely. “Experienced teams have found that documentation costs can be as low as $10,000. Inexperienced teams have found cost as high as $60,000, and this figure appears to be independent of project size,” reports Rob Watson, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council and co-chair of the LEED Steering Committee. Comments on e-mail discussion groups corroborate these estimates, which do not include other costs associated with designing a LEED building, such as energy modeling and commissioning. These additional expenses should be recouped through savings in construction and operating costs of the building.

For many credits, the application for certification under LEED 2.1 will consist of a document, signed by the responsible party for the project, affirming that the project has met the requirements of the credit and providing some information on how the requirements have been met. A template will be provided for this document, so users will only have to print it, fill in the required information, and sign it. The templates should also help streamline the application review process by ensuring that only the necessary information is provided and that it is in the proper format. This process will be backed up by a system of random audits to ensure that the integrity of the third-party certification is maintained. “Probably about one-third of the credits chosen will be audited for any given project,” predicts Watson.