LEED lasts forever.
Businesses pursuing Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design certifications from the U.S. Green Building Council for new and remodeled properties receive plenty of recognition for their commitment to sustainability; but along with the plaque comes responsibility for the life of the building.
While property owners are usually aware of the upfront costs of designing a building to LEED standards, they should be aware there are ongoing costs in maintaining that certification. Those after-certification costs range from administrative expensive associated with monitoring and reporting a building’s energy use to replacing expensive equipment designed to help with sustainability.
“The responsibility and liability for a LEED building comes down to the owner,” said Sue Yoakum, attorney with Boston law firm Donovan Hatem LLP. “There is an awful lot of paperwork and contracts.”
In striving for LEED, businesses should see the true benefits as creating a structure that was built to respect the environment and save on energy use in the long run, and the certification is simply a side benefit of sustainability, said Kent Schwendy, senior vice president at Manchester engineering firm Fuss & O’Neill, Inc.
“The value is in the process and the conscience decision-making, and not in the paperwork and the certification,” Schwendy said.
As the USGBC continually revises the requirements to achieve the various LEED certifications, owners are increasingly obligated to monitor the various features of their sustainable buildings, particularly the energy features. And some of the LEED categories require the owners to recertify their buildings every five years.
But the LEED certifications are only as burdensome as the building owners want them to be. USGBC is a non-profit organization determined to promote sustainability in construction, and LEED certifications have no affiliation with the government, so there is no legal obligation to maintain the certification.
In monitoring LEED building’s energy usage, USGBC won’t penalize projects that aren’t performing up to standard, said USGBC spokeswoman Ashley Katz. The idea is to encourage them to step up and fix the problem to get back in line with the sustainable goals.
“It’s not as if projects that aren’t performing well lose their plaque,” Katz said.
This comes as more property owners are seeking the official LEED ranking from USGBC. Even though the LEED program has been in place since 1998, more than 85 percent of Connecticut’s LEED buildings were certified in the past three years.
“Everybody is designing for sustainability in a way that we’ve never seen before,” said Todd Renz, former chairman of the Connecticut Green Building Council and principal at Branford contracting firm OR&L.
LEED certifications are broken down into five categories: new construction, renovation of existing buildings, interiors, homes and neighborhood development. Under each category, a building can receive one of four rankings: certified, silver, gold and platinum.
The requirements for maintaining the certifications vary on the features incorporated into the design of a building, the LEED category, ranking and year the ranking was achieved. Property owners using certain energy and water saving features will need to monitor their water and energy use and report back to the USGBC.
“Monitoring is something you should be doing already,” Schwendy said. “That’s how you get your return on investment, by monitoring your building’s performance into the future.”
Property owners who achieve LEED certification by renovating existing buildings are required to recertify the building at least every five years.
Connecticut has 88 buildings with LEED certifications, according to the USGBC. Those buildings include the Frito Lay food manufacturing facility in Killingly and one of the facilities at the East Hartford campus of aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney.
Massachusetts grocery chain Stop & Shop sought LEED certification for 50 of its properties, including eight in Connecticut: Rocky Hill, Bristol, South Windsor, Southbury, North Berlin, Glastonbury, Fairfield and East Lyme. The locations all received the basic level LEED certified status for renovated existing buildings in 2008.
Stop & Shop got the certification because grocery stores have a large footprint and the company wanted to offset that as much as possible, said Suzi Robinson, Stop & Shop spokeswoman. Maintaining the LEED features has become a regular part of the company’s processes now.
“It was part of all the pro forma that we would have had in building those stores,” Robinson said.
Rockville Bank achieved LEED silver certification under the new construction category for its Manchester branch on Jan. 7. The company decided to go after the certification because of the positive impact it would have on the community and the environment, said Richard Trachimowicz, Rockville Bank executive vice president.
The LEED standards were actually a helpful guide for Rockville Bank to determine what was a sustainable feature, Trachimowicz said. The bank relied closely on its designer — Rocky Hill firm Solidus Inc. — to know how to achieve the certification.
The paperwork surrounding the certification was the hardest part, as the certification didn’t come until three years after the Manchester branch opened, Trachimowicz said. The LEED certification does require Rockville Bank to maintain the building in a different way — it needs special light bulbs, for example — but that was easily folded into the company’s maintenance department.
“It is not so burdensome where we go back and say ‘We wish we hadn’t done this,’” Trachimowicz said.
Hartford health insurer Aetna got its customer care center on Farmington Avenue in Hartford LEED certified silver in the interior category in 2009. In order to maintain the certification, the building upgrades and retrofits require more sophisticated systems, and additional reporting and monitoring by the facility operations, said Michael Marshall, Aetna’s head of asset management.
The payoff for the company is the increased energy efficiency in the building and a better environment for the employees, Marshall said. Aetna is pursuing another LEED certification for its atrium building in Hartford, recognizable for its solar panels easily seen from Interstate 84.
