LEED....scam??

“LEED is a scam” came the cry from a client recently on learning that certifying his building under the popular green building program would add more than $200,000 in administrative costs alone to his project. And, the city was thinking about making it a requirement.

Now, I want to take care of our planet as much as the next guy and our firm touts or LEED certified projects when we can, but I think this client has a point, and I think it’s one we’re going to hear a lot in the near future. It’s not that he was against the environment, or even that he didn’t want to spend the extra dough, but his question was really about the worth of that certification. He reasoned that his building could be even better for the environment if he took those certification dollars and spent them on more green features, rather than on guys with clipboards.

Somewhere LEED went from a well-intentioned program to raise the bar for green building to a giant money making machine. I’m not talking about the cost of making a building more environmentally responsible. That’s just doing the right thing. I’m talking about the cost of pushing the paper. Between the direct costs to the developer of consultants to shepherd the process and third-party certification to the indirect cost of all those USGBC disciples becoming LEED AP accredited, keeping current by attending USGBC workshops and maybe even raising the bar to a LEED AP + specialty, the money associated with “doing the right thing” gets downright crazy.

Add to all of this, the discussion about whether LEED is actually the best way to evaluate the environmental responsibility of a building (Famously, Thom Mayne derided it years ago. http://archrecord.construction.com/features/interviews/0711thommayne/0711thommayne-1.asp) and you get the idea that the PR folks at the USGBC have done a remarkable job of branding and creating a household name for those who want to sound in the know at a cocktail party, or worse, a city council meeting.

LEED guidelines were never intended as a code, and they don’t work like one. So, for a city to require LEED certification is asking those guidelines to do a job for which they were never written because for the city that’s the easy way out. The city doesn’t need to be fluent in green building issues. They’ll rely on outside third-party inspectors, make the developer foot the bill and brag how “green” their city is. --ds