In LEED of good contractors

Getting a project LEED certified is difficult enough but having a contractor who does not want to be on board will make it near nigh impossible. The situation is compounded if it happens to be a public bid project where the contractor is not part of the process from the onset. The public low bid atmosphere typically results in potentially adversarial relationships since the contractor needs to find ways to “gain” back profits left on the table via a lowball bid. Why on earth in a situation like that will they want to take on the added costs and overhead generated by the LEED process?

That said, I want to talk about my recent experience working as a LEED administrator consultant on a 42,000sf office building development in the Bay Area (not a public bid project). I’m not the architect but was brought on as the LEED admin. The contractor was on board from the beginning. The client, design team and contractor were all for LEED which made my life as the LEED admin far easier. This project fell neatly into the LEED CS (core & shell) category and we developed the LEED project vision and distributed the credit responsibilities to the appropriate team members.

The initial target had been LEED certified but as the project progressed and the team got even more fired up, the client pushed it to silver as the target. We have enough credits for Gold but we take into account that most times, a project tends to get denied a few credits and so it is more realistic to shoot for a higher level but assume you will hit the level below.

In the design phase we went after 19 credits and earned 18. Only one credit was denied.  Which we suspected we probably would not get it but tried anyway. Maybe one day I’ll talk about that particular credit.

Initially for the construction credits we pursued 15 credits but through the contractor’s efforts added two separate credits. This is why having a good contractor on board is essential. They have to work with their subcontractors and their vendors to ensure that we actually get the credits.

The contractor found a waste management facility that recycles at a rate close to 95-99% and therefore off hauled everything to the facility and diverted 100% of construction waste from the landfill. All wood procured for the job was FSC certified. We helped them develop a “green” construction job-site guide for their employees and the same with the IAQ plan. It was collaborative from the start which is far more enjoyable and rewarding than butting heads continuously.

Recycled and regional material credits all hit the 2 point mark because of their efforts. I worked closely with their project admin on completing the letter templates. Most people have no idea how much work goes into getting those done. Right now we are waiting word to see what we will need to clarify and what we will have earned outright. While we don’t have the final decision yet, it still made life a lot easier to work with a great contractor.

This entry was posted on 27. February 2009 at 11:09 and is filed under LEED. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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