By James Qualk

On the morning of January 29, a podcast at RedState.org entitled “How Green Building Regulations Backfire” aired, inspiring this response. Though little was actually said about regulations, it’s important to address many of the inaccuracies and outright falsehoods presented in this piece, apparently for the purpose of confusing the general public.

The guest, David Williams, is president of the Tax Payers Protection Alliance and is asked by the host to speak about “faulty green building regulations,” “potential kickbacks to a ‘green building council’” and “how the regulations result in more energy use.”  While the host and guest seem to have a good understanding of the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) mission, describing it as providing a “voluntary, consensus and market driven certification process providing third party verification for green buildings,” the factual part of the interview ends there.  Mr. Williams and the host then claim that “people are gaming the system” and that the “process is being perverted.”

“We’ve seen reports that that LEED buildings cost 15-20% more than a regular building,” says Mr. Williams, but the myth that green building costs more was busted and put to rest years ago (and here more recently). Every credible and independent case study I have seen indicates the pursuit may incrementally increase first cost by 1-2% (or more in some cases), but that many pursue LEED or green building with little or no added first costs.  I am certain Mr. Williams is referring to “first cost” in this statement, and it’s possible that some LEED buildings have experienced a higher premium than expected.  But a building project can experience increased first cost for any number of other reasons, and what Mr. Williams ignores, not surprisingly, is that the total cost of ownership is far greater than those associated with the procurement of a building.  With proper design, incremental first cost increases spent on energy efficiency have an associated short payback period with lifetime savings, having significant long term impacts on the bottom line of building owners and businesses. It’s important to note that LEED for New Construction certification can set up a building for potential operating efficiency only to the extent the design team focused on this aspect of LEED, and persistence in operational performance is required to maintain any operational efficiency over the course of a facility’s useful life.

The show goes further to assert that the USGBC is “making money off of taxpayers,” for whom the requirements of LEED as used by government entities are not voluntary.  To support this claim, Mr. Williams says that the USGBC gets up to $35,000 for each certification.  To examine further, here is an excerpt for the registration and certification fee schedule from the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) website (per project):

Registration fees:

• Members – $900
• Non-members – $1,200

Certification fees:

Source: http://www.gbci.org/main-nav/building-certification/resources/fees/current.aspx

According to this and my own experience, fees for registration and certification are hardly significant and fall into the rounding error for most projects’ budgets. On the largest projects, those over 500,000 square feet(a large building sometimes costing hundreds of millions of dollars), total fees could get close to $35,000, but most projects will be far less and as little as $4,200. For the most part, these fees are paying for the critical third party independent verification process for LEED buildings and the professional services required to conduct a multidisciplinary technical review.  I’m not going to comment on the financial management of the USGBC, but if you are interested in the full accounting of the organization, the most recent annual report can be found here.

Finally, near the end of the interview the discussion gets to the upcoming release of LEED v4.  Mr. Williams asserts that the new version of LEED “is saying that you can’t use certain chemicals in federal buildings or any sort of construction.”  He goes on to say that “one of these chemicals is used to make bullet proof glass,” and that a building (courthouse) might “lose certification if they have bullet proof glass.” Mr. Williams is referring to a proposed credit in LEED v4 that would grant points for disclosure of certain chemicals and additional points for avoidance of those same chemicals.  Since these items are not required as a prerequisite (credits are optional), the design team of any building requiring bullet proof glass for security reasons would very easily be able to proceed and make their own value-based judgments without compromising safety or LEED certification.

Mr. Williams says something at the very end that actually, I very much agree with in this interview. He says that it is in the interest of private industry to be more energy efficient, and not to spend money on wasted electricity and water consumption.  These actions are just good business.  Thankfully private industry has the ability to use LEED: a collection of best practices that includes third party verification to minimize the impacts of buildings and maximize the opportunities of green building.

James D. Qualk is Vice President at SSRCx, a division of Smith Seckman Reid engineering design and facility consulting firm. He lectures on sustainability, design, construction and operations in the Civil Engineering Department of Vanderbilt University and is a Sustainable Practice Adjunct at Lipscomb University. James is an editorial advisor and contributor to EDC magazine, the official publication of the LEED® professional.  He is a member of Building Design + Construction magazine’s 40 UNDER 40 class of 2012.  Follow him on Twitter @Jamie_Qualk.