An article in yesterday’s USA Today caught my eye and after reading it, I’m really disappointed in what is considered Green Building for our environment and Building Green only to get tax credits.
It’s a long read but worth the time:
A
USA TODAY examination shows that thousands of “green” builders win
tax breaks, exceed local restrictions and get expedited permitting under a
system that often rewards minor, low-cost steps.
5:46PM EDT October 24.
2012 – LAS VEGAS — The Palazzo
Hotel and Casino boasts many features of Las Vegas excess — an indoor
waterfall, a smoke-filled gaming area, seven decorative fountains, and guest
suites with three TVs and power-controlled curtains.
Yet the
50-story complex achieved an unlikely and lucrative milestone after opening in
2008. A powerful private organization declared it an environmentally friendly
“green” building, the world’s largest at the time.
The
designation won its owner, Las Vegas Sands Corp., a $27 million tax break over
10 years because a Nevada law puts the private interest group — not the
government — in charge of deciding which buildings are green enough for a
taxpayer subsidy.
The U.S.
Green Building Council, a building industry non-profit, credited the Palazzo
for having bike racks in the garage; room cards telling guests when towels are
replaced; landscaping that does not use grass, which local law prohibits
anyway; and preferred parking for fuel-efficient cars — spots that on a recent
week were occupied by Ford Expeditions, Chevy Tahoes, Range Rovers, Mercedes
E320s, Chrysler 300s, Audi A6s, vans, sports cars and a Hummer.
The council
even sidestepped its own policy and allowed smoking in the Palazzo casino, a
2.5-acre expanse between the hotel lobby and the hotel elevators.
Across the
United States, the Green Building Council has helped thousands of developers
win tax breaks and grants, charge higher rents, exceed local building
restrictions and get expedited permitting by certifying them as
“green” under a system that often rewards minor, low-cost steps that
have little or no proven environmental benefit, a USA TODAY analysis has found.
The council
has certified 13,500 commercial buildings in the
most influential forces in building design by helping persuade public officials
and private builders to follow its rating system, known as LEED.
More than
200 states, cities and federal agencies now require LEED certification for new
public buildings, even though they have done little independent and meaningful
research into LEED’s effectiveness. LEED can add millions to construction costs
while promising to cut utility bills and other expenses.
and roughly 85 other cities go an extra step and require some private
commercial buildings to follow LEED. And nearly 200 jurisdictions give LEED
builders tax breaks and other incentives.
LEED, or
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, awards buildings points for
features that aim to minimize emissions, water use, waste and indoor
pollutants. A new commercial building needs 40 out of a possible 100 points for
certification.
A USA TODAY
review of 7,100 LEED-certified commercial buildings shows that designers target
the easiest and cheapest green points by trying to create pleasant and
healthful office spaces; using common building materials; or taking steps with
an unknown effect, such as providing preferred parking for fuel-efficient cars,
bike racks and showers, and posting educational displays about the building.
Nearly every design team has won a point for including
someone who has passed a LEED exam. Thousands more have won points for giving
office workers their own light switches, views of the outdoors or
temperature-control mechanisms, which can include operable windows or desk
fans. More than 6,000 buildings got credit for using structural steel or
concrete, common building materials that the council considers green because
they are made from recycled material.
Points also
have gone to universities that offer a course on green building, to employers
that give workers a video-game room and fitness center and to builders for
installing a modern fire-alarm system that “minimizes stresses on the
firefighters,” council records show.
“People
have a tendency to buy points — they buy that bike rack even though there’s no
value in it,” said
helped create LEED in the 1990s and remains a strong proponent. “It’s
unfortunate. That’s just where we are at this time.”
TABLE: Top options
for turning buildings ‘green’
TABLE: The least
popular green building options
Yet
environmentalists and experts widely praise LEED for sparking environmentalism
in the building industry.
“LEED
put this on the agenda single-handedly and rallied a mass of people interested
in green buildings who didn’t have a framework,” said University of
California engineer Arpad Horvath, whose 2006 study criticized LEED for not
considering the lifetime effect of its various points.
LEED also
has expanded the use of green practices such as energy modeling of buildings
and of green products such as low-flush toilets, low-emitting paints and
materials made from wood that is sustainably harvested.
“LEED
has been one of the most significant drivers of forest conservation in
history,” said Corey Brinkema, president of the Forest Stewardship Council
which promotes sustainable forestry.
Berkebile
calls LEED “the most transformative force in the design and construction
industry in my lifetime by a factor of four. For the first time, (designers)
are starting to consider how a building affects the life and well-being of the
occupants and the vitality of the system in which it operates.”
There are
now LEED-certified breweries, stadiums, dormitories, bus depots, parking
garages, shopping malls, libraries, fire stations, warehouses, boathouses,
locker rooms and prison buildings.
LEED’s
growth has been driven partly by the building council itself, a 13,000-member
non-profit chiefly run by architects, builders and building suppliers. Many
specialize in — and profit from — the type of design the council certifies and
promotes. The council collects up to $35,000 in fees for each LEED
certification.
Building
council members have boosted their own LEED-related businesses by helping
persuade officials to require or reward LEED certification. LEED also helps
developers market buildings to tenants and investors and collect higher rents
and sales prices,
of
Nils Kok said.
“A lot
of the fuel for LEED, to be honest, is marketing advantage,” said Bill
Walsh, executive director of the Healthy Building Network, which promotes
non-toxic building materials. “People are interested in how they get the
(LEED) credits, not in thinking deeply about it.”
Stacking up easy points
Some
LEED-certified buildings include advanced or costly technology such as solar
panels, on-site water treatment and highly efficient heating and cooling
systems. The Palazzo’s seven swimming pools are solar-heated; sensors reduce
air conditioning when hotel suites are empty, for example.
But LEED
does not require designers to take specific steps beyond meeting minimum
standards in water and energy conservation, recycling and indoor air quality.
Designers chart their own course to certification, choosing from roughly 50
options that range from minimizing light pollution and storm water runoff to
maximizing interior daylight and ventilation. More options bring higher
certification levels — from Silver to Gold to Platinum — and sometimes bigger
tax benefits.
first public analysis of the 7,100 LEED certification records posted on the
council website and found that designers emphasize LEED points that can be won
through simple purchasing decisions and shun labor-intensive options and
cutting-edge technology.
The most
popular LEED option — earned in 99.7% of the buildings — has no direct
environmental benefit but generates millions of dollars for the building
council by giving one point if a design team has a LEED expert. People become
experts by passing a LEED course and paying $550 to $800 to a non-profit that
the building council created in 2007.
The building
council gets 5% of those fees — $3.3 million from 2008 through 2010, council
tax records show. The council rewards the inclusion of LEED experts to
encourage building designers to learn about LEED.
More than
90% of the buildings got points for using indoor paints, adhesives and flooring
that aim to protect occupants’ health by emitting fewer contaminants. Widely
used, the materials add little cost or effort and have no impact outside the
building.
A point for
low-emitting adhesives “shouldn’t cost you anything,” says a LEED
user’s guide written by BuildingGreen, a consulting and publishing firm run by
former council board member Alex Wilson. Low-emitting sealants are “an
easy, no-cost credit,” and low-emitting flooring is “a pretty easy
credit, with minimal additional cost.”
Another
“easy to achieve” point, earned by 91% of the buildings, is for using
building materials with recycled content. That includes steel and concrete,
standard building materials that usually yield a point for being made within
500 miles of a building site.
In total, a
downtown office building can earn 32 of 40 points needed for LEED certification
through measures that the user’s guide calls easy or inexpensive.
“We put
in some very easy points,” said Rob Watson, a former Natural Resources
Defense Council scientist who led the writing of LEED in the 1990s. “We
wanted people who were six or seven points away (from certification) to see
that if they could get three or four easy points, then LEED was accessible. We
wanted LEED to be accessible both economically and technically.”
At the other
extreme, only 14% of buildings generate renewable energy, and 12% include major
water-reduction steps such as using waterless urinals or treating sewage on
site.
“People
figure out the path of least resistance to get to the end goal, and it doesn’t
matter if it’s LEED certification or 50% energy savings,” said Paul
Torcellini, a building researcher at the Energy Department’s National Renewable
Energy Laboratory.
Cheap points
can add valuable tax breaks. In
Vegas
minimum needed for its $27 million tax break.
The Tower Companies, a
developer, got a $1 million windfall by adding last-minute features to an
office tower near
certification when construction began in 2007, company officials realized when
the building was nearly finished that they were close to reaching Platinum.
They added preferred parking spots for hybrid cars and a system that channels
cooling-system water to outdoors landscaping — and turned a $530,000
property-tax break for Gold into $1.6 million for Platinum.
The extra
money was not the goal, said David Borchardt, Tower’s chief sustainability
officer. But the extra incentive for Platinum certification “more than
made up for the cost” of the two extra features, he added.
The uncertainty of LEED
In 2009,
responding to criticism, the building council revised LEED to put more emphasis
on energy conservation.
But the
revision increased the uncertainty about LEED and highlights a central problem:
LEED certification is awarded before occupancy. Points for minimizing energy
and water use are based on projections, not on actual energy and water use.
“That’s
like the ranking of football teams before the season starts,” said
testified before Congress in May.
Designers
can earn up to 19 points for projecting lower-than-average energy use. The
projections come from computer models that analyze hundreds of features such as
insulation and sun exposure. Such models are good at comparing designs to show
which would use less energy. But they are bad at quantifying actual energy use,
which depends largely on how a building is used and maintained.
“Buildings
have a poor track record for performing as predicted during design,” the
council itself reported in 2007. “Most buildings do not perform as well as
design metrics indicate.”
The
Environmental Protection Agency says “it is a common misconception that
new buildings, even so-called ‘green’ buildings are energy-efficient.” The
EPA’s voluntary EnergyStar program certifies only buildings that prove energy
efficiency over a year of occupancy, and rates buildings every year.
A
little-noticed study of Navy buildings in January showed that four of 11
LEED-certified buildings used more energy than a non-LEED counterpart. Of the
seven others, four were better than their counterparts by 9%, a level of
improvement that is insufficient to earn any LEED points.
“Energy
savings are not closely related to the number of points received,”
concluded the study by
of
LEED tries
to address the problem by offering one point for buildings that measure actual
energy use. Only 23% of the LEED-certified buildings have taken that option,
found.
Building
council Senior Vice President Scot Horst has long pushed to require
LEED-certified buildings to report their energy use, but faces resistance.
“A lot of people don’t want to disclose that information — they feel like
somehow their energy data is like dirty laundry and shows they haven’t
connected their ability to use energy wisely,” he said.
A new
version of LEED, likely to become mandatory in mid-2015, will require building
operators to write a plan for running a building efficiently and to tell the
council a building’s energy and water use for five years. In recent years, the
council has started to review energy and water use for LEED buildings that
volunteer the information and tells owners how they are doing compared to
projections.
The new version
would require low-emitting paints and other items to pass lab tests, and
LEED-friendly building materials to demonstrate a wide range of environmental
benefits.
Horst said
that even with some uncertainty, LEED vastly improves design and “creates
buildings that have the ability to do what they might not do otherwise.”
Some
officials shun LEED or require builders only to follow its guidelines without
getting certification.
law urges school districts to get new buildings certified by LEED or by the
EPA. The overwhelming number opt for the EPA because it’s free and requires
energy efficiency.
“We’ve
designed educational buildings that could easily be LEED-certified, but a lot
of school districts have chosen not to because of the cost of certification
itself and the lengthy documentation process,” said Martha Tarrant, a
architect specializing in school construction. “Districts don’t see the
value of LEED as worth that cost.”
Government-fueled green
Governors,
mayors, state legislators and federal administrators have been forceful LEED
advocates who helped it flourish nationwide. About 26% of LEED-certified
buildings are government-owned.
But
officials have embraced LEED and similar standards “often without fully
understanding their benefits, trade-offs and costs,” says a 2009 study by
the National Institute of Building Sciences, a research group that interviewed
building officials, regulators and advocates.
The federal
General Services Administration (GSA), which owns and leases space in 9,600
buildings, gave crucial support in 2003 when it began requiring LEED
certification for its new and substantially renovated buildings. Every federal
department now follows green building practices along with 35 states. Roughly
170 cities give LEED builders tax breaks, grants, expedited permitting or
waivers allowing them to construct larger buildings than local law allows.
Roughly 2,000 developments, buildings and homes have received $500 million in
tax breaks nationwide,
TODAY found.
Public LEED buildings typically cost taxpayers extra. In
for new state-funded schools has added $131 million in construction costs since
2007. “Soft costs,” such as fees to the building council and to LEED
consultants, add about $150,000 to the price of a new federal building, the GSA
estimates.
Governments
seeking to justify LEED often rely on reports funded by the council or written
by council leaders asserting long-term cost savings.
A widely
cited 2004 report for the GSA said that the costs of getting a building
LEED-certified can be “surprisingly limited.” The report was written
by Steven Winter Associates of Connecticut. Firm principal Steven Winter was
chairman of the building council from 1999 through 2002 and was on its board
through 2004. Winter did not work on the report, said Andy Hathaway, the firm’s
head of sustainability consulting.
Another
oft-cited report, which says LEED buildings use less energy than typical
buildings, was funded by the council and written in 2008 by Mark Frankel when
he was a board member of the council’s
chapter. The report, the largest to date, studied 121 LEED commercial buildings
and said they used on average 24% less energy than conventional office
buildings.
The report
also found that roughly a third of the buildings used more energy than
conventional counterparts. For an individual building, LEED is “a poor
predictor of project-specific performance,” the report said.
Researchers
questioned the findings because they encompassed only buildings that
volunteered to reveal energy use. Scofield, the Oberlin professor, said the
report overestimated energy savings, which were nil by one calculation he made.
The Canadian government’s National Research Council said the findings were encouraging
because they showed overall energy savings but “should be considered as
preliminary.”
The GSA
released its largest report on its green buildings in August 2011, which
studied only 16 of the agency’s roughly 40 buildings that were LEED-certified
by the end of 2009. Seven LEED buildings were “not cooperative” in
disclosing energy use, the report said. The report found 13 of the 16 LEED
buildings used less energy than typical office buildings but acknowledged
studying only “a small number of buildings.”
The council
has advocated for more research. Its strategic plan says the “lack of data
on green building performance makes it difficult to address perceptions that
green building is not cost-effective.”
One
researcher says the council tried to suppress a critical 2002 report by the
federal National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that said some
LEED points were too easily earned and that others had only marginal long-term
benefit.
“USGBC
wanted NIST to take it off line, not to publish it,” recalled study author
Greg Keolian, who is co-director of the University of Michigan’s Center for
Sustainable Systems.”They didn’t like the findings. They were concerned we
were criticizing LEED.” NIST published the report.
Christine
Ervin, the council CEO from 1999 to 2004, said recently that she doubts the
council tried to suppress the report and more likely wanted to make sure that
NIST provided context about LEED.
What happened in
The biggest
winner of LEED incentives has been the
Vegas
Green Building Council, which agreed to allow smoking in casinos.
Smoking
arose as an issue in 2006 when the Nevada State Office of Energy was deciding
how to implement a law that created the nation’s biggest tax breaks for LEED
buildings. LEED requires certified buildings either to be non-smoking or to
restrict smoking to contained rooms. Casino resorts wanted the LEED tax breaks
and smoking in their gaming areas.
Tom Hicks,
then a building council vice president, told the state in a crucial September
2006 letter that the council would award LEED certification to every part of a
casino complex except the casino, which the council would ignore. Hicks cited
the “extraordinary health risks associated with exposure to tobacco
smoke.” He also said there is “unprecedented opportunity for market
transformation” in
Hicks, now deputy assistant secretary for energy at the Navy, declined comment
on the issue.
Building
council Vice President Brendan Owens said recently that the council let the
Palazzo developers declare the hotel tower and the casino separate buildings
because each has its own ventilation system — a distinction the council no
longer allows for attached buildings. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say they
were exploiting loopholes,” Owens said, “but they were exploring the
boundaries of the way the rating system should be applied.”
The
council’s accommodation let the Palazzo cut $2.7 million a year from its
property tax bill over 10 years and also to avoid sales taxes on some building
materials. The Palazzo is one of seven LEED projects — five of them casino
resorts — that have saved $138 million in sales taxes between 2005 and 2010.
Palazzo
officials declined to be interviewed and cited a company report saying the
green features reduce energy and water use.
The author
of the tax-break law, former state legislator Chris Giunchigliani, said the
incentives were a viable alternative to mandatory new-building standards.
Writing the law with a neighbor, Lance Kirk, who led the building council’s
Giunchigliani said she hoped that LEED buildings would be “a marketing
piece” to tell visitors “we have more than gambling — we have a
sustainable environment.”
But the
Palazzo’s certification shows the need to improve LEED to require more than
common practices such as hotel-room cards about towel replacement, said
Giunchigliani, now a county commissioner in
industry standard,” she said. “I don’t think LEED should be giving
credit for the industry standard.”
Contributing:
Christopher Schnaars, Hannah Morgan
