Building Operating Management September 2011 - FacilitiesNet

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buildingoperatingmanagement
SEPTEMBER 2011
Fortunately, they have help. The U.S. Green Building
Council (USGBC) is well aware of the challenges campuses
face in applying the EBOM rating system, and has been
working diligently on the issue for the last several years.
LEED-EBOM is built around a fairly simple building
model. The design of the rating system was historically
based upon — although by no means limited to — an owner-occupied
commercial office building standing alone on
its own piece of land, where property lines clearly demarcate
boundaries of responsibility and operations.
That model is often tested from two distinct directions
— when that building is located on property shared with
other buildings (as in a corporate office park) or when multiple
distinct and unrelated (or partially related) tenants
occupy a single building. Combine those challenges and
multiply them times a dozen or more buildings and one
can start to see the problem facing Coghlan and folks like
him who are wrestling with certifying multiple buildings in
the campus environment.
In a campus setting, buildings don’t have natural property
or even ”project” boundaries. As one example, the landscaping
between two laboratories at University of California,
Davis isn’t divided between those labs; it is functionally
shared by both, and its management is handled by parties
who do not occupy either building. In addition, those laboratories
may each contain multiple departments, which also
are spread across two or more additional buildings.
Adapting LEED-EBOM’s strategies for campuses has
been on USGBC’s radar since the very beginning, when the
Existing Buildings Pilot Program wrestled with buildings
on campuses like Emory University and UC Santa Barbara,
as well as the corporate campuses of Nike and Microsoft.
These buildings made clear that a thoughtful approach to
adapting the LEED suite of tools to campuses would be a
One Policy, Multiple Buildings
Allen Doyle is a reasonable man. With
more than 5,300 acres of campus and
5 million square feet in his portfolio as
sustainability manager at the University of
California, Davis, the UC system’s largest
campus both in terms of acreage and enrollment,
Doyle understands the need for a
measured approach to LEED for Existing
Buildings: Operations and Maintenance
(LEED-EBOM) certifi cation. “If we can
certify 400,000 square feet of building on
this campus by 2013, we will be very satisfi
ed,” he says. “It’s a lot of space, but on
a campus this size, it’s just a beginning.”
UC Davis, like many university campuses,
not only has dozens of buildings
to consider, but a diversity of building
types as well — many of them larger than
50,000 square feet. “We have everything
from administrative buildings to performing
arts halls to basketball gyms and dormitories,”
says Doyle. “One of our student
rec centers actually shares a building with
conference and meeting space. We have
more than 1.6 million square feet of energy
intensive laboratory space, and one of our
hallmark laboratories has a cyclotron in the
basement.”
Doyle’s challenge is not uncommon on
campuses. Beyond the relatively common
feature of a central plant, campuses often
house research and development facilities,
laboratories, production or manufacturing
lines, health clinics, sports facilities, and
data centers. This diversity can make the
application of overarching sustainability
policies diffi cult.
Adaptable Policies
Ensuring that sustainability strategies
maintain fl exibility and adaptability
for diverse building types is critical. This
may mean creating a lean set of blanket
sustainability policies for the campus while
planning on supplementing those policies
with more detailed, building-specifi c implementation
documents — one strategy the
LEED Application Guide for Multiple Buildings
and On-Campus Building Projects
(AGMBC) suggests. The core contents of
those blanket policies can be focused on
the elements of performance that can be
implemented campuswide; where buildings
differ, the policy may leave room for
building-specifi c information.
According to Melissa Gallagher-
Rogers, a LEED director and leader of the
group developing the parameters for the
AGMBC, policies that apply to multiple
buildings across campus is one of the
major ways the AGMBC can help facility
managers with LEED-EBOM certifi cation,
and save time and cost on certifi cation
fees to boot.
The AGMBC is intended to provide
guidance to achieve two different effi ciencies
— the more effi cient production of
policy documents and the more effi cient
review of those documents after they have
been submitted as part of the LEED-
EBOM certifi cation process.
When policies that require extensive
building-specifi city are under development,
a blanket policy may end up being
so thin as to come up short in the master
site review process. But that doesn’t
mean efforts are wasted. If the multibuilding
policy approach doesn’t work for a
given policy, a campus will still benefi t if
the facility manager can create a partial
policy document, even one that is limited
in scope, that establishes consistency in
form, structure and as much content as
possible. Although that policy will need to
be resubmitted with each LEED-EBOM
application, the facility manager’s confi -
dence in the policy will grow with each
successful certifi cation.
— Dan Ackerstein