40 buildingoperatingmanagement SEPTEMBER <strong>2011</strong> Fortunately, they have help. The U.S. Green <strong>Building</strong> 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 <strong>Building</strong>s 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 <strong>Building</strong>s 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 <strong>Building</strong>s: 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 <strong>Building</strong>s and On-Campus <strong>Building</strong> 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
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