LEED Blog

LEED Blog

The Elusive LEED Superlative

Part of the lure of a green building is its payoff: reduced utility bills, better looks and a healthier indoor environment.

But the sweetest might be bragging rights for the building that claims firsties in a LEED category.

The U.S. Green Building Council's list of LEED-registered and certified buildings in the Monterey Bay area, updated Dec. 2, includes 33 in Monterey County. Only seven of those have been certified:

-The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local in Castroville (Gold, Existing Buildings Operations & Maintenance)
-The Trader Joe's shopping complex in Monterey (Silver, Core & Shell)
-Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (Gold, Existing Buildings 1.0 Pilot)
-Salinas Municipal Pool (Gold, New Construction 2.2)
-Chartwell School in Seaside (Platinum, New Construction 2.1)
-CSUMB Library (Silver, New Construction 2.2)
-Monterey College of Law's Community Justice Center (Platinum, New Construction 2.2)

So far, the list doesn't show any platinum certifications for existing buildings. The Weekly is hoping to claim that honor.

That list, by the way, only seems to apply to commercial buildings. A different USGBC spreadsheet shows quite a few LEED-certified homes in the county, including Interim, Inc.'s Sunflower Gardens housing complex in Salinas, which scored LEED for Homes Platinum cred in June 2010.

A Carmel Valley home landed Platinum honors in April 2010, another in Carmel got Silver last June, and on July 6 of this year, Carmel-by-the-Sea City Councilman Jason Burnett's home earned Platinum.

Burnett, who runs an eco-energy consulting firm in Marina and is running for Carmel mayor, says he and wife Mel decided to go platinum on the remodel of their mid-century modern home to show that it can be done—and because the things that earn LEED points also tend to be best building practices.

"It makes for a building that is better-looking in the end, and it makes for a building that's going to last longer," he says.

The Burnetts (whose remodeled home is pictured above) replaced their shag carpet with a water-based, reflective apoxy floor; installed a system that turns out all of the house's LED lights at the push of a button; and calculated a net-zero electricity footprint, thanks to a photovoltaic system on the roof.

BuildingWise Project Manager Levi Jimenez doesn't think the county's certified LEED projects take any wind out of the Weekly's sails in going for the first local LEED-EB Platinum.

"The realm of Existing Buildings is not as easy to achieve Platinum," he writes by email. " It measures the building's actual performance, not a modeled theoretical performance as in [LEED for New Construction] or interior design as much as [LEED for Commercial Interiors].

"EB, as [BuildingWise Founder] Barry [Giles] says, 'is where the rubber hits the road.'"