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Critics also say a costly and bureaucratic certification process is responsible for the low percentage of projects that ultimately get certified. Since 2000, LEED for new construction (LEED-NC) has gotten 3,113 registered project applications. But only 403 have been certified by USGBC - a lackluster thirteen percent clip. LEED for Commercial Interiors (LEED-CI) and LEED for Existing Buildings (LEED-EB), both introduced in 2004, have received 297 and 171 applications, with just 68 and 28 projects receiving certification, respectively. Despite the fact that they were building an exemplary green building project, the designers of the new 52-story New York Times Tower, on 8th Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets in Manhattan, did not apply for LEED certification. Architect Bruce Fowle of FXFOWLE, a leading green architectural firm, told the New York Observer that LEED was “time-consuming and costly,” and said “some of the prerequisites are not that meaningful.”

Some professionals say the rating system’s structure is all wrong. Peter Weingarten, a senior associate at FXFOWLE, describes LEED’s greatest strength - its objective evaluation of a building’s performance - as, at the same time, its greatest weakness. “LEED is a metrics-based review of a building that is performance-based and not subjective,” he says. “This essentially formulaic approach leaves no room for the broader architectural implications that the building’s design presents.” For example, a building that receives a LEED Platinum rating could be an architectural nightmare - in other words, just plain ugly. “LEED currently doesn’t address design excellence,” he says. “People need to love these buildings.”

There are other, bottom-line reasons why owners may not choose to pursue LEED. For one, adding features like a green roof or a pond (both get one point) can be incredibly expensive. Pete Atkin is an associate with GreenOrder, Inc., a Manhattan-based green building consulting firm. “On the whole, some of our clients have balked at cost,” he says. His firm works with developers to come up with certification strategies that won’t break the bank. But in the end, developers may simply use the LEED standards as a benchmark. “For some clients, because of the nature of their business, achieving a certification is not important, so they may use LEED as a design guide in developing a building, but not go through the actual certification process. The end product may be just as green.”

Still, in a recent study, the General Services Administration, a government agency that monitors other federal agencies, called LEED “the most credible” of five green building rating systems it evaluated. The other four systems were Japan’s Comprehensive Assessment System for Building Environmental Efficiency (CASBEE), the United Kingdom’s Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM), a software program called GBTool, developed in 2000 by a consortium of sixteen nations to assess buildings’ environmental impact, and the Green Globes, a European green building rating, from 1991.

And, in the survey administered by the Pittsburgh Green Building Alliance, 59.4 percent of respondents called meeting the LEED prerequisites only “moderate” in difficulty. A whopping 88 percent said building green was similar or only slightly more costly than conventional construction. And 54.8 percent called LEED “very useful” as a guideline for their respective projects.

But people who use the system on a daily basis feel differently. Erik Olsen is an engineer and green projects administrator in Chicago, where green building has taken off. In 2004, Mayor Richard M. Daley announced all new public buildings must meet LEED standards. Surprisingly, the city uses LEED for fast-tracked permits because administering its own standards would be too expensive. But those permits aren’t always on such a fast track. Olsen, who works for the city’s Department of Construction and Permits, says he receives numerous phone calls from Chicago-based project teams who would rather turn to him than LEED professionals to answer questions about certification. “I get all kinds of interpretation questions,” he says, “ranging from extremely basic ones that I can clearly answer to very project-specific items that I certainly have an opinion on but can’t answer because the final ruling is with USGBC.”

To its credit, USGBC has recognized that LEED is not perfect. Over the past six years, the organization has rolled out new versions of the rating system to address different means of construction, types of buildings, and scope of development. Even as LEED becomes more widely used and understood, the USGBC is realizing LEED may be in for a more drastic upgrade.

One not-so-subtle clue to the USGBC that something was wrong with its rating system came in October 2005 in the form of a study, entitled “LEED Is Broken: Let’s Fix It.” Published by two Aspen, Colorado-based green building proponents, Auden Schendler, director of environmental affairs at the Aspen Skiing Company, and Randy Udall, directory of the Boulder-based Community Office for Resource Efficiency, the study made big waves in the industry. The authors did not hold back. “LEED has become costly, slow, brutal, confusing, and unwieldy, a death march for applicants administered by a Soviet-style bureacracy that makes green building more difficult than it needs to be,” they wrote. They gave, as case studies, their own experiences building a restaurant and a golf clubhouse for the Aspen Skiing Company. Their tally of costs: for initial consultation and document-gathering alone (required for certification), $68,450 for a relatively small building. They polled others in the industry about the effectiveness of certification vs. simply investing money in a building’s green features. Ken Leinbach, executive director of a new Urban Ecology Center in Milwaukee, said he did not pursue certification because “it could have added as much as $75,000 to the cost, just for the paperwork.” Chris Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, which built a new facility on Stanford University’s campus, said he decided to skip certification and invest instead in the building’s heat-rejecting windows. The authors asked: “If a global ecologist doesn’t find value in LEED, will Donald Trump?” They called on USGBC to “get to work, and reinvent LEED.”

USGBC responded. Early in 2006, it retained Seattle-based green building consulting firm Paladino and Company to begin a comprehensive overhaul of the various LEED rating systems. Paladino has been involved with USGBC since 1998. It has authored various LEED business plans and reference manuals, reviewed numerous LEED certification applications, and was responsible for administering the inaugural LEED pilot program in 2000. USGBC’s first official announcement about a next generation LEED came in September 2006. In a press release entitled “LEED Version 3.0: Foundation for the Future,” it described the new LEED as “a working title nomenclature around which to coalesce our development efforts, rather than a new product per se.” Last summer, USGBC led a series of “scoping eco-charrettes” (a concept developed in the 1990s by Paladino, basically brainstorming sessions between developers, design teams, and other project stakeholders) held at local USGBC chapters across the country. Specifically, Paladino and the LEED 3.0 committee were interested in changes to LEED’s structure that would result in more sustainable buildings, marketing LEED to a broader audience, and reducing the costs of using LEED systems. Now that Paladino has completed the charrettes, it will collect comments into short-, medium-, and long-term improvements the USGBC might make. The comment and development period will extend through the 2007 Greenbuild conference, scheduled for November 7-9 in Los Angeles.

The development process behind the next generation of LEED has been less than transparent. This could be both good and bad. The fact that no one knows what the new version will look like could mean the organization is planning for a massive overhaul of the certification process. On the other hand, the fact that it’s mainly USGBC member organizations and chapter members shaping the process gives LEED 3.0 an aura of exclusivity, rather than one of inclusiveness and accessibility. “Green building is hard, and the USGBC should be aiding and abetting green projects, not crushing them with a faceless technocracy,” Schendler and Udall wrote in their paper.

Still, from where USGBC and LEED stood five years ago, it is a remarkable accomplishment that a reform-oriented conversation is taking place. “The great thing about LEED is that it’s created a branded goal that companies can shoot for,” says Atkin of GreenOrder. “Even if the average person doesn’t appreciate energy- or water-efficiency performance, LEED is a mechanism that clearly communicates to the public that something good has been done.”

This article appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!