Progressive AE - 8/08 - Steve Fridsma

Most of our church clients appear to be catching up quickly with creation care issues and want a green building; however, few seem to want to go the extra mile and pay for the LEED application, energy modeling, and pre-requisite 3rd party building commissioning. For example, we just completed a 62,000 sf church project that would earn at least 29 and probably 33 points (easily good for LEED Certified, almost to LEED Silver) but they balked at the pre-requisite commissioning costs. We've been seeing $0.30 to $0.60/sf for that. They are so close but are apparently going to be satisfied telling their constituents that the building is "LEED-certifiable".

This morning, we finally registered our first worship project for pending LEED certification with the USGBC. Of the over 15,000 projects registered for pending LEED certification, it appears to be only the

29th ecclesiastical project.

As a firm we're now up to 19 projects registered, with 9 certified. This is not counting over 100 that are registered as part of a volume-build (LEED prototype, repeat work) pilot program we're doing with the USGBC. 4 projects in the volume-build program are now certified, with another 14 expected next week.