HELP - Do I have to follow AGMBC?

Dhanujie, as a first step I think you need to establish your LEED project boundary. There is generally not a requirement that you need to certify multiple buildings at once and thus use the AGMBC. As a starting place I would review the LEED Minimum Program Requirements supplemental guidance document and review the requirements for setting a reasonable project boundary, especially relative to facilities that provide necessary services to the project building.

Hello Dhanujie, We are very glad to hear that you intend to seek LEED certification for this project. Per pgs 25-26 of the LEED 2009 MPR Supplemental Guidance (http://www.usgbc.org/ShowFile.aspx?DocumentID=10131), until Group Certification functionality is released, each separately-certifiable building should be assigned its own LEED project boundary and there may be only one such building per LEED project boundary. It is left to the Owner's/project team's discretion as to whether each or every such building on the site should pursue LEED certification. Use of the AGMBC is not mandatory, but may be required to capture credit for site-wide characteristics and/or multiple-building performance. As noted on page 26 of the MPR Supplemental Guidance, Non-LEED-certifiable structures that support the main LEED building can be included in that building's LEED Project Boundary, and then accounted-for consistently throughout the application.

Although, technically, a structure must meet all 7 MPRs in order to be eligible to attempt LEED certification, effectively, MPR 4 sets the 'floor' for being considered a "LEED-certifiable" building. If an entire building contains at least 1,000 sf of 'gross floor area' (as the term is defined in the Glossary of the LEED 2009 MPR Supplemental Guidance), it is eligible to seek separate certification and should be excluded from any other single-building LEED project boundary.

Please also note that in the rare instances where a building seeking LEED BD+C certification does not contain any of the water-consuming fixtures addressed by the requirements of WEp1, this fact should be explained in the Special Circumstances Narrative section of the Form and it is, effectively, exempted from that Prerequisite.

"Use of the AGMBC is not mandatory, but may be required"

Eric, how can something be 'not mandatory, but may be required'? Isn't this effectively the same thing? Are projects on campus required to use the AGMBC or not?

Hi Susan, My apologies that I wasn't clearer about this, but if you'll refer to the rest of the sentence from the excerpt you quoted you'll see that use of the AGMBC would only be required "...to capture credit for site-wide characteristics and/or multiple-building performance." In other words, just because a single LEED project building is being built on a shared site or campus, the project is not automatically required to utilize the AGMBC. If you were only basing calculations on the site area included within the LEED project boundary for a single building, and if you were not trying to capture any of the eligible 'campus credits' for that project based upon aggregated data from multiple buildings on the same site, the use of the AGMBC would not be mandatory. Thanks for asking me to clarify that. I hope this explanation makes more sense.

Dhanujie,

I had a similar conversation going on this same thread--if you scroll down, you can see it under the listing for a hotel project. I am in final review of a LEED EBOM project for an office building. Adjacent and within the project boundary is a kitchen, storage and canteen which provided facilities strictly for the office occupancy. The canteen building didn't have any toilets or full-time occupants so it wasn't "stand-alone" in the strict terms of the MPRs, so this may be different to your case, but the site plan and logic is quite similar. If strictly adhering to certain aspects of the MPR detailed advice, it looked as if I needed to drop the canteen from the certification. However, in the overall picture it never seemed logical to me to do so, so I stuck with it. In my application, in the project information submittals (P1-P4), I listed each justification for including the canteen, to ensure absolute clarity. The review team apparently has accepted the narrative. My overall experience is that there are continued ambiguities in the MPRs concerning this type of situation, which require further clarification, especially as this is a very common format for the increasing number of both tropical and industrial projects in the LEED portfolio. If your building can stand alone then I would strongly suggest getting an actual decision from GBCI--once you have started down the road of certifying your project, you don't want to be beset with doubts.