I've been looking through the forums and documentation and get some conflicting information. We're trying to establish an appropriate LEED project boundary for our project. It's an office within a sort of company campus. It will be built and connected to an adjacent parking garage (already built) used by the company and its other office buildings. A small percentage of the parking garage will be allocated for this building. No new parking will be built. The MPR guidelines says we can exclude the parking from our boundary if it is not included within the construction scope. But also states we should include any area that services our building. I would lean towards not including the parking in our boundary, but I'm not sure.
Also if we're providing the preferred parking spaces for the fuel efficient vehicles for credit SSc4.3 does that have any impact on whether or not to include the spaces within our boundary?
Can someone please clarify? Thank you.
Kristina Bach
VP of InnovationSustainable Investment Group
151 thumbs up
January 28, 2014 - 12:37 pm
For LEED-CI, it's generally more common that the parking areas are excluded from the LEED-CI Project Boundary as that shared area is not really in your scope of work/under the direct control of the LEED-CI tenant. That does not impact your ability to still go for the parking credits (similar to how you'd treat the boundary if you had other shared amenities such as bathrooms or a fitness center).
Note that LEED-CI does not include a credit for providing preferred spaces for low-emitting/fuel-efficient vehicles; do you mean that you intend to pursue SSc3.3 (preferred parking for car/vanpools)?
If you mean to go for SSc3.3, you would just want to provide plans and a narrative clarifying how many spaces of the existing parking garage are allocated to your specific LEED-CI project. The signage would then need to designate those spaces as reserved for your tenant's specific use (i.e. "ABC Company/Dept. Car/Vanpool Vehicles Only"). If you cannot reserve the spaces for your specific LEED-CI space, I have heard of LEED-CI projects being allowed to meet this based on the LEED-NC thresholds (5% of the overall parking capacity of the garage/shared parking lots). LEED Interpretation 1669 talks about this somewhat when the number of spaces allocated to the LEED-CI space is limited compared to the number required by the credit. Generally a narrative saying that you cannot reserve them for your space but that the building has now provided the amentity to all occupants would probably be helpful to show that you are still meeting the intent of the credit.
One caution - make sure to read LEED Interpretation 10206 regarding which spaces are considered to meet the definition of "preferred" in parking garages when you do your layouts of the newly reserved preferred spaces. Depending on whether your project registered before the LI was posted (7/1/2012), you might be held to this requirement.
Michelle Oishi
ArchitectCBT Architects
1 thumbs up
January 28, 2014 - 1:16 pm
Thanks for the reply, I think you get linked to the same forum for all corresponding credits in each rating system. This project is a LEED-NC project so would that make a difference in how the boundary is interpreted?