100% of the athletic areas for an urban school are made of artficial turf. It's my understanding that this would be counted as hardscape under SSc5.2. There is a clause in WEc1 that allows a team to not count playing fields for the irrigation credit. It's not clear to me whether or not that also means that playing fields, if not counted relative to WEc1 could also not be counted toward SSc5.2 (and SSc7.1). The reason I'm bringing this up is because it appears likely that the artifical turf will blow our ability to say that 25% of the open space is vegetated. However, if we don't include that area, we'll still have 20% open space on the site including vegetation and pedestrian oriented hardscape. Any thoughts regarding whether inclusion of the artificial turf in the open space calc is required would be most welcome.
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Tristan Roberts
RepresentativeVermont House of Representatives
LEEDuser Expert
11478 thumbs up
November 24, 2015 - 3:14 pm
Helen, are you basically asking if the playing fields can be excluded from open space calculations? I don't think so, either in terms of an official exception or in terms of the LEED intent, which asks you to have open space that is also vegetated.
Helen Kessler
PresidentHJKessler Associates
51 thumbs up
November 24, 2015 - 4:56 pm
Hi Tristan,
I received a response for this from GBCI. Bottom line - the entire site must be counted toward SSc5.2. However, one can choose NOT to include all of the hardscape in the calculations. Therefore, on some sites, the calculations can still work out showing over 20% open space and over 25% of the open space being vegetated. For instance, I have a project where we did not count any of the artificial turf as open space, but still met the threshold for over 20% of the entire site being open space. Helen
Tristan Roberts
RepresentativeVermont House of Representatives
LEEDuser Expert
11478 thumbs up
November 24, 2015 - 9:29 pm
Wow, interesting—not what I would have guessed. Thanks for posting the info from GBCI!
Helen Kessler
PresidentHJKessler Associates
51 thumbs up
November 24, 2015 - 9:40 pm
I have three schools with a similar situation going in for review soon. I'll let you know if there are any problems.