I am working on an indoor practice facility for a university Division 1 athletic program and am having a difficult time deciding how to enter FTEs and transients in a project information form. I need at least one FTE to apply for certification. My quandary is that the building has no permanent occupants (a couple of offices were deleted for budget reasons). It will be in constant use throughout the year, primarily by the football and track teams, with some use by the soccer and baseball teams. It is used on both a scheduled and nonscheduled, weather-related basis. Occupant loads will vary between 25 and 150 for team practices, and up to 25 for small group sessions.
Effectively, all of the users are "transients", but I can convert them to FTEs with a little math. My question is: should I convert them all to FTEs and say I have no transients? or should I just convert enough to have the equivalent of one FTE and treat the remainder as transient, with a peak of 150?
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Susan Walter
HDRLEEDuser Expert
1299 thumbs up
April 24, 2015 - 3:36 pm
No security guard? You really may have a problem. I would put together a use chart of some sort and call the GBCI.
Andrew Carman
Sustainability ConsultantApolloBBC
1 thumbs up
June 3, 2015 - 12:55 pm
David, you've probably figured this out by now, but just in case you or someone else might have a similar question:
I had a similar issue with a religious building where there were no permanent staff, but there were large groups showing up for worship and other events.
The motivation behind this requirement is, of course, that there are people using LEED Certified buildings and that unused buildings are not achieving LEED Certification. In your case the building is clearly being used, so you should be fine--it's just a matter of showing how you get the FTE number you present to GBCI.
The key is that there has to be at least one Full Time *Equivalent* occupant, which is not the same as one full time occupant. So if you have people numbering in the hundreds using the facility, just at odd times, you shouldn't have a problem establishing the usage pattern that is equals the *equivalent* to more than one full time occupant.
What I did to document was check the option for "Actual, historical and/or projected project occupancy includes non-standard occupancy patterns such as shift work, non-8-hour work days, etc." then explained in the box below in the form and also provided a spreadsheet of usage patterns to demonstrate the building usage patterns I got from the building owners.
Even though there were no full time occupants, I still had 30 FTE from the usage patterns of all the part time building occupants.
There is good guidance on this in the pdf file: "Supplemental Guidance to the Minimum Program Requirements" which you can find here:
http://www.usgbc.org/Docs/Archive/General/Docs6473.pdf