LEED Design Review and Final Certification Proceedures

What you're asking for is somewhat impossible due to the fact that every rating system has both Design and Construction Phase prerequisites. This means that there are required items in your project which GBCI has not looked/approved as part of your Design Review Process. The Construction-phase prerequisites/credits can only be submitted/reviewed as part of a Construction Phase submission. As such, the project will still have to go through the entire Construction Review Phase in order to achieve certification (i.e. both a Preliminary and Final Construction Review).

One option you could look at is to Skip the Design Final Review and then move right into the Construction Preliminary Review. In this case, you would submit all of the Construction items (in your case, maybe just the prerequisites?) as well as all the pending Design credits (i.e. everything you were going to respond to as part of the Design Final). That would let both of those be reviewed concurrently and so would shorten the overall review process by the time of one Final Review Phase (i.e. approximately 3 weeks).

Some very important caveats:
-If you go that route, your Design credits would only receive one more review (as they were reviewed once in the Design Preliminary phase). As such, if anything more is outstanding after the second review, you would be required to appeal those credits if you still wanted to achieve them.

- The combined Design Final/Construction Preliminary Review would take at least as long as a typical Preliminary Review (i.e. approximately 5 weeks). You will not learn the status of any of the credits until the entire review is completed (i.e. both design and construction credits).

- After the results of that review, there is the potential to skip the Construction Final if everything was awarded without questions/issues (but you won't know that until the Construction Preliminary Review is complete). If you need to respond/clarify anything, then you would also have to undergo the Construction Final Review.

- You would have to pay the full Construction Phase Review fee at the time of submitting the combined Design Final/Construction Preliminary submission. As you selected the Split Review option, both fees are required to achieve LEED certification.

Does that make sense?

Each credit is only reviewed a maximum of 2 times before an appeal is required assuming that the design/approach remains the same. As such, denied design phase credits typically cannot be resubmitted/reviewed during the construction phase; an appeal phase would be required.

The only time that credits are re-reviewed without the need to appeal is if something in the design changes which fundamentally changes the project's compliance/approach with a credit. In that case, a single re-review is offered. An example: an NC v2009 project submits for SSc7.1 with a large, high-SRI plaza and courtyard. This credit gets approved in the design phase. During construction, the plaza is value-engineered out of the project. In the construction submission, SSc7.1 is resubmitted with revised calculations to confirm that the project still meets the requirements based on the new site design.

Credits are not re-reviewed if the strategy/approach is still the same and the product is only trying to respond to issues. An example: an NC v2009 project submits IDc1.1 with a non-compliant Green Education strategy in the Design Phase. After undergoing both the Preliminary and the Final review, the credit is denied due to oustanding issues. That strategy would not be re-reviewed again without an appeal (if if you attempt to submit it during the Construction Phase).

One note - ID credits can be switched out and resubmitted between phases. So in the previous example, if the project had switched from a green education approach to a green cleaning approach, that credit would be re-reviewed as that is a entirely new strategy. ONLY ID credits work in this manner.

So regardless if you go down the typical Split Review Path (Design Preliminary Review -> Design Final Review -> Construction Preliminary Review -> Construction Final Review) or the combined option I mentioned above (Combined Design Final/Construction Preliminary -> Construction Final), all of your Design credits would only receive 1 more round of review before an appeal is necessary. The reason I included that as a caveat is that sometimes projects doing the combined approach think that they can still provide clarifications in the Construction Final submission.

It may be useful to note that you can postpone the appeal of any denied Design Phase credits until after the Construction Phase is complete and appeal them then, We typically do this on our projects as it allows us to assess the "final" standing of the project after all typical reviews are complete to determine whether an appeal is necessary to hit our certification targets. This might not be applicable in your case, as you note that you don't intend to submit any credits during the construction phase, but - if some of the design items are denied - that might be something to reevaluate/consider. If appeals are necessary, this also would shorten your maximum potential overall timeline as you could do all appeals concurrently (i.e. one 5-week period) rather than a separate appeal phase for design and a separate appeal phase for construction (i.e. 2 separate 5-week periods).

Hope that helps!

The 25-business day guideline to submit your final submission (i.e. your clarifications to any pending items after a preliminary review) is really just a guideline. It's not a firm deadline nor are you required to request an extension from GBCI to take longer to make that submission. You should aim to be close to that, but it's not a firm deadline.

The response deadline is critical if GBCI issues a Mid-Review Clarification. That is a request that they might send you while the project is actually under review (not required/not typical). These are generally only sent during a final review when a very minor item/document is missing which would enable the credit to be awarded. In this case, the Mid-Review Clarification Request will come with a 10-business day deadline to provide a response. This deadline is VERY critical as the review team will resume the review after 10-business days even if you don't respond (and potentially deny the credit). As such, you definitely want to respond to those as soon as possible. If it will take you longer than 10-business days to respond, you should respond to the request specifically asking more time to try to work out a longer response timeframe.