The project we are working on has a ground floor tenant space that has the potential to be a restaurant, cafe, small grocer, or even non-food retail (though this last one is relatively unlikely). We identifed it as a 'future cafe' on the drawings, but on the PI form for occupancy we had limited choices so we indicated it as restaurant. The GBCI reviewer comment notes the restaurant usage and is requesting we revise our calculations for IEQp1 - Minimum IAQ Performance to reflect this occupancy type. Our MEP engineer is indicating that to calculate this for the restaurant use, he will have to essentially design the entire mechanical system for this space. The owners would prefer to leave the ground floor space occupancy type as flexible as possible as they are in the process of selecting tenants, but without more definition we are concerned our response on this prerequisite will be insufficient or will require significant changes during the construction phase submittal if the selected tenant does not match the occupancy type we indicate in the PI form. Has anyone had a similar experience with unspecified tenant space and how best to manage the relative uncertainty?
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Dave Hubka
Practice Leader - SustainabilityEUA
LEEDuser Expert
530 thumbs up
November 3, 2017 - 5:22 pm
I'd recommend selecting "other" in the PI form, then complete the EQp1 calc with what you'd best expect the space to become. Since this is future work and speculative at this time you can't 100% say that you are correct, but GBCI cannot 100% say that you are wrong. GBCI should not have the ability to make teams "overdesign" spaces to account for all future possibilities. Finally, I'd recommend coordinating a call with the GBCI review team and discuss...this option is available to all project teams. We've found great success when discussing such issues with GBCI.
Good Luck!