We would like to confirm the applicability of our project to meet the requirements of this credit. The project involves the development of a new four-story 125,000 SF Health Sciences Center on the existing North Central Technical College Campus in Wausau, Wisconsin. This structure is positioned directly south of an existing campus parking lot that will be adapted to work with the new facility, but will remain as shared parking for other adjacent buildings. In fact the overall number of parking spaces, in the shared lot, will be decreased to allow for the new building. The proposed building site, as the entire campus, was mass graded and planted with turf grass with the development of the college and the adjacent roadways. The existing turf grass area provides a limited amount of habitat for wildlife and does little to create biodiversity. As part of this development we plan to remove approximately 2-acres of adjacent turf grass area and replace it with a native tall grass prairie, which will do much more to enhance the habitat area and the biodiversity. We feel that we have met the intent of the credit by restoring damaged areas of the landscape with native vegetation that will enhance the entire campus while increasing the perviousness of the site with native grasses. Will the area of turf grass constitute a previously developed site? Will we be able to achieve this credit even though we are replacing somewhat pervious, not impervious, surfaces with native vegetation? Additionally, there is some question as to how we should measure the area calculation with the adjacent shared parking lot. Should the project boundary, for this credit SS Credit 5.2, and SS Credit 7.1, include the entire parking lot, the portion of the parking lot stalls that can be attributed to this building, or just the area of the parking lot that must be constructed for the development of the building?
In your project application, provide further narrative supporting justification to classify the site as "previously developed". This justification could be based on the prior removal of native vegetation and subsequent human impacts such as mass grading, structures, paving, other surfaces, or high maintenance ornamental landscape improvements not meeting the intent of "native or adapted". To achieve SS Credit 5.1, a minimum of 50% of the site area (excluding the building footprint) should be restored with native or adapted vegetation. With regard to the project boundary limits, it is acceptable to include the square footage of the parking lot that is required to serve this building and its uses. This includes all spaces exclusively for this building as well as any that may be considered shared spaces with other buildings at different times of the day. The same project boundary must be used for all credits.