The project is an interior fit-up of 16,948 sf within a 410,357 sf building, or approximately 4% of the building\'s total sf. The building, a 1950\'s era building, was renovated in the 1990\'s, with a mechanical system consisting of 4 built-up air handlers for the building. This credit consists of 4 requirements; entryways, exhausting of air, containment drains and MERV 13 filters. The first 3 requirements are appropriate for any tenant space and reasonable cost, but the fourth requirement, requiring all air to be filtered with MERV 13 filters, would require replacement of major components of the existing AHU\'s, and is financially beyond the capability of this tenant project or any small tenant. The requirement for MERV 13 filters appears to be appropriate only for tenants relocating to LEED CS projects or large tenants occupying more than 50% of a building. Proposed Solution: The project team believes that the objective of this credit can only be obtained by tenants that rent in excess of 75% of a building and become a major stakeholder in the building. Other credits within LEED-CI make distinctions between tenants renting less than 75% and more than 75% of a building. And LEED-EB actually makes a disconnect between the first 3 requirements and the MERV 13 requirement in CI Credit EQ 5, with EB Credit EQ 5.1 - Reduce Particulates in Air Distribution and EB Credit EQ 5.2 - Isolation of High Volume Coping/Print Rooms/Fax Stations. The tenant has been conducting Indoor Air Quality Testing on their numerous facilities and the preliminary findings are indicating the importance of ventilating the High Volume Print Areas because of VOC\'s and particulates. The particulates in the office spaces tend to spike after hours when the air handlers are either shut down by the Building Owner. It appears to be more appropriate to remove the particulates before they enter the indoor air. They have also found that percentage of particulates are just as high in their naturally ventilated office spaces, as they are in their mechanically ventilated spaces (The tenant occupies both the naturally ventilated space and the mechanically ventilated spaces). The project team believes that a distinction of project size should be made for this credit, whereas any tenant occupying less than 75% of the building be required to obtain the first 3 requirements of this credit (entryway systems, exhausting of air to outside, containment drains) and any tenant occupying over 50% to obtain all of the requirements, including the MERV 13 requirement. In fact it appears that naturally ventilated spaces are exempt for this requirement, because there is no way to remove particulates. The cost of ventilating the High Volume Copy spaces can be expensive, but will eliminate the VOC\'s generated by the equipment. It will also rid the space of the particulates before they need to be contained by the MERV 13 filters or any filter media. We believe that it is important in making a distinction between large and small tenants for this credit and would be beneficial to small projects, because it is would make this credit obtainable. LEED CI should produce better indoor environments and therefore we believe that this refinement would enhance LEED-CI. The only other option available to a small tenant would be to provide plenum installed mechanical air filters with MERV 13 filter material, but this would be independent of the mechanical system. Our concern with this is method, is cost, determining the appropriate number of air returns per hour and the additional energy needed to power the fans and filters. Also the existing AHU\'s would continue to dump the rest of the buildings particulates into the tenant space.