Santa Fe seeks citywide LEED certification

LEED, an international green building certification system that is widely recognized as the standard for energy and water efficiency, CO2 reduction and other sustainability metrics in building design, has started a new program to extend LEED rankings to cities and communities.

The US Green Building Council started LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, in 1998 as a way to foster sustainable standards and innovation in the built environment. To date over 94,000 commercial buildings are certified worldwide. The cities and neighborhoods certification is still in its beta phase. But since it got started in 2016, already 90 cities and neighborhoods have achieved  a ranking, including Las Cruces. Santa Fe hopes to be one of the next on the list.

On Wednesday, the city announced it has received a grant to participate in LEED v4.1 for Cities and Communities. Katherine Mortimer, the sustainability supervisor at the Public Utilities Department tells SFR the grant does not include cash, but does include membership to the US Green Building Council, and registration under the cities and communities program. Mortimer, who works for the Environmental Services Division of the department, says that the grant also includes some financial assistance in implementing new programs and participating in trainings for staff from various departments who will join a new team to gather complete the assessment over the summer. The city will apply for final certification in September.

To receive basic certification, a city must achieve a minimum of 40 out of 110 possible points awarded for good performance in the categories of energy, water use, waste, transportation, human experience, education, equitability, prosperity, and health and safety. The program is also designed as a roadmap to help cities develop future sustainability initiatives.

Santa Fe is pursuing the certification as it begins the process of implementing the25-Year Sustainability Plan that was adopted in December 2018. LEED certification would acknowledge these current and past efforts, but more importantly, says Mortimer, it would also help the city to identify blind spots and priorities as it figures out how to implement the 25-Year Sustainability Plan going forward, and would provide a framework for sustainable development as the city expands.

"We are hoping that this LEED for cities program will help us understand which actions will have the biggest impact so we can know where to focus our resources first. We want to keep an open mind so we can be strategic," says Mortimer.

The LEED certification has undoubtably changed the building industry and constructed environment for the better, pushing for environmentally friendly building materials to become widely available and for cities and municipalities to adopt green building and carbon emission benchmarks. The Federal Government even requires that all newly constructed federal buildings meet the LEED Gold ranking standard.

But the ranking system has also come under scrutiny. In the past, LEED granted certification based on building plans, but until recently failed to enforce performance and outcomes-based data reporting requirements in the long term. Several studies measuring the energy efficiency of LEED buildings in New York and Chicago as compared to non-certified buildings threw doubt on the idea that LEED buildings are indeed better for the environment, though other studies have found that LEED buildings produce 20-30% less emissions than non-certified buildings. The controversy often comes down to what data is used and how it is measured. LEED has updated its data requirements in the most recent version of the certification, but now faces criticism for failing to sufficiently raise standards to meet the crisis of global climate change.

And when it comes to LEED cities? The program is still too new to fully identify whether it will prove an effective mechanism for encouraging whole communities to become more sustainable, or whether it is just another fancy greenwashing method for cities to pat themselves on the back without actually having to change much. Either way, as one of the programs grant participants, the city of Santa Fe will help provide LEED with information about what could be improved next time the program gets an upgrade.