Today, I’d like to share a project we are extremely excited to be working on incorporating into our construction and design: LEED certification!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, it’s basically a set of standards put forth by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) to implement environmentally sustainable design, construction, and operation of buildings and neighborhoods. Ok ok. What does that mean? Just think of LEED as a rating system and certification process for green building practices.

Back in December, we felt that we should at least review the LEED process, and quickly decided it was something we wanted to pursue. Shawn Lavin, a LEED AP who was also a member of the volunteer architectural design team, is heading our LEED endeavors. In addition to Shawn, our team consists of Matthew Nesbitt (our Architect), IE2 Construction (our general contractor), AYS Engineering (our MEP engineers), Jerry Van Norman (Enhanced LEED Commissioning Agent) and yours truly (representing the Black Star Workers’ Assembly). We are pursuing the LEED certification for Commercial Interiors, as we are finishing out a shell building.

The LEED process certainly has presented its challenges…allow this LEED joke from greenbuilding.com to demonstrate:

How many LEED credits does it take to change a light bulb?

One—but you need a writer, 18 committee members representing manufacturers, government, the environmental community, the social justice community, and the health and safety community, three draft versions, two public comment periods, one life-cycle analysis, one pilot period with 100 pilot light bulbs, one member ballot, and one competing system with completely different standards.

While this can be a tedious process at times, we are passionate about being to able to proudly represent the desires of our membership and the Austin community in supporting an environmentally conscious building process. This added facet of our project has impacted time in our design process and does have additional upfront construction costs associated. So we hope that with the upcoming Green Brewpub Investment Forum we can gain the financial support from the environmental community to achieve the highest level of certification we can!

Also in this post – construction document update!

The papers have circulated throughout the varying City of Austin departments for review and we’ve received a round of comments. We’re confident that our responses will fully address those comments and we’ll soon be cleared for a building permit! I truly  hope to be able to announce in my next blog post that we have the permit in hand and that I am doing my last rollerskating dance routine with Steven in the empty space that eve.

The clock is ticking and we are eagerly and anxiously awaiting till we can officially break-ground, begin some demo and trot around in hard-hats.

Until next time!

:::Karinne