The new Warnock Engineering Building will not receive an environmental certification now required of most other construction projects of public buildings in Salt Lake City.
Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson recently signed an executive order requiring all new or renovated public buildings to be built according to the U.S. Green Building Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards.
LEED design standards focus on making buildings as environmentally friendly and energy efficient as possible.
But U officials took advantage of a loophole in the law that does not require the U to follow city building regulations.
“We are a separate building entity and are not subject to Salt Lake City rules and regulations,” said Randall Funk, manager of construction service for the Department of Campus Construction and Design.
U officials said the new environmental certification was too expensive, despite a decision to have the new Health Sciences Education Building receive the LEED certification.
“The main drawback [to LEED] is the expense of the certification process,” said Archie Phillips, former project manager for the Warnock Engineering Building.
While short-term costs may have prevented U officials from LEED certification of the Warnock Engineering Building, proponents say LEED-certified buildings make the most sense economically.
“LEED buildings save taxpayer resources in the long-term through energy efficiency and innovative design,” Anderson said in a recent press release.
Although the Engineering Building will not be LEED certified, it will have some of the same environmentally friendly features that are seen in most buildings on campus.
“It is not going to get the formal LEED recognition, but it still meets most of the LEED standards,” Pieter Vanderhave, associate vice president of facilities management, said.
Jack Robertson, project architect for the Construction Administration of the Warnock Engineering Building, said the primary hold-up for LEED certification was the cost of the paperwork, not necessarily the cost of the environmentally friendly features.
“Nobody was against the idea of building a building that met LEED standards,” Robertson said. “But we were against the cost that was required to achieve certification in terms of documentation.”
General features that lead to LEED certification are: the use of natural light, recycled building materials, water wise landscaping, efficient heating/AC systems and accessibility to mass transit.
In an effort to make the ideas of environmentally friendly construction more applicable to Utah and the U, U officials have teamed up with the State Division of Facilities Construction and Management Standards to create a new set of environmental standards.
Funk said the standards will be similar to LEED but will be adapted to the Utah climate and conditions.
“We’ve done one [LEED] building and learned some things, and now we’re working with the state to produce a standard which is appropriate to the university and the state of Utah,” Funk said.
Vanderhave said the new standards would streamline the process of certification for the building of environmentally friendly buildings on the U campus.
“The results would be the same but with less red tape and less cost,” Vanderhave said.
“The new standards would eliminate overhead costs and maintain construction quality.”