New Senate Amendment Puts Additional Pressure on LEED

Taxpayers aren’t used to receiving good news.  And, if you have been following the trials and tribulations of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) and the expensive and needless Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building certification system developed and run by the non-profit U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), you know it’s been a frustrating 7 months with unanswered Freedom of Information Act requests to the General Services Administration and LEED (read more on TPA’s LEED Watch).  There is some good news because more action is coming from Congress to limit the unchecked growth of LEED.

The good news comes from an unlikely source, the United States Senate.  Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) has introduced an amendment to the Department of Transportation (DOT) and Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) appropriations bill, aka the THUD appropriations bill, that would prevent DOT and HUD from using LEED to certify the projects they fund.

According to a report by Energy And Environment Daily on the Wicker amendment,  “Wicker’s amendment is seen as an effort to rein in the use of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, standards to certify federal building projects.”  The article went on to say that, “The U.S. Green Building Council earlier this month announced that its members had approved the fourth version of LEED. But the certification system has faced criticism from some industries that say it penalizes the use of certain types of building materials… Wicker’s amendment would bar DOT and HUD from funding projects requiring the use of any building certification system that is not ‘based on voluntary consensus standards’ developed through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) process. And any standard could only exclude ‘a building material if the exclusion is well-founded and based on robust scientific data and risk assessment principles.’”  Sounds like some commonsense.

As TPA has written throughout its coverage of LEED, there is concern that a private, non-science based non-profit organizations like the USGBC is involved in creating environmental standards that are then relied upon to dictate government policies and in turn cost taxpayers millions of dollars. The Wicker amendment is a step in the right direction and TPA (and all taxpayers) should applaud Sen. Wicker for his efforts. TPA will continue to monitor all legislative developments with LEED.