Sustainable Land Development Today - July/August 2008 - (Page 16) REDEVELOPMENT Brown& Green As Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED®) gains velocity, unintended consequences are occurring increasingly with programs involving Brownfield sites and green design. Brownfields are real property, of which the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse may be complicated by the presence, or potential presence, of environmental contamination. Although re-using such property is an automatic one point toward obtaining LEED project certification, Brownfield projects can suffer by inadvertently limiting future “green” building and sustainable design with traditional application of land use controls (LUCs). The result is a collision of good intentions. LUCs are a reasonable and cost-effective part of the cleanup process. Brownfield LUCs do not clean up contamination, but can responsibly manage the chemical risk of contaminants left in-place. LUCs can be engineered structures such as impervious parking lots used as caps or institutional controls such as deed restrictions prohibiting excavation. While Brownfield LUCs defer costs of a physical cleanup to preserve available capital for initial reconstruction, they may directly oppose vital construction concepts of green architecture. For instance, the use of pavements as caps over contamination to ‘shed’ water from the property contradict “green” use of permeable pavements to maximize on-site stormwater retention. Parking lots can conflict with green space, water features, and ecological habitat restoration. However, such collisions are avoidable. If we understand how and when Brownfield redevelopment affects LEED, we can progress from what have been sequential, or at best parallel, pathways to a process that integrates Brownfield and LEED early in site-planning. Sustainable design can be incorporated earlier in the project by making it part of the environmental assessment and early cleanup planning. 16 July/August 2008 Sustainable Land Development Today Collision of How to avoid unintended consequences in Brownfield redevelopment and LEED certification. An understanding of the relationship between Brownfields cleanup and green design in LEED-certified redevelopment also provides opportunities for valuable LEED credits using Brownfield assessment information to support green building requirements related to sustainable site planning and water resources. By David E. Koch Traditional brownfields reuse Consider the following scenario. You are the developer of a contaminated Brownfield property, which in some areas exceeds cleanup levels. Your environmental consultant offers you two options for closure. Option 1: “Clean” restoration with unrestricted land use; cost approximately $500,000: • Treat or remove and dispose of contamination and backfill with clean soil. • Some nominal low-level residual contaminants may remain in isolated areas. • Stormwater may or may not be diverted off-site. Option 2: Risk-based restoration with restricted land use; cost approximately $80,000: • Construct using the proposed parking lot and building as an impervious cap for risk-based closure; contaminants remain beneath the structures and the cap. • Divert 100% of rainwater off-site through storm sewers to nearby stream. • Land use controls restrict soil excavation or construction below a depth of 3 feet. As mentioned earlier, the application of LUCs in lieu of remediation for Brownfield sites is well advanced and accepted by regulatory agencies. As a developer seeking to preserve reconstruction capital, your choice appears obvious. Option 2 is a reasonable, fiscally responsible, environmental-management process to bring an abandoned and contaminated property back to productive reuse for the community. Sustainable Brownfield redevelopment rarely occurs in a single restoration. Traditionally the first-build position is the initial restoration and makes maximum use of LUCs, tailoring them to fit the physical reconstruction at lowest cost. The second build may expand the initial reconstruction or occur as peripheral redevelopment, usually within a few years following the first. Although LUCs do not fit the second build exactly, designand construction-cost adjustments to accommodate them are not significant enough to be ‘deal killers’. The third-building position occurs much later in the restoration timeline and may involve fundamentally different concepts in planning and design unlike those of previous build positions. Today we find ourselves in this situation, transitioning from traditional brick-and-mortar construction to sustainable and energy efficient LEED reconstruction. Brownfields and green building seem synonymous with sustainable development. The property above is cleaned up using Option 2 and seeks a developer. The impervious parking lot prevents contact with subsurface chemicals in soil. The public health and environment are protected.
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