Mining Gold in Park City

Our area is about to jump up a few “green” notches with the December 11th open house celebration for Knox Housing Partnership’s 7 LEED Gold low-income homes in 5 Points. These are the first LEED Gold homes in the state and, I believe, the first LEED Gold low income housing in the US.
Mostly because my Energy Star Provider became a USGBC LEED for Homes Provider, I was privileged to be Green Rater for this project. LEED is the US Green Building Council’s program for energy efficient and sustainable home construction. KHP's construction project manager, Ken Block set the goals and Jason Estes from CAC provided the crew for the seven homes’ construction. It took a little bit of a push to get the USGBC program going but once we got past the Design Charrette (USGBC speak for planning meeting.) things went very well. I made regular site visits to verify that the LEED prerequisites were met and that the work quality for a Gold rating was accomplished. My roll was much more coach than cop and I found that the crew was very understanding and enthusiastic about the work we did.
A Green Rater’s roll is to provide an unbiased third party review of the construction process. Everything done is expected to be better quality work. From a builder’s point of view this might seem like a costly headache. In reality it was not. Nor is it significantly more expensive. These homes will appraise around $100,000. While we all know that material cost has become a moving target, the labor side was not much different. The gang at CAC is now much more aware and better trained to build homes to these standards so I expect the next group to be even better.
In the realm of subcontractors it helped that there was a Design Charrette and that they were all there. Some things, like caulking building penetrations, advanced framing techniques or sealed crawlspaces take some explaining both to builders and code officials. These systems stem from building science developed at places like ORNL and are more common in other parts of the US than here in ol’ East TN. Nevertheless, local builders will find that the techniques are not all that different from what they currently do, just more attention to detail.
Plan, pay attention to detail and be willing to give it a try and builders will find that LEED is a path to a new market.