Going for Gold and Making it: My (Our) New York Olympic Region LEED for Communities Story

Going for Gold and Making it:  My (Our) New York Olympic Region LEED for Communities Story

It all started more than a century ago, or better said, eons ago.  In ancient Greece, prize athletes, often the core of the best and brightest that defended the cities states in war, competed below Mount Olympus, engaging in sport and contests before their gods.  Come the 20^th century and a renewed sense of how sport could surpass nationalism and create a movement that could cause pause in the chaos and even in conflict, the Olympic Games were reborn.  In a sleepy small village, in the midst of the deepest economic and sociological worldwide depression, present in 1932, the nascent winter Olympics took place.  Several decades later, in the midst of yet another worldwide ideological conflict, they returned to the same village, Lake Placid in the heart of the Adirondack Park of New York State, to wage in contests, coveting the gold medals that had by now become the sign of elite worldwide sporting accomplishment coveted by all.  It was in the midst of this backdrop, this context, this environment, it happened on ice, and the question that has rung through the ages since is “Do you believe in miracles!?!”

Today, 12 September 2019, has been a phenomenal day.  It’s a day that has answered that question yet again with Gold; Lake Placid Olympic Gold.  This is one of my summit moments.  Sitting only behind my marriage to my amazing wife Jackie, enabling the Village of Hope in Hawr Rajab, Iraq to come to fruition, and arriving safely home after two tours in combat, this was among my proudest moments.  Today, I struck Gold.  More aptly, however, it was not “I” that did it, it was a whole team.  WE DID IT!  The New York Olympic Region, the very place of the modern Miracle on Ice, achieved LEED for Communities Gold Certification!  WE DID IT!!!

This achievement represents several firsts, namely this is the first LEED Community that is:
1. multi-jurisdictional, representing 4 different and collaborating municipalities and authorities
2. an Olympic host site community
3. a community with a tourist centric economy community
4. entirely within a world renowned State Park, including parts of the Adirondack reserve
5. executed by collegiate level students guided by faculty immersed in a non-urban community

The particular part of this story that intersected with me began in the fall of 2016.  As part of the US Green Building Council’s (USGBC’s) NY Upstate Board, I heard about a soon to be released new version of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system.  LEED had originally been designed to rate buildings along a set of factors to determine its level of sustainability.  LEED, at that point and today, is the world’s leading sustainable building rating system.  The system had been extended in the mid 2000s to provide a rating of “Neighborhood Development”.  This new system, however, would extend the system way beyond any single neighborhood, to whole communities and cities.  LEED for Communities and Cities (https://www.usgbc.org/cityperformance/) leverages a combination of common metrics (derived from key things like the UN Sustainability Development Goals) with local community goals and objectives, in a performance based program of constant community development and improvement.  This, to me, was something I had to be on the forefront of understanding and applying, especially as a leading sustainability professional working across the entirety of New York State.

At the same time, something in connection with my day job was brewing.  Clarkson University is where I work full time as a professor and where I was lucky enough to spend my undergraduate days back in the mid-1990s.  Its home campus, situated as it is, north of the Adirondack Park in Potsdam, NY, has strong ties to the region and as such it’s VP of External Relations, Kelly Chezum was in the midst of term on the boards of both the North Country Regional Economic Development Council and the Adirondack North Country Association.  In conjunction with those activities, Clarkson through Kelly was in the midst of efforts to pursue the next iteration of the International University Sports Federation (FISU) Winter World University Games (https://www.fisu.net/, https://www.wamc.org/post/lake-placid-pursues-2023-winter-world-university-games; https://www.suncommunitynews.com/articles/the-sun/bid-to-host-world-university-games-in-lake-placid-gets-state/).  In an earlier effort, I had been part of a team working with Kelly in regards to a SMART Cities grant for the City of Schenectady, which had prompted a conversation about this application process between us in early 2017 when the idea of offering educational opportunities during the games came to the forefront.  It was then, as I reviewed the FISU application process, I noted that one of the major areas of evaluation for any host site’s bid must include a justification based on its sustainable aspects (https://www.olympic.org/news/sustainability).  FISU, given their relationship to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), has made this a top priority, especially based on criticism for the effects of the IOC’s Sochi and Rio games.  From this realization, I immediately sent an email to Kelly once I learned more about USGBC’s LEED for Communities program.  The proverbial snowball in pursuit of LEED Gold had its origin.

The email went like this:

“Kelly,

I have a meeting on Monday with USGBC in DC in regards to LEED for Cities/Communities.  Where are we at with Schenectady on their next Smart Cities proposal, if it is still going?

USGBC is looking for some pilot locations for their platform for tracking performance that would work real well with such a proposal.  Likewise in regards to our discussion regarding Placid.

I know [you’re] at the Board [of Trustees meeting], but if there is some sense of interest I'll bring it up in my conversations to see what support they can offer.  Thanks.”

Soon after, we met, I shared more, and by the end of June 2017, we agreed it was time to pitch this to the group that was putting together the FISU 2023 bid as well as the larger community leadership.  So working with Tracie Hall the USGBC NY Upstate Community Director and Vatsal Bhatt, the USGBC Director for Cities and Communities, we developed the pitch and Kelly set the meeting for July 17th.  What we heard was, this sounded great, they wanted to learn more.  Not to drag this out too much further in a play-by-play fashion, by March 2018 the Village of Lake Placid, the Town of North Elba, the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA), and the Lake Placid Central School District all signed on to pursue LEED for Communities certification as the New York Olympic Region (NYOR).  The lynchpin, however, was Clarkson’s role in all of this.

You see, for all of its history and its uniqueness, like many non-urban communities, NYOR lacks a permanent planning staff (Dean Dietrich is the volunteer Chair of the Lake Placid/North Elba Community Development Commission, https://www.futurelakeplacid.com).  While ORDA had the charge to maintain the 1980 Olympic venues, it wasn’t organized to pursue community scale assessment and certification.  This left NYOR with a great need.  With the bid for the 2023 FISU games front and center, this meant they needed an answer, and this is where Clarkson along with the USGBC stepped in.  As this effort was developing within NYOR, an opportunity to pursue a grant with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Smart and Connected Communities (SCC) program.  One of the promises we (Clarkson and the USGBC) made was that we would help the community pursue grants and other financial efforts to enable certification.  As such, this was thought to be a perfect opportunity to help NYOR get this off the ground.  This is where we quickly assembled a research team and in 3 months built a proposal for support.  While worthy in itself, this brought together all of the professional players that have been behind the scenes working for this day to happen (for more on the research and related efforts go to this link:  https://webspace.clarkson.edu/~ebackus/SHPS.htm).  At this point, I think it just makes sense to name them:

The Research Team

Full Name	Position	Institution	Expertise/Role
Erik Backus	Primary Investigator (PI)	Clarkson University	Construction, Planning
Stephen Bird	Co-PI	Clarkson University	Political Science/Public Policy, Energy
Anne Mosher	Senior Personnel (Higher Ed Faculty)	Syracuse University	Geography, Community Engagement
Santosh Mahaptra	Senior Personnel (Higher Ed Faculty)	Clarkson University	Business, Operations Management
Martin Heintzelman	Senior Personnel (Higher Ed Faculty)	Clarkson University	Economics
Sue Powers	Senior Personnel (Higher Ed Faculty)	Clarkson University	Sustainability, Education
Joseph Skufca	Senior Personnel (Higher Ed Faculty)	Clarkson University	Mathematics, Data Analytics
Vatsal Bhatt	Senior Personnel (Non-Profit)	USGBC	Planning, Certification
Steven Baumgartner	Senior Personnel (Consultant)	SmithGroup	Infrastructure Planning

Other Personnel

Name	Role	Organization
Tracie Hall	Stake Holder Rep (Upstate NY USGBC Director)	USGBC
Kelly Chezum	Stake Holder Rep (External Relations)	Clarkson University/ANCA/NYS Regional Econ. Dev. Council
Michael Pratt	Stake Holder Rep (Agency CEO)	New York State (NYS) Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA)
Craig Randall	Stake Holder Rep (Mayor)	Village of Lake Placid
Jay Rand	Stake Holder Rep (Councilman)	Town of North Elba
Jim McKenna	Stake Holder Rep (Marketing)	Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism (ROOST)
Roger P. Catania	Stake Holder Rep (K-12 Education)	Lake Placid Central School District
Kerop Janoyan Augustine Ledo	Other Research Faculty	Clarkson University
Peter McNally	Other Consultants	SmithGroup

Participating Organizations

Institution	Role	Notes
Clarkson University	Academic Institution/Investigators
Syracuse University	Academic Institution/Investigators
US Green Building Council	LEED for Communities Developer, Non-Profit Organization
NYS Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA)	State Agency, Sports Venue Operator	LEED for Communities partner/participant
Village of Lake Placid	Municipality, Host of the 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympic Games, Municipal Utility Operator in NY	LEED for Communities partner/participant
Town of North Elba	Municipality, Surrounding jurisdiction of Lake Placid (with several Olympic sites)	LEED for Communities partner/participant
Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism (ROOST)	Regional Development/Marketing
Lake Placid Central School District	K-12 Education	LEED for Communities partner/participant
Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK)	Non-Profit Conservation Group
Adirondack Park Agency (APA)	Permitting Authority and Conservation Oversight Authority

Sadly, the grant application did not succeed in being funded, but it did create a truly interdisciplinary/multi-disciplinary team that was enthused, engaged, and ready to take on the charge of “going for gold” with this community.

To that end, my complete partner in crime in this effort, Stephen Bird, took my suggestion of turning Clarkson’s fall 2018 Adirondack Semester (https://www.clarkson.edu/adirondack-semester) integrated research project (IRP) and make it all about LEED for Communities in NYOR.  This, then, is where the real heroes of this story enter the picture, Clarkson students.  Having made the decision to make the IRP focus on helping NYOR become LEED certified, droves of students applied to be a part of the semester (for the first time ever, the ADK semester had to turn away a good number of students from participating give that the opportunity is capped at fifteen).  The experience kicked off with a pre-semester workshop in August, bringing together the research team and the community leadership, enabling a focus and resolve for the project.  This set the stage for what was to be the hard work of doing the actual certification.

Taking cues from the already successful LEED Lab program by the USGBC, Steve and I began by giving context, setting the problem before the students and then educating about the LEED for Communities effort.  Over the first third of the semester, we also had the students meet with stakeholders, and the key partners in the overall NYOR effort.  Here is where I need to pause to acknowledge one of the immediate key contributions of the students.  The students immediately shortened our heretofore unruly acronym for this partnership, “ORNYS” (standing for the Olympic Region of New York State) and turned it into the shorter and distinctive “NYOR”.  I won’t give you a play-by-play on this entire semester (that is available here:  https://webspace.clarkson.edu/~ebackus/SHPS_files/20190315b%20LEED%20for%20Comm%20Lab%20Pilot%20Whitepaper.pdf).  In short, by the end of the term, they had done the lion share of the work towards determining the score and gathering the back-up for all of the fourteen (14) core LEED for Communities metrics and establishing the numerous metrics that NYOR, and its various partners, was dedicated to tracking over time.  There was some clean-up to be done and there were a few things in ARC (https://arcskoru.com) that needed modification for submission to the Green Business Certification Inc. (GBCI) raters, but the project was basically ready for review.

And review, if you are not familiar with the LEED process, takes time.  So, in order to keep things going, we asked four (4) of the students to continue on, namely:  Paul Barber, Benjamin Buck, Megan Flory, and Louisa Ulrich-Verderber.  These four amazing students (under the guidance of Steve Bird and myself), took on the charge of not only helping answer the mail on every single review comment and re-submission (of which there have been three (3) since initial submission in February 2019), but also preparing and supporting research efforts related to this work on the part of the above named faculty research team.  This included a paper that is nearing completion on the background literature in support of the use of Sustainable Holistic Rating Systems (like LEED for Communities) in non-urban contexts and presenting papers and posters in various conferences and symposia over the last 6 months or more.  And in all of this time we have been waiting, waiting patiently (well, sometimes not so patiently) to deliver on the promise we were all hoping for, to achieve, Olympic gold.

It finally came in another email:

“Dear Erik, 

Thank you for 1000108480 New York Olympic Region LEED for Communities application. GBCI is pleased to award New York Olympic Region with the LEED for Communities Certification, achieving the LEED Gold level! The certification recognizes New York Olympic Region's commendable efforts to meet its commitments towards sustainability and to measuring the tremendous progress the community has made.

Please find attached the Certification Review Report detailing the status of our findings. We encourage you to promote and celebrate your significant achievement. Marisa, copied here, will follow up to coordinate the next steps and resources that are available to you to do the same. 

We thoroughly enjoyed New York Olympic Region's application and understanding the many ways it strives to be truly sustainable. Congratulations again and we look forward to working with you in the future!

Best Regards,

Reshma Kulkarni

Green Business Certification Inc.

2101 L Street NW, Suite 500

Washington, DC 20037”

This is Gold.  Sustainability Gold!  Green Gold!  It’s just awesome!

And you know what makes it even more special?  This was a consummate team effort.  From Vatsal and the entire USGBC and GBCI team that made special provisions to make certification affordable for the NYOR community and enabling this to be execute primarily by students to my fellow colleagues that have made this not only a project but an intellectual pursuit of the first order.  From the NYOR partners themselves, trusting Clarkson and Steve Bird's and my leadership in this effort to get this done to several enablers like Steve Baumgartner at SmithGroup that were constant champions for the cause as well as the trust and confidence the entire Clarkson University institution has put on me and this team to demonstrate once again what Golden Knights are all about.  And without a doubt, this wouldn’t have happened without the students, who took to this like fish in water.  Especially for the stalwart four, who are now taking their learning and experiences to a new level in a startup firm working to help communities have this same kind of success, LEED Gold would have been a far way off.  This is special, special because of the amazing special people that I have been able to accomplish this goal with together.  Thank you all and Congratulations!

So to conclude, this is among the most significant professional experiences in my life.  I am bursting out with joy.  This is just too cool for school, as might have been said not too long ago.  There is more to do, this is but a mere milestone, albeit a significant one, for all of us.  WE DID IT!  Olympic LEED for Communities Gold!  Now upward and onward to the next, amazing and sustainable goal.