The Roosevelt Sustainability Group wishes to incorporate LEED for Neighborhood Development Rating System into our neighborhood design guidelines. This planning document is intended to help guide future development that is in keeping with sustainability goals adopted in the neighborhood plan. The area surrounding our neighborhood commercial center, at 65th and Roosevelt, is zoned to accommodate significant density over the coming years. Several projects are already in the works that will require focused neighborhood review to ensure the development fits within our collective vision for our community. In order to encourage more sustainable development and to give our community better tools to discuss, encourage and/or require effective growth, we offer LEED for Neighborhood Development Rating System as a lens through which future development must be reviewed and critiqued. While this is an ambitious document that speaks to a wide variety of critical sustainable issues, a number of the chapters have direct relevance to the challenges and opportunities we face in our neighborhood. We imagine that the document will be used to promote more relevant discussion. We are not proposing that the neighborhood incorporate the checklist and point system outlined in the document.

Because the document has a copyright, the RNA needs to decide whether to adopt it in its entirety or not at all. We also need to access the document through the U.S. Green Building Council Web site. Those of us on the RSG who are promoting the adoption of LEED for Neighborhood Development Rating System believe the document will improve and, hopefully, inspire our community dialog. We have spoken with Vince Lyons at Seattle DPD and he was very encouraging about the idea. In fact, Vince mentioned that the city was moving forward toward adoption of a similar document, but it would take several years to get it in place. Therefore, neighborhood adoption in the interim was a means of helping the city reach their goals. Obviously, if the RNA was to adopt the document we would do so such that our neighborhood goals would not trump city regulations, rather they would be subsumed within the comprehensive requirements of the city.

Our hope is:

- Lorne L. McConachie AIA