Franklin doesn’t actually care

On the outskirts of Nashville lies Franklin, a small, affluent city. Franklin is ‘the first city in Tennessee’ that is LEED certified. For cities, LEED serves as a comprehensive framework for local governments to measure, manage, and improve their sustainability performance. We were excited about this, so we stopped in and visited with the city employee who was listed on their website as associated with the program.

Gotta say, the certification didn’t mean much. Evidently, the original LEED certification was evidently pushed about five years ago by a monied private party and when asked ‘what changes were made in city direction due to LEEDS’ the answer was basically ‘I can’t think of anything’. It also doesn’t seem like they are going to renew their LEEDS program.

For the areas that LEED considers that directly affect the environment (Energy, Water, Waste, Transportation) Franklin has a ways to go … with no action planned. For the LEED  category of Quality of Life, Franklin aced the test as one would expect in an idyllic, well-off ($118k/year average income), fancy dancy community.

All this means we have a load of questions about the LEED city certification program itself. What exactly is it good for other than collecting what are evidently really high fees from cities?