A relatively new Connecticut law, Public Act No. 07-242, signed by Governor Jodi Rell on July 10, 2007 contains provisions mandating that, beginning January 1, 2009, all new public and private buildings over $5 million be constructed to meet LEED Silver green building standards (or the equivalent), and that beginning January 1, 2010 all renovations of $2 million or more meet the same standards. Residential buildings of four units or fewer are exempted, as are projects where the cost of meeting the green standards significantly outweighs the benefits.
On the surface, this would seem to be an extremely promising development, but there’s a catch. The law also requires that the State Buildings Inspector and the Codes and Standards Committee revise the state building code to require that buildings meet those standards as of the dates specified.
The devil is in the details. The first draft of the code revisions was considered insufficient to achieve the desired results, so it was withdrawn. A new draft is being written but it’s a complicated process that will take months, and maybe much longer. The first meeting of the subcommittee to discuss the new draft isn’t until July 14, 2009, and it will take months more before the code amendments can be completed and passed into law.
In the meanwhile, the green building mandates in Public Act 07-242 are unenforceable.
A memo dated October 28, 2008 from Assistant Attorney General, Henri Alexandre lists some of the questions that must be addressed by the new code. They include:
1. What is included in the cost of a building?
2. How is "constructed" defined?
3. What is included in the cost for renovating a building?
4. How is "renovation" defined?
5. What body determines what "an equivalent standard" is?
6. What is the exemption process?
7. What baseline will be used to determine when "the cost of such compliance significantly outweighs benefits?"
8. What is an applicant’s appeal process if an exemption is denied?
These are all good questions, but not necessarily easy to answer. It could take a long time. This points up the difficulty of mandating green building.
The whole issue of mandating green building would disappear if more people realized what it means to build green. If more developers understood that for the same cost as conventional buildings they could build ones that had higher occupancy rates, commanded higher rents, and fetched higher prices on the resale market, why would anyone build anything but green buildings? Why would anyone choose to put up a building that was less profitable, less competitive, and less valuable?
It will take a while for that message to sink in, but in the long run, information may well produce more results than legislation.<>/span>
