Over the last eight months the City of Sacramento, in conjunction with the County and Valley Vision, convened a 26 member working group to ultimately come up with solutions to encourage the marketing, education, and use of green building practices in Sacramento. The task force consisted of members from the: real estate/building industry, numerous “green” related businesses, and local government/Valley Vision staff. As a member of the task force, we were pleased to be a part of the six-month stakeholder process and applaud the majority of the Task Force final recommendations to promote sustainable building practices. However, we have staunch concerns with one item of the recommendations (1.1), which would impose additional CalGreen mandatory regulations on Sacramento construction in 2012. These added regulations would be voluntary in almost all other jurisdictions in the rest of the State of California, let alone the nation.
The “building code and process” improvement related recommendations would make substantial progress in helping the industry build in a greener fashion. A comprehensive review of building codes that create a consistent and aligned process for all government agencies would not only streamline the green building process but also remove the barriers to low impact development (LID). Creating an Alternative Means Requests Database to monitor local green practices could be instrumental tool in helping local builders utilize the sustainable processes that can be implemented with the best success. Also, as a trade association with an online planroom (a collection of construction projects out to bid), we encourage public agencies to embrace today’s technology by sending all projects electronically instead of sending thousands of paper hard copy bids each year.
We also see the “financing and incentives” recommendations as intriguing proposals that will most certainly result in a more sustainable built environment and equitable fees structures for green building. For example, lowering impact fees on projects that have a lesser impact on public infrastructure (i.e. CalGreen Tier 1 or 2, LEED, Etc.) makes sense and passes the appropriate nexus test. Streamlining projects that will go above and beyond current standards would also make construction businesses desire to build this way because as the saying goes “time is money”.
Educating and marketing green building practices is something the Region Builders believes in. Industry organization’s have held countless green education seminars regarding the best practices and why it should be encouraged. These groups will continue to promote sustainable building and have notified City Staff that we would embrace the opportunity to partner with the City in educating not only the City’s builders but also City staffers if needed. As we all know, Public-private partnerships are a sometimes necessary and effective way to educate and market in today’s present economy.
The major concern we have with these recommendations is the additional CalGreen building Code mandatory requirements beginning in 2012. Our reasoning includes: adding an additional cost and burden on an important economic industry that is already losing jobs at an alarming rate, creating a region of inconsistency where builders have to deal with a different code in each different jurisdiction, and even the discussion of adding mandatory requirements after the State of California just adopted the first in the nation green building code simply only two months ago. The recently adopted CalGreen code already has dozens of new mandatory requirements that local builders are struggling to get acquainted with as well as practice cost effectively. If the recommendation was adopted it would then result in a building code that instrumentally changed in 2011, then again in 2012, and then once again in 2014 during the regular three year state building code cycle. This in essence would be a change in codes almost every year to a first in the nation green building code, and on a struggling real estate and construction market. Not to mention, costing the city additional general fund dollars to implement the additional requirements.
In closing we urge City Staff to pursue the majority of the recommendations outlined above that will incentive and encourage our City towards a more sustainable built environment. However, we strongly recommend staff not to impose any additional CalGreen mandatory requirements that would stifle development and burden an already hurting regional construction industry.
