Earlier today, the City Council passed the four pieces of legislation which Mayor Bloomberg introduced last April as his "Greener, Greater Buildings Plan." As you'll recall, building owners immediately opposed one of the bills (Int. 967: Audits & Retrocommissioning), which would have required them to implement a bundle of energy efficiency upgrades with a payback period of less than five years after the results of a rolling audit process. While auditing remains part of the approved legislation, owners will not be required to make the improvements, which will now just be identified based on a "reasonable" payback period. Public buildings, however, must still install any retrofit measure that the audit pegs with less than a seven-year payback. Although the costs of auditing were noted by opponents to the bills earlier this year, mandatory energy audits are now required every ten years, though buildings certified under LEED-EB and Energy Star are exempt.

Michael Bloomberg (left) is like a little, orange, unimaginably wealthy litmus test. Or... well, really, he's more like a little, orange, unimaginably wealthy politician. Not just in the strictly literal sense -- for those just joining us, Michael Bloomberg is the mayor of New York City -- but in the sense that, despite his cosmos-altering personal wealth, he is also a prisoner to the rich-dude biases and interest group influence that have traditionally made politics so sclerotic and annoying, and have made "politician" something of a pejorative term. The "litmus test" part is this -- when you heard that Michael Bloomberg was rolling back the most ambitious (and, not coincidentally, onerous) element of his Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, did you feel surprised? Confirmed in your suspicions? It's relative, of course -- I personally felt a little of both -- but "disappointed" is a very acceptable answer.

As part of gbNYC's rolling transformation from one platform to another -- WordPress to Drupal, for all you curious nerdz -- we've been having to do a lot of re-tagging of old posts. The reasons for this are both complicated and uninteresting, but it's working: our Google rating is back, for one thing, and things are starting to make sense more generally. There has been an unexpectedly poignant side benefit to all this re-tagging, though, as your author (and super-intern Vik Gupta) have worked our way back to 2007-vintage posts about burgeoning new green developments that were supposedly thisclose to becoming the next big green thing. Vornado's LEED-CS Gold building a 20 Times Square is locking up an anchor tenant! Except... no, it's not, and construction has been halted. CBRE is confident that its LEED Gold 11 Times Square tower is going to do fine, even with an anticipated dip in the market! Except... it isn't.