DASNY to Require LEED Silver Beginning in 2008

DASNY, the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York, announced last week that it will require a LEED Silver rating for all of its projects beginning in 2008. DASNY, which ranked fourth in the entire country in 2006 among public authorities in terms of municipal bond issuance, oversees a variety of both public and private projects in New York across university, court, and healthcare facilities. Currently, DASNY is overseeing $3.5 billion in construction across 72 projects (which won’t be required to meet LEED under the new initiative) but is expecting a similar volume of projects to proceed over the course of the next few years. Importantly, DASNY is aiming for a thirty-two percent reduction in energy use for each of the new buildings that it constructs under the LEED program.

At the same press conference detailing the DASNY LEED mandate, First Lady Silda Spitzer also announced a proposed NYSERDA initiative that would provide energy efficiency incentives - based on LEED - to New York State homeowners. These incentives would be capped at $10,000 per home and be based on the home’s size, serving at least in part to (interestingly) “offset what state officials believe is a 5 percent increase in construction costs to make a home more environmentally efficient.”

• First Lady Announces Green Initiatives (PR)