Green Building Law

Okay, let's move that lovely picture of Burl Ives from the previous post a little further down the page. Apologies for the long period of radio silence, here, but, um, Happy New Year? I can only hope that your holiday-period time off was 1) actually extant and 2) restorative. I don't know if Stephen ever made it back from Virginia; they got a lot of snow, and he could still be shoveling his way to the Piedmont Triangle Airport for all I know. At any rate, while we wait for the Top Green Stories of 2009 post that Stephen will eventually be doing -- and while I continue to work on my meta-masterpiece/online-performance-art Top 10 "Top 10 Green Stories of 2009" List -- let's take a moment to check out the list on display at Greentech Media, shall we?

As you may know by now, Chief District Judge Martha Vazquez of United States District Court for the District of New Mexico issued an order back on Friday granting a preliminary injunction in favor of the plaintiffs in AHRI et al. v. City of Albuquerque. The injunction bars the enforcement of the city's Energy Conservation Code, which the plaintiffs claim is preempted by federal regulation, pending the outcome of the lawsuit.

I thought a portion of Vazquez' 24-page written opinion was particularly interesting in light of much of our commentary on state- and local-level green building legislation here at gbNYC. "The city's goals [in enacting the disputed code] are laudable," Vazaquez wrote, "[u]nfortunately, the drafters of the code were unaware of the long-standing federal statutes governing the energy efficiency of certain HVAC and water heating products and expressly preempting state regulation of these products when the code was drafted and, as a result, the code, as enacted, infringes on an area preempted by federal law."

I did not attend West Coast Green last week, but was pleased to see that the conference included a panel discussion about the emerging legal risks associated with building green, titled “Packing a Parachute: Practices that Minimize Risk and Prompt Best Use of Green Features.” Some of the panelists’ remarks (which were published yesterday in an article on GreenerBuildings.com) resonated particularly salient in light of recent posts here at gbNYC, particularly with respect to how green projects are marketed, as well as our presentation of the country’s first green building litigation.

As you may know, the USGBC recently accepted public comments on proposed amendments to its certified wood credit. The purpose of the effort is to establish “a clear set of metrics, proposed as the USGBC Forest Certification System Benchmark, that any forest certification system must meet in order to be recognized within LEED.” In its current form, only Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood products are eligible for LEED points.

Earlier this year, Toronto-based construction consultant and gbNYC reader Leslie Marshall was asked by the Canadian Wood Council and the Canadian Forest Service division of Natural Resources Canada (similar to the U.S. Department of the Interior) to lead a research team and evaluate various green building rating systems. His team produced a report called Certified Wood and the Impact of LEED, which looked closely at the Canadian market and attempted to quantify most aspects of stakeholder experiences with specific rating systems, including LEED.