All Posts Tagged With: "Green Building Initiative"

Earlier this week, Hudson County Assemblyman Ruben Ramos of Hoboken sponsored two green building bills as New Jersey’s fall legislative session opened up in Trenton. The first, A1626, would require affordable housing to implement green design features, though the bill as proposed does not mandate any particular formal certification or include specifics on how the legislation would be enforced. The second, A2065, would provide low-interest loans available to developers who construct or renovate a building that qualifies as a “high-performance green building,” which is defined in the bill as “a building having at least 15,000 square feet in total floor area that is designed and constructed in a manner that achieves at least a [S]ilver rating according to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Building Rating System as adopted by the United States Green Building Council.” Ramos was also a co-sponsor of last year’s Green Building Tax Credit Act (S1077, which is apparently still pending before the legislature); that bill would provide developers with up to $20 million in annual tax credits which they’d be able to apply to their state corporate, income, sewer, and water taxes.

Almost a year ago, USGBC announced that it was developing a new building standard in cooperation with ASHRAE and IESNA. Standard 189P for the Design of High-Performance Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings remained open for public comment through the end of last July. Though modeled on it, 189P is not the same thing as LEED. It’s intended to contain a series of performance-related criteria- including targets for energy and water efficiency- that buildings must satisfy in order for municipalities to issue a certificate of occupancy for new buildings or major renovation projects. The Green Building Initiative has announced that, it too, is in the process of developing a similar standard based on its Green Globes tool.

The Chandler Airport Commerce Center is an office and warehouse building that just became the first in the Copper State to earn any level of Green Globes certification from the Portland, Oregon-based non-profit Green Building Initiative. Located just outside of Tempe, the Center features a modest 27,000 square feet of warehouse space and 3,000 square feet of office suite space. According to Michael O’Connor, senior VP of Wisconsin-based developer Irgens, “[t]he building is relatively small, and going for LEED certification didn’t make sense financially.” Irgens has a number of LEED-certified projects throughout the Midwest, but the Chandler Center was its first to seek a rating under Green Globes.