City: Build green or pay up

Proposal would create tariff for projects that fail to meet standards

By Toby Van Fleet

The Portland Tribune, Oct 30, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (7 Reader comments)

JIM CLARK / TRIBUNE FILE PHOTO

Sitting just behind the towering Civic (and part of the same development), the Morrison is an affordable housing project built by Gerding Edlen in conjuncton with the Housing Authority of Portland. The building is going for gold-level LEED certification.

Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development is drafting a proposal for a “green” building policy that, if approved, would mandate a carbon fee for all new commercial and residential buildings and major commercial remodels unless certain green building standards are met.

Those exceeding the standards would be paid an incentive by the city, funded by carbon fees paid by others.

City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who is spearheading the effort, expects the proposal to be presented to the City Council early next year.

It’s not clear whether he has two other votes on the council to approve such a program.

While no one yet knows how much the fees would add to building costs, certain groups already are wary of the potential mandate and, depending on how the proposal is written, could oppose it.

“It would be very difficult for the home-builders to support a mandate,” said Jim McCauley, president of government affairs at the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland, which deals solely in residential construction. “We always prefer a voluntary approach to getting a policy shift.”

Peter Hurley, the sustainable development office’s green building program manager, was hired in May in part to develop the policy, which could be the most aggressive green building policy in the country.

Hurley has been developing a draft with input from public agencies, developers, real estate professionals and energy experts, and he says he’ll soon be seeking feedback from trade groups like the Home Builders Association and the Portland Metropolitan Association of Building Owners and Managers.

The policy would operate on the basis of three concepts: the carbon footprint (the amount of carbon dioxide emissions that a building causes, mostly through the energy use) as well as education and technical assistance for meeting the building standards, and energy-efficiency rating and upgrading.

The nuts and bolts of the fees and standards still are being discussed.

Many builders not on board

McCauley said the primary issue, at least on the residential side, is cost.

“You can get a house built green, but you have to be willing to pay for it,” he said, pointing out that additional building costs are “not exactly something we need in the market right now.”

But to what extent the policy would add to building costs still is unknown.

Mark Edlen, of Gerding Edlen Development Co., disagreed that green costs substantially more, pointing out his firm’s projects like the Morrison, an affordable housing structure that is going for gold-level LEED certification.

(LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a certification administered by the U.S. Green Building Council, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit.)

“I don’t think it’s just for the wealthy anymore,” he says.

Indeed, a growing trend in the affordable housing sector is building green. HOST (Home Ownership a Street at a Time) Development has been building Earth Advantage-certified homes for years, most of which are bought by first-time home buyers who make less than the median family income.

Simon Tomkinson is an owner of Litmus Design & Architecture and chairman of the Development Review Advisory Committee, a group of volunteers from the business community that meets regularly with representatives from city bureaus.

“I’m extremely for sustainability, but I’m also a small-business owner,” he said, adding that smaller projects suffer more under the weight of increased costs than do larger projects like many of Gerding Edlen’s.

“My primary concern is that we absolutely positively have to get buy-in from everyone in the community,” he said.

He also has questions about how the policy will be implemented.

“Who’s going to pay for it? When? Who’s going to manage it?” he asked.

Build it green or pay

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