Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Should green buildings be mandated?
According to an article in today’s Washington Post, the Washington, DC, City Council will require private developers of more than 50,000 sq.ft. of new buildings and major renovations to meet the LEED certification standard by 2012. The Council rejected a request to also include the Green Globes standard in the requirement. According to the Post, the city of Pasadena, California, and Montgomery County, Maryland, have adopted similar standards. This raises a question: should green buildings, implying superior environmental performance beyond building code requirements, be mandated by government, or left to the private sector to decide when and where to build green? Is the specter of global warming significant enough to begin requiring all buildings to improve energy and environmental performance dramatically, no matter what the marketplace says? Or, in attempting to do the “right” thing, are local governments prone to overreact? What happens to a building that doesn’t get LEED registered or LEED certified? Does it not get a building permit to start construction, or at the completion of construction, does it not get a “certificate of occupancy”? These are great questions for lawyers to sort out. What do you think?
Posted by Jerry Yudelson on 12/06/2006 at 07:50 PM
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