It’s Just Not So Easy Being Green
Municipal codes make it harder
For builders to earn LEED certification
(03/12/2009) Government officials openly praise energy-efficient projects, but developers have run up against impediments in the state, county, and town codes to earning certification for green buildings.
Ari Meisel is a real estate developer and accredited professional in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a rating system for environmentally sustainable buildings developed by the United States Green Building Council.
Working in his family business, Meisel Development, he directed the effort to make the Watermill Ateliers, an office building with affordable apartments on Montauk Highway in Water Mill, compliant with the highest LEED rating available — platinum.
“LEED is not a fad,” he said recently. “It’s the future. A lot of municipalities have problems accepting that, but it is the future.”
One of the primary obstacles to achieving the platinum rating was the building’s parking lot. The Meisels wanted to use crushed pea stone, which filters water and prevents runoff.
“It was a problem with the town,” Mr. Meisel said of Southampton. “Even though 200 yards away there was the same parking lot, they were pushing for black asphalt, which is terrible for the environment and impossible for LEED platinum.”
The same issue came up in the overall design for 132 North Main Street in East Hampton Town, but the town and the developers of that commercial building were able to resolve it. Jonathan Tarbet, who owns the property with the project’s architect, Paul Masi, said the town engineer at first required asphalt, but that they proposed putting gravel down in a plastic grid instead.
“Tom Talmage said, ‘Prove to me it’s going to work’ and then he approved it, no problem,” Mr. Tarbet said.
Mr. Tarbet and Mr. Masi plan to get a gold rating on their project, a flat-roofed contemporary structure that prompted a lawsuit in January against the planning board for not requiring more thorough environmental review and against the town’s architectural review board, claiming that it had been biased in approving the project.
“The code’s not that strict to not be somewhat flexible, so we can work something out,” said Marguerite Wolffsohn, East Hampton’s planning director. “It’s not ‘Thou shalt asphalt.’ ”
She added that “LEED is something we’re very excited about. We don’t want to say if you do LEED it doesn’t comply with the code. It’s a good thing, something we want to encourage.”
Mr. Masi said, however, that “when we started our project, the town said it would help expedite permits trying to achieve LEED status and waive its application fees. It didn’t do either. There are real incentives in other places around the country, but they didn’t apply to us.”
Mr. Tarbet said that their parking lot may be the best thing for a natural water course running underneath the North Main property. After passing through the gravel, water will be caught in tanks that then let it out slowly over the next day, preventing flooding and runoff.
Mr. Meisel said this week that he thinks that he too will be able to resolve his parking lot problem with the town, but that he would like to see it and the county take a more enlightened approach.
His buildings should save 100,000 gallons of water a year by reusing it, he said, but this was not considered when determining how many dry wells had to be put in or how many sewage credits would be needed to allow apartments.
The Meisels were required to put in 27 dry wells based on the number of uses and the size of the buildings. “They have some book that they probably never update that says what kinds of uses use what amounts of water, and that’s what they go by, even though a green building can use 50 percent less water then a standard building,” Mr. Meisel said.
He added that he would be surprised if even two of the wells ever get wet.
The Meisels’ complex has been in the works for over three years, and they have owned the property for longer than that. Much of the delay was due to the site plan review process and the County Health Department. The town stepped in to offer some of its sewage credits to encourage building the affordable apartments, but that was not enough to expedite the process.
Mr. Meisel, Mr. Tarbet, and Mr. Masi all said they would like to see expedited review or waived fees for LEED projects, such as other towns and counties have adopted.
On Long Island, Babylon requires that any new commercial building or multiple-family residence of more than 4,000 square feet be LEED-certified. Once the building is certified, the town will reimburse the certification fees charged by the building council. In Huntington, an upfront fee on commercial buildings of more than 4,000 square feet will be refunded at 80 percent for any level of LEED certification.
Across the country, towns, counties, and states have opted to offer grants, expedited review, or other incentives for certified buildings. The laws recognize the extra cost in both time and money — Mr. Tarbet estimated it to be about 20 percent more than a standard building.
Those who build to LEED requirements, however, can expect to collect higher rents, and banks will take a quarter point off their financing, Mr. Masi said. A state program that was discontinued last month lowered financing for new commercial buildings by 1 point and gave breaks to homeowners who needed financing if they were meeting standards for energy efficiency.
“Everybody talks about wanting to promote energy-efficient design and promote energy conservation,” County Legislator Jay Schneiderman said. “It’s certainly a goal you see in town candidate platforms, but I don’t know if anybody has looked at the building codes at a state level.”
These are the codes that guide the County Health Department in its determinations, he said. “The county can’t change Article 6 and Article 12, only the state can,” he said, referring to the state’s laws on the flow of waste water.
Mr. Schneiderman said he could see an argument for having a group recommend changes to make current laws more “in line with new technologies and new building materials that are more energy-efficient.”
“Even newer bathrooms use far less water than in the past,” he said. “When buildings are designed to reuse gray water, that ought to be taken into account. How does that get done? It’s beginning to sound like a bill.”
State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. said he thought New York was “way behind” other states in offering incentives or a more enlightened building code. “There were good reasons for the regulatory requirements when they were instituted,” he said, “but with developments in renewable energy and conservation technology, they need to be rethought.”
Mr. Thiele said one idea was to look at the state codes through the State Department of Energy. “We need to streamline the ability to accommodate renewable energy and provide a mechanism to do it in construction,” he said, adding that it would help to speed up review.
“Time is money,” he said.
Southampton Town Councilwoman Anna Throne-Holst spearheaded a law that requires some of the strictest energy-efficient ratings in the state for new or significantly expanded houses. She noted that Southampton Village was close to developing some new standards for public and private buildings.
“At this point to have LEED standard requirements for municipal buildings, when all buildings not adhering to them will be obsolete in a few years, is a no-brainer,” she said.
Still, the resistance she encountered while trying to pass the requirements, which were based on Energy Star standards, led her to conclude that “it makes people very nervous having it codified.”
“It clearly makes the building industry nervous,” she said.
“It’s clear that there’s a whole movement going in that direction, but we’re very slow to react here,” Ms. Throne-Holst said. That may change when the benefits become more apparent, she said, although encouraging energy-efficiency may have to take a back seat while governments face budget shortfalls.