New York Town to Mandate LEED Standards

Monroe, a town with a little over 30,000 residents located in New York State’s Hudson Valley, may soon require all newly built buildings to comply with LEED standards.

Town officials from Monroe conceived the proposal due to fears arising out of the threat of global warming, a potential shortfall in energy supplies as well as economic reasons such as the increasing cost of power.

All new development in the city would at the very least require the EPA’s Energy Star building standard to be met. To ensure the standards are met, an audit of the building will be required to show that the building is at least 16% more energy efficient compared to current standards.

If the structure is over 4000 square feet, additional LEED standards would have to be implemented. LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a Certification that demonstrates how environmentally sustainable a building is.

The main criterias used to judge the Eco-Friendliness of a building are whether the property built upon is sustainable, water efficiency, use of materials and resources, innovation, impact on energy use and the atmosphere as well as the environmental quality inside the building.

If the new proposal is passed, developers would have to submit a LEED rating checklist and pay 3 cents per square foot, up to a maximum of $15,000. This fee acts as a deposit and will be returned if the building acquires LEED certification, other wise the fee will be put into Monroe’s general fund.

This new legislation may become one of the strictest in the United States, which has a lot of catching up to do in terms of building green and protecting the environment.

Even though the town of Monroe is small, the success of the law may have a ripple effect spreading to other towns in the region and throughout the country. This may mark one of the larger steps the United States has taken to combat the seemingly unstoppable effects of global warming.

Many will undoubtedly find these actions too decisive, but we are slowly running out of time to combat the effects of greenhouse gases. More cutbacks and more decisive measures will need to be undertaken if we want to preserve everything that makes this planet so great for generations to come.

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