BCAP Helps San Antonio Improve Buildings Codes
Since late 2008, representatives of the Alliance's Building Codes Assistance Project have served the City of San Antonio and its Office of Environmental Policy by providing technical assistance to the advisory committees of the Sustainable Buildings Task Force. Charged with developing the city’s new advanced energy codes, the Sustainable Buildings Task Force was formed in response to San Antonio Mayor Hardberger's groundbreaking 2009 Mission Verde initiative, an all out effort to strengthen the city's economy through widespread sustainability efforts built on energy and water efficiency and conservation.
Earlier last year, San Antonio Mayor Phil Hardberger proclaimed Mission Verde, a city-wide initiative to build a self-reliant, flexible economy by attracting green businesses, developing green jobs, conserving energy and water resources, generating and distributing local renewable energy and developing a robust and efficient system of transportation and land use. Among the mayor's priorities was the adoption of advanced energy codes that would exceed the current Texas energy codes, which are based on the IECC 2000/ASHRAE 90.1 2001.
Sustainable Buildings Task Force
Because buildings represent a very large part of electrical energy use in San Antonio, and because resource conservation is a major component of Mission Verde, it was imperative that the building code proposals incorporate energy and water conservation.
So Mayor Hardberger appointed a Sustainable Building’s Task Force comprised of elected officials, city staff, architects, builders, engineers, developers, environmentalists, the City of San Antonio, San Antonio Water System (SAWS), the Real Estate Council and the Greater San Antonio Builders Association, among others.
The Task Force was charged with reviewing and approving code proposals, with technical assistance from commercial and residential advisory committees chosen by the City’s Office of Environmental Policy (OEP). The Alliance's Building Codes Assitance Project (BCAP) was actively involved in these advisory committees along with other representatives of the building community, many of whom were concerned about the implementation and feasibility of improving current state energy codes by 15 and 30 percent.
The challenge for both the Task Force and advisory committees was to develop advanced code proposals that would be acceptable to their peers and constituencies, all of whom hailed from different professional and technical backgrounds and therefore did not possess an equal understanding of the new codes. Their goal, in effect, was to ensure that the constituents were eventually comfortable with the new codes and able to work them into their lives and businesses.
Working with the Building Community
The Task Force worked close with the advisory committees, and convened meetings with constituants to provide guidance on technical details of the proposals under development.
BCAP representatives assisted in developing recommendations that the building community would find acceptable, while also providing technical “interpretation” to the Task Force stakeholders, many of whom were not technically inclined or aware of the potential impacts of code proposals on their businesses. Through funding from the Energy Foundation, BCAP also worked with the OEP to answer questions about the various code proposals, develop code language and work through many implementation issues.
The advisory committees were able to overcome the challenge of crafting recommendations that could be easily understood by stakeholders and implemented by the entire building community. The result was a set of technical recommendations that had a great deal of flexibility in terms of compliance, providing business stakeholders with achievable compliance options that would attain an improvement in energy efficiency of 15 percent above current code while also supporting current business practices.
In addition, the advisory committee set a future goal of 30 percent energy efficiency improvement by 2012 while pledging guide the community towards the creation of higher-performing buildings.
The Sustainable Building Ordinance was adopted by the San Antonio City Council on March 19, 2009 and set for a January 1, 2010 implementation date, marking a significant collaborative effort by many city stakeholders.
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