Molly Lane
Last July, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu signed an executive order
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ending the use of fossil fuels in new construction and major renovations of city-owned buildings. Mayor Wu previously mentioned her intention to draft and sign this executive order in her 2023 State of the City address.
The executive order
encompasses both new construction of city buildings and renovation projects
that affect 75% or more of a building’s square footage. Municipal buildings
impacted by the executive order will include schools, Police and Fire
Department stations, offices, and public-private partnerships on City land that
house City facilities. Heating, ventilation, air conditioning, hot water, and
cooking systems are all required to operate without fossil fuels in buildings
and projects covered by the executive order. For now, Mayor Wu’s executive
order only applies to city-owned buildings as under current Massachusetts law,
municipalities are preempted from passing fossil fuel bans to the entirety of
the city. The executive order is signed effective immediately, however, it does
not apply to projects that began the building process before the executive
order’s signing.
In Boston, municipal
emissions make up 2.3% of all of the city’s carbon emissions, yet over 70% of
those emissions come from buildings. Boston has seen efforts to decarbonize
both publicly and privately owned buildings, and this executive order furthers
these efforts. The city’s existing capital plan has already allocated more than
$130 million to advance decarbonization and revitalize older structures. By
2050, Boston hopes to reach carbon neutrality city-wide, and this executive
order expands upon the city’s Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure
Ordinance (BERDO) to achieve that goal. BERDO sets emission standards for large
existing buildings and requires all covered buildings, including municipal
buildings, to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
The city of Boston owns
over 16 million square feet of property, and the administration has indicated
that it anticipates the change will increase the demand for the trades and
professions that are part of the green building ecosystem. Programs such as
PowerCorpsBOS support these efforts by training Boston residents for new jobs
that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions in large buildings. PowerCorpsBOS is
learning how to run building operations with maximum efficiency and passing
this information on to trainees. Additionally, the administration indicates
that it anticipates the executive order will save the city money as
high-efficiency fossil fuel-free buildings are more cost-effective to maintain
in the long run, thereby reducing municipal energy costs and creating savings
that can be reallocated to other municipal services.
Molly Lane is a Law Clerk
with Moriarty Bielan & Malloy LLC. She is currently a 2L at Suffolk
University Law School where she is a Staff Member of the Moot Court Honor Board
Journal of Trial & Appellate Advocacy.”
