St.

Paul City Council Policy Committee to Order.

Well call, please.

Councilmember Bowie here.

Council President Naker.

Here.

Councilmember Joost.

Councilmember Coleman.

Here.

Councilmember Kim.

Council Vice President Yang.

And Councilmember Johnson, who will be arriving shortly.

Great.

Thanks so much.

Good morning, everyone.

We have two items on our agenda today.

The first is a presentation, uh, an update on our sustainable building ordinance.

Um I would invite Kurt Schultz and everyone who's with him, uh, who you will introduce, hopefully, to join us.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Good morning, Council President Naker members.

My name is Kurt Schultz.

I'm the Clean Energy Coordinator for PED, and I manage the Sustainable Building Ordinance for the City, along with uh support from my colleague Dave Schrader and our partners at the Center for Sustainable Building Research at the University of Minnesota.

Uh we have uh Liz Kutchy uh here who is a research fellow at CSBR and also is leading the uh policy update process this year.

So today I'd like to uh review the current ordinance, uh talk a little bit about the history of it, um, uh how it works, provide some context, and then describe the update process that we are currently engaged in, summarize what we've been hearing back from stakeholders, uh talk about what uh we would like to do next with the proposed uh changes and then QA and of course uh please um interject at any time or uh ask questions during my presentation.

So uh why would a city adopt uh a sustainable building policy?

There's a lot of reasons.

This slide, this slide shows uh a number of those.

One of the main reasons cities adopt policies like this is to reduce emissions.

And as you know, in the recently updated climate action and resilience plan, the city has set some pretty aggressive emissions reductions goals.

Uh 63 percent uh reduce emissions 63 percent by 2030 from a 2018 baseline, and then carbon neutrality by 2050.

Uh so we have our work cut out for us.

Uh I should say that uh on these slides, each of the buildings you see are pictures of uh projects that have complied with the SBO, the sustainable building ordinance.

This, of course, is the Penn Field that was one of the earlier projects that complied.

Uh buildings in St.

Paul are the primary emitter of emissions.

This is common in in cities like St.

Paul.

In fact, it's 67% of the emissions in St.

Paul come from buildings, and so if we hope to reach those goals uh that I just mentioned, buildings need to be a priority.

So a bit of context, a bit of history, uh stepping back.

Um in 2007, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency uh approached the city of St.

Paul and uh provided a grant to the city to develop a model policy that could be replicated by other cities around the state.

The idea was to create some sort of consistency between building policies in different cities.

Uh we used the grant, we partnered with uh the folks at the Center for Sustainable Building Research to guide us through the process.

And we launched a two-year stakeholder engagement and policy development process.

Uh we invited virtually every stakeholder group to the table, including developers, contractors, architects, green building experts, affordable housing advocates, BOMA, and others.

And in the end, everybody who was part of that process supported the new policy, the proposed policy, and all of the testimony at the public hearing uh was in support, and the city council adopted it in 2010 uh unanimously.

The policy applies to uh all new and renovated city buildings as well as all new and uh renovated private development that receives more than 200,000 of public investment.

We updated the policy in 2018, uh at which time we added major renovation.

Prior to that, the policy only covered new construction, and in 2018 we added, as I said, uh major renovation.

This is Hamlin Station on University Avenue, and virtually every new apartment building, everything that's been constructed on University Avenue in the last 10 or 12 years has also complied with the sustainable building ordinance.

There are two key steps to compliance with the ordinance.

This is Kendall's Ace Hardware on Paint Avenue on the east side, which is also complied with the policy.

Two key steps to the ordinance.

The first is to comply with a green building standard from the eligible list, and I'll talk more about that in a moment, and to comply with something we call the St.

Paul overlay, and I'll go into detail about that as well.

In 2009, we conducted, or I should say CSBR, Center for Sustainable Building Research, conducted a nationwide survey of city policies, city green building policies.

And very few built very few cities at that time had a policy, and those that did leaned heavily on leader LEED, which is leadership in energy and environmental design, which is the best known green building standard uh in the country.

Um in our community engagement or our stakeholder engagement process, we heard from developers and said, please don't have us just comply with LEED.