Update on Codes & Regulations

March is the Preliminary Budget season for the City Council, where all the different Council Committees, in conjunction with the Finance Committee, review the Mayor’s Preliminary Budget for City agencies. This takes up much of the Council’s Hearing schedule, although they can hold other hearings later in the month and pass legislation.

In the meantime, BOMA/NY has teamed up with the New York Energy Consumers Council (NYECC) and REBNY to take on a Local Law 87 matter that has been creating unnecessary violations. Under the law, buildings built in the last 10 years are exempt from the first retro-commissioning and energy audit cycle, as are buildings that have undergone "substantial rehabilitation" and that meet the most recent energy code. The City’s enforcement agents, however, have been applying the energy code requirement to new buildings as well, and they have issued violations to recently completed buildings. In response, our three organizations wrote a letter to the Department of Buildings asking them to reverse this approach and instead to follow the language of the law.

In another matter, several BOMA/NY Members, including Vice President Ron Zeccardi, met with staff from the Department of Health to discuss a number of issues related to their enforcement of the cooling tower legislation and rules. The meeting, which lasted nearly an hour-and-a-half, covered a tremendous amount of territory. DOH has nearly completed a new round of revisions to their enforcement tablet-based protocols, which they are trying to simplify and make less discretionary on the part of inspectors. We plan to come present the new approach at an upcoming BOMA/NY event.