County rethinking green-building codes

Revisions that would make Boulder County’s green-building code far more flexible will be recommended to county commissioners after gaining the unanimous approval of an advisory board on Monday.

The three elected commissioners will decide whether to adopt the revisions to the county’s BuildSmart program, which went into effect in April 2008, at a meeting tentatively scheduled for March 2.

As approved by the county’s Board of Review, the proposed changes would allow many of the people who plan to build a new home or addition in unincorporated Boulder County to meet the code’s requirement using a prescriptive approach — which works like a checklist — instead of the existing performance-based approach.

Now, BuildSmart allows people to build their houses however they want, within certain limits, as long as the total package meets a defined energy-efficiency threshold, which gets stricter as houses get larger.

“Our intent and our hope is that people will find this more flexible,” Jeff Dwight, the county’s chief building official, said at Monday’s Board of Review meeting.

The revisions, he said, are a direct result of a series of focus group meetings held by the county’s building division to gauge how the BuildSmart program was working.

BuildSmart has already been amended once. Over the summer, the county relaxed the performance-based energy-efficiency goals for new houses, particularly for those between 3,000 and 6,000 square feet.

The latest proposed revisions would require all new houses larger than 6,000 square feet to continue using the performance-based system. Additions that would bring the total house size over 6,000 square feet would also have to abide by the older rules.

But smaller houses and additions could choose to meet the BuildSmart code using a prescriptive method, which would require the builders to use a certain degree of insulation or a certain type of windows, among other things, without measuring the final efficiency of the building. Houses between 3,000 and 6,000 square feet that are built using the prescriptive option would also be required to add solar panels.

Paul Zopff, who estimates his architecture and contractor business has lost $1 million worth of work because of BuildSmart, said the revisions represent progress, but he’s concerned they won’t go far enough. Zopff’s company, Environmental Systems Design, has lost several clients because the cost of implementing the county’s code is too great, he said.

“I applaud the attempt to go and modify the system further,” he said. “But a little tweak here like what’s been done the last time or two isn’t going to cut it.”