Global warming and climate change are formidable issues that policymakers and California as a whole are facing these days, especially since the Governor signed the Global Warming Act last year which created a statewide greenhouse gas emission limit to reduce emission by 25 percent by 2020.

The legislature has also increased its activity in this area with a number of “green” type legislative proposals, including green building standards for public, commercial and residential buildings. Two of these legislative measures would have a significant impact on the CSU’s capital improvement program if enacted without the additional capital outlay funds to cover the new mandated costs.

The Board of Trustees has been supportive of these efforts and has taken a leadership role with an aggressive policy and program for CSU energy conservation, sustainable building practices and physical plant management we believe the good these bills are attempting to obtain would be at the determent of our students by limiting the buildings that can be built due to the high costs associated with these LEED ratings. The CSU policy promotes responsible stewardship of state and non-state facilities that aim to provide the best learning and working environment possible for our students, faculty and staff while minimizing the impacts to our environment. The policy focuses on defining sustainable design attributes and incorporating sustainable building practices into planning, design, construction, operations, and maintenance and includes longstanding policies in energy efficiency and utility management that have helped to save utility operating costs and provided plant managers with greater control of energy intensive systems. The incorporation of sustainable building practices into existing policy promotes building cost-effective quality buildings with a lowered environmental impact, while allowing individual project solutions based on campus location, academic program needs, and available funding.

Assembly Bill 35 (Ruskin) would require the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) to adopt regulations establishing green building standards for the construction and renovation of state buildings, including those in the CSU’s capital program. The standards would require at a minimum buildings meet the equivalent to those described in the United States Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) “Silver Rating” version 2.2 or better.

The other measure, Assembly Bill 888 (Lieu) would require CalEPA to establish green building standards that meet the United States Green Building Council’s LEED “gold rating” standards for commercial buildings constructed after July 1, 2012. It defines "commercial building" as a nonresidential building that is specified within the occupancy groups specified in Title 24 (the California Building Standards Code), which includes buildings that are “educational occupancies above the 12th grade.”

If passed these bills would take sustainability one step further and would likely result in the creation of requirements that would impose substantial costs and restrictions on design and construction of our system wide facilities and also likely impose new requirements and costs on the operations and maintenance of existing facilities. These broad mandates are unfunded, and, while well meaning, restrict the ability of the CSU to effectively manage its capital program and imposed added costs that have lengthy payback periods and may not be recoverable over the long term. Proposition 1-D provided the CSU with $345 million in the 2007-08 Budget for our capital improvement program. General obligation bonds are the only source of public funds for our capital program; even well meaning conditions may have a detrimental effect on limited dollars when our total capital need of the CSU is over double the amount provided in Prop 1-D.

AB 35 and AB 888 will both be heard in the Senate Environmental Quality Committee on July 2. CSU is working with both authors to address our concerns in the hope that the renewed interest by policymakers translates to increased support to CSU to make our common goal of a cleaner, healthier environment a reality.