Officials begin to rally around ‘green’ request

CITY HALL — Glendale is preparing to join the green building movement that has cropped up all around it over the past few years as city officials and commissioners begin to mull a Feb. 12 City Council request to come back with how to introduce green building standards.

Members on the Glendale Water & Power and Planning commissions — the two bodies that would have the bulk of input into a new set of proposed green building standards — say they are anxious to begin work on whatever direction comes out of a report that was requested by the City Council three weeks ago.

On Monday, city officials updated the Glendale Water & Power Commission on the preliminary form the effort was taking, announcing a committee made up of representatives from the Public Works, Planning, Community Development and Housing departments and the utility that has already begun to scope out what will be included in the report.

Much of it will be focused on what other cities in the county are doing in the way of requiring developers to build environmentally friendly buildings, and what planning officials feel make the most sense for Glendale, said Craig Kuennen, who coordinates the Public Benefit Charge program for the utility.

“It’s not clear what those recommendations will be,” he told the commission. “There’s a lot of things we’re doing, it’s just not in one place, where people can see it.”

While that may be true — Glendale Water & Power offers more than 20 incentive programs to customers to “green” their buildings — the city has virtually no green building requirements, or standards, on the books.

Almost a dozen cities in the county — including Calabasas, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Burbank — have established voluntary or mandatory green building standards.

Two weeks ago, two Los Angeles City Council committees approved one of the toughest set of green building standards in the nation, setting up a full council vote in coming weeks.

Pasadena already has one of the most strict set of standards in the county, requiring municipal buildings 5,000 square feet or more and commercial projects larger than 25,000 square feet to be built according to the most basic standards set forth in the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — widely known as LEED.