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On Earth Day, April 22, the Portland City Council unanimously approved a new policy that will require buildings of a certain size to report their energy usage to the city every year.

The policy will apply to buildings over 20,000 square feet and will include offices, retail spaces, grocery stores, hotels, and health care and higher education buildings, according to the city. The businesses will report energy use through a free online tool called Energy Star Portfolio Manager.

Excluded from the new policy will be residential properties, nursing homes, places of worship, parking structures, K-12 public schools, industrial facilities and warehouses.

Not everyone is happy about the new rule, and Susan Steward, executive director of the Building Owners and Managers of Oregon, expressed her concerns at the council meeting.

Steward said she worries about the city not having enough staff to handle the new policy and about the need to give utility companies more time to update their software. She said some BOMA members who own 50 or more buildings will feel 鈥渁n enormous financial and time burden to the owner.鈥�

Steward also said the new rules should be voluntary, not mandatory.

鈥淲e’ve been fighting this for a year,鈥� she said. 鈥淲e understand it and we’re on board, but if we’re going to do this we need to be successful.鈥�

Steward said she’s concerned that a city hot line on the new energy reporting rule will overwhelm city staff.

鈥淚 co-chaired the city’s tree code committee and they brought out five staff members,鈥� she said. 鈥淭hey would get 60 calls a day just to do with trees. Now you’ll have 1,000 buildings trying to figure this out but they’re not planning to add staff.鈥�

Alisa Kane, green building and development manager for the city, said city staff will be reassigned to allow 1.25 full time employees to work with the energy reporting program. She said the first reporting by 500 buildings of more than 50,000 square feet will be required by April of next year and another 500 buildings of more than 20,000 square feet will report their energy use by April of 2017.

鈥淭his gives us time to make sure we can keep up with the demand and I know as a city we’ve run hot lines before,鈥� she said. 鈥淲e also plan to work with our partners in the community on training and education for building owners.鈥�

Steward said in other cities that have mandatory energy reporting, such as Seattle, the energy companies are able to upload energy use data directly to Energy Star, but Portland utilities are not yet up to speed.

Kane pointed out that Seattle has had its program in place for five years now and local utility companies are on track to make the software upgrade in the near future. Other options are also available.

鈥淭here are also third party solutions where another company can take the information and upload it at a very low cost,鈥� she said. 鈥淚t will be nice to see those companies enter our markets and take a lot of burden away from the (city) staffer.鈥�

But Wade Lange, general manager of American Assets Trust, said he is concerned that the new ordinance puts an undue burden on building owners. Lange’s company manages about 1 million square feet of building space that includes a 360,000-square-foot building at Southwest First and Main streets, the Lloyd Center Tower, Lloyd 700 Building and Oregon Square.

鈥淭he first thing we have got to do is acquire all the data and that is not going to be easy because certain retail tenants are metered separately and we don’t have access to that information, so it makes it difficult,鈥� he said.

Lange said he and many other BOMA members have worked closely with the city and have been doing energy reporting for 鈥渜uite a while.鈥� BOMA has put on programs to train people in energy tracking, he said, but he would be happier if the program were voluntary,

鈥淚t still requires ownership of the buildings to take on the entire burden and getting information may not be as easy as it sounds,鈥� he said.

Still, Lange said he and other BOMA members take energy efficiency very seriously and will work with the city to try and make the new ordinance a success.

The new ordinance cites climate change as a reason to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and states that the state of Oregon has a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 75 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The city stated in a staff report that buildings are the largest source of carbon emissions in Portland, and went even further than the state by establishing a goal to reduce carbon emissions of buildings by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The city’s Climate Action Plan includes an objective to reduce total energy use of all buildings built before 2010 by 25 percent by 2030.

The city’s new energy use reporting ordinance require building owners and managers to identify site energy use intensity (EUI), source EUI, weather-normalized site EUI, weather-normalized source EUI and total annual greenhouse emissions. The results of all energy reporting will be made public in October of each year, starting in 2016.

Building owners who do not comply with the new energy performance reporting rules will first get a written warning from the director of the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. For any subsequent violations, the owner may receive 鈥渁 civil penalty of up to $500 penalty for every 90-day period,鈥� according to a staff report.