Boulder Green Building Guild offers education, support for building green

By Katherine Creel

In 1996, Boulder became the first municipality in the United States to adopt mandatory “green” residential building codes.

The Green Points Building program, as it’s known, applies to all new residential structures and renovations more than 500 square feet. Deciphering these ordinances isn’t always easy, however, and that’s where the Boulder Green Building Guild comes in.

In large part, codes are only as good as the builders and contractors implementing them, partly due to difficulty in understanding and applying them. For that reason, and also to help push green building measures into the future, a group of local building professionals founded BGBG, an association of like-minded, forward-thinking professionals, in 2004. Their goal? To make green building practices common practice.

Recognizing that more homeowners and businesses would embrace green building if they understood its benefits, BGBG works hard to educate the public. Each month they conduct residential and commercial brown-bag seminars, covering topics from energy retrofits and green roof systems for homeowners to commercial HVAC systems. It was one of these brown-bag seminars that first attracted Susan Weeks, president and owner of Blue Spruce Construction and Design, to the guild three years ago.

“I was so impressed … that I wanted to be part of that,” she says.

Now she serves as secretary of the BGBG board of directors. She explained that one of the guild’s core functions is to facilitate understanding and adoption of building codes and ordinances as well as the increasing number of incentive opportunities available to property owners. With an influx of funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, both the city and county are offering new programs to encourage energy-efficient improvements.

Julie Herman, who has been executive director of BGBG for more than three years, says this will likely make renovating and retrofitting a more active sector than new construction.

Because improving existing buildings is accomplished on a voluntary, incentive-based basis, though, convincing home and businesses owners to go along will be the main challenge.

“There’s a lack of education on the return on the investment [in] energy efficiency,” Herman says. She hopes, however, that the new programs will change that. “There’s never been a better time to invest in it.”

The guild also works with governments to help develop green building programs. Weeks advised the City of Boulder on its ClimateSmart Loan Program, which provides loans for property owners who want to make energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements, and she says other guild members have been tapped by the U.S. Department of Energy for assistance.

“There are some very talented, very knowledgeable, very dedicated people here,” she says.
For more information about the Boulder Green Building Guild, to view a list of members or to see a calendar of their upcoming events, visit www.bgbg.org.

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