Alicia McDevitt, director of the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act Office (MEPA), told an Environmental Business Council breakfast on Friday that the Patrick administration is considering scrapping its Super-MEPA permitting process and will likely eliminate some green building permitting guidelines.
But McDevitt also said that administration officials "are not revisiting the purposes" of the state’s development guidelines, which will only get tougher in the coming years.
McDevitt said that, when the administration launched its voluntary Super-MEPA pilot program last year as part of Patrick’s permitting streamlining efforts, they expected that five to 10 projects would participate. Super-MEPA was intended to allow several permitting agencies to run their project reviews concurrently. However, just one project, Trinity Financial’s Hamilton Canal in Lowell, has gone through the process in its first year of existence.
As a result, McDevitt said, "We’re wondering aloud whether to continue with it."
McDevitt’s office is also continuing to wrap its arms around new regulations that force developers to quantify new buildings’ greenhouse gas emissions.
"We’re taking it very seriously," she said.
As part of its new review process, MEPA is requiring developers to present three versions of green building plans: one that’s compliant with energy baselines in state building code, one that presents a "preferred alternative" and one for a building that would create lower emissions than the preferred alternative.
The most efficient alternative option has presented feasibility hurdles, and MEPA will likely issue new regulations this fall that scrap the lower-than-alternative requirement, McDevitt said. That’s because, in the past, MEPA’s feasibility standard has been a technical one; developers are now coming to McDevitt and saying that some green building techniques are technically feasible, but aren’t economically realistic.
"MEPA is in a new position of assessing financial feasibility," she said. "It’s a challenging issue."
Still, she said, the burden will be on developers to prove that aggressive environmental mitigation isn’t feasible.
"Show us your work," she said. "Don’t dismiss mitigation alternatives out of hand. Don’t just say, ‘We looked at solar but we heard solar is expensive.’ You have to satisfy us that you looked at what it would mean for an individual project."
