For the last several years, D.C. has faced a challenging fiscal picture, and so says Mayor Muriel Bowser has proposed plugging some of the city’s budget gaps by slashing environmental programs. This year is no different.
In her 2027 budget plan, Bowser is pitching deep cuts to the District’s Department of Energy and Environment, as well as to a key funding stream for renewable energy programs. She’s also hoping to delay the enforcement of energy efficiency standards for both new and existing buildings just before they’re set to take effect, and is slashing funding meant to help property owners comply with those standards.
Bowser has framed the cuts as necessary ones while the city grapples with shrinking revenues and a local economy hammered by federal layoffs. She’s pledged that the delays of the building efficiency standards, in particular, are merely temporary measures.
But environmental advocates are skeptical of her assurances, given her repeated efforts to push back these deadlines and the size of the cuts contemplated for environmental programs. They hope the D.C. Council will once again find money to reverse at least some of those reductions, but that will likely prove difficult in a year with so many cuts elsewhere.
“The mayor went a couple years ago to one of the big international climate conventions and talked about what a great climate champion she is, and then she comes back here to D.C. and undermines our climate and energy policies,” said Lara Levison, chair of the D.C. Sierra Club’s energy committee. “It’s very disturbing that the mayor has been so resistant to this.”
Levison fears the delays to the building standards will be particularly impactful because property owners have been preparing for years for them to take effect in the near future. The city’s standards for new construction — requiring buildings to generate as much energy as they consume, a practice commonly known as “net zero” construction — were set to go into place at the end of the year. Meanwhile, enforcement of the District’s “Building Energy Performance Standards” for structures with up to 25,000 square feet of space was set to start in 2028.
Bowser now hopes to delay the implementation of both of those standards by a year. City Administrator Kevin Donahue told lawmakers last week he viewed it as a chance to “learn from” the implementation of energy efficiency standards for larger buildings, and incorporate new advances in technology into the city’s programs.
“That will allow for more time to have an energy code applied both to the District as well as all businesses operating in the District,” Donahue said.
In budget documents, Bowser’s deputies also note the city itself will have to comply with the building energy efficiency standards and that will likely “cost over $340 million in unfunded capital improvements, including for retrofits of a whole building, a whole system, or a system component, or a retro-commissioning of a current system,” and it doesn’t yet have a plan for how to pay for that work or its exact scope. In a year when the city’s budget shrank for the first time since the Great Recession, officials believe it will be challenging to meet those expenses. In fact, the city shrank its maintenance budget for all buildings, from government offices to schools, by roughly 17 percent in Bowser’s spending plan.
But Levison believes any delay is fundamentally short-sighted. The longer the city waits to start making these upgrades, the longer it relies on dirtier, less-efficient fuel sources. And that costs money too, she says.
“It’s a money-saver in D.C. buildings over time, it’s the money-saver in private buildings over time,” Levison said. “The challenge is that energy efficiency does require some upfront investment, but it pays off substantially over time. That doesn’t seem to be a calculation that this mayor is willing to make.”
Bowser has also frequently framed these energy efficiency programs as well-intentioned, but incompatible with the city’s goals of attracting more development. The District’s building owners and property managers have long opposed the standards, even going so far as to sue to block some of them — a federal judge tossed the case out of court earlier this year.
“I just don’t ever want to leave people with the impression that it doesn’t matter what our laws are, what our taxes are, how our business climate is perceived,” Bowser told lawmakers while presenting her budget plan last week. “It matters more than ever right now.”
Yet Levison observes some of the cuts will also impact development. Bowser hopes to pull $20 million from the Sustainable Energy Trust Fund, which seeds both renewable energy retrofitting programs for homeowners and the D.C. Green Bank. That’s a key loan fund for projects seeking to meet high energy efficiency standards, and it’s financed a good deal of construction in the District in recent years.
Nevertheless, Bowser has repeatedly targeted it for cuts: the council has restored its funding, but never filled it back up to prior levels. Levison fears the effects of this slow erosion of a key environmental funding stream.
“It’s truly penny-wise and pound-foolish,” Levison said.
The council will spend the next two months reviewing Bowser’s proposal and making changes to it. A final vote is expected on June 23.
The post Mayor Bowser once again targets D.C. environmental programs for budget cuts appeared first on WAMU.
Published Date : 2026-04-16 17:29:00
Source : wamu.org
