LANSING -- The Upper Peninsula already is a green place, but a new Senate proposal might encourage it to go even greener.
Lawmakers introduced several bills that would give tax breaks for building projects that are LEED-certified.
LEED certification -- Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design -- means that a structure is built with sustainable and environmentally friendly elements and constructed in an eco-friendly way.
Jim Ebli, president of Gundlach Champion, a construction firm based in Iron Mountain, said certification considers several categories, including waste disposal.
"One of the requirements is that a certain percentage of the discarded material must go into a recyclable facility. Another is that the raw materials provided must be manufactured within 300 miles of the project site," he said.
A building can be certified when it passes an accreditation exam by the Green Building Certificate Institute, a part of the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit based in Washington.
Sponsors of the bills include Sens. Patricia Birkholz, R-Saugatuck; Wayne Kuipers, R-Holland; Hansen Clarke, D-Detroit; and Jason Allen, R-Traverse City.
Allen said that "this is to allow for local government to give tax credits for buildings upwards to 10 or 20 percent of the total cost of the project. It makes energy efficiency more affordable."
Allen said tax incentives would apply to updated buildings, also.
"What you can do is called a historical rehabilitation," he said. "It means you take an old building and gut it, re-engineer it and then you can apply for the breaks. There are certain standards for re-modeling, but it would have to be something significant."
The Senate committee is holding hearings about the bills and trying to establish what the state's tax revenue loss would be. Allen said they expect to see action on the bills this spring.
Ebli said building green makes sense.
"We mostly do LEED certification on larger projects," he said. "Of the projects we did last year that were over $1 million, over half of them were LEED-certified.
"It's more advantageous for the owner as far as the energy savings go," he said. "There's a higher initial cost going in, but there's probably a seven- or eight-year payback. If a building lasts 25 years, the payback is three times the cost of construction."
Eco-friendly construction has one major disadvantage, he said: the higher initial cost.
Tony Retaskie, executive director of the Upper Peninsula Construction Council in Escanaba, said that there's also a cost associated with becoming certified.
"A lot of folks will build LEED buildings but won't go for accreditation," he said. "For instance, some builders and architects only build bits and pieces of buildings in sustainable ways. There's a cost factor there for some folks."
Laura Fosmire writes for Michigan State University's Capital News Service.
