Builders and Contractors Information

Download the Bid Packet (PDF).

The Office of Community Conservation’s (OCC) new Green Building program is intended to promote energy and resource efficiency and environmentally friendly building techniques for Baltimore County’s affordable housing. We have partnered with several state and national programs to provide standards and criteria. These standards and criteria were designed to address the three major types of housing construction:

• Renovation: A Green Building checklist (PDF) has been developed for minor renovations. More extensive projects will require a home energy audit and certification by a Home Performance Analyst.
  
  
• Gut-rehab: Stripping everything down to studs and floor boards opens up the opportunity for building green. The initial consideration for these projects is to be energy efficient. The base requirement for all gut-rehab projects will be to achieve an Energy Star Certification. In some cases, a US Green Building Council's LEED HOMES Silver rating will be required.
  
  
• New Construction: With new home construction, the opportunities for including green concepts are even greater. These projects provide a clean slate to start from which expands the possibilities for going green. Energy efficiency should be the starting point for all new construction projects and the OCC Green Building program requires that all new construction (single and multi-family housing) would earn the Energy Star label. 

The majority of new construction projects qualifies as affordable housing and should go beyond just energy efficiency. Given the flexibility of design with new construction, the ability to achieve a required level of green should not be difficult.The requirement for single and multi-family housing projects is to use the appropriate US Green Building Council’s LEED guidelines and achieve no less than a Silver certification or alternatively, the Green Communities program are available on their web site.

Program Note

These new standards and criteria are being incorporated into the Bid Packets (PDF) and Development Guidelines for all new funding requests. We are already implementing some of the green standards in our Single Family Rehab Loan programs, but have not fully implemented the requirements in the Multi Family programs. However, those standards will be implemented fully by September 2008.

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Revised June 3, 2008