Benchmarking and Transpanrency Ordinance – THIS IS A DRAFT RIGHT NOW

WHEREAS, the Consolidated City of Indianapolis and Marion County is committed to taking steps to mitigate and adapt our community to climate change to ensure a healthy and prosperous community for all our residents now and in the future

WHREAS, in 2018, the City launched Thrive Indianapolis, the first sustainability and resilience action plan in our city’s history, which was developed through an extensive community engagement process and sets out the goals for our city in the coming decades to address the effects of climate change; and
WHEREAS, in furtherance of the Thrive Indianapolis action plan, the city desires to establish an energy and water benchmarking, reporting and transparency requirement for certain buildings within its jurisdiction to incentivize the city, the county and other property owners to improve the use of energy and water in buildings to reduce costs and to foster a cleaner and healthier environment; and
WHEREAS, improvements to energy efficiency will serve to spur economic investment through reduced operating costs, increased asset values and improved worker productivity; and

Sec. 710-101. – Purpose and Policy.

The purpose and intent of this chapter is to establish an energy and water benchmarking, reporting and transparency requirement for certain buildings to incentivize the city, the county and other property owners to improve the use of energy and water in buildings to reduce costs and to foster a cleaner and healthier environment, to spur economic investments and to create an efficient and affordable building stock.

Sec. 710-102. – Definitions.

Benchmarking (or benchmark) means to input and submit the total energy and water consumed for a property for a calendar year and other descriptive information for such property as required by the benchmarking tool. Total energy and water consumption shall not include separately metered uses that are not integral to building operations, as determined by the administrator.

Sec. 710-103. – Applicability.

This chapter is applicable to the owner of each covered property, as well as the tenants thereof, subject to any exceptions set forth in this chapter

This chapter is applicable to each utility to the extent that each utility is highly encouraged to:

Develop and maintain the capability to determine aggregated whole-building data for each covered property that it serves in an electronic format capable of being uploaded into the benchmarking tool for at minimum the most recent 24 months.

Sec. 710-104. – Collecting and Entering Benchmarking Data; Recordkeeping.

The administrator shall, beginning in accordance with the schedule set forth in section 710-106(a) and annually thereafter, make shared benchmarking information available on a publicly accessible website.

Beginning December 1, 2025 and on or before the first business day of December of each calendar year thereafter, the administrator shall make available on a publicly accessible website an annual report on the benchmarking of all covered properties.

The administrator may provide non-anonymized data from benchmarking submissions to any utility serving a covered property or to any federal, state, county, or city-managed energy efficiency or management program, provided that the data will be used only for purposes of offering programs

The administrator may disclose non-anonymized data from benchmarking submissions to a third party for academic or other non-commercial research purposes

Sec. 710-110. – Rules.

The board of public works is empowered to adopt and enforce rules and regulations supplementing this chapter which are reasonably necessary to make effective the provisions thereof and to supply further details, not inconsistent therewith, in the administration and enforcement of this chapter.

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