Advocacy

Advocacy Information
Legislative Updates
BOMA International

Advocacy Information

BOMA MEMBERS ARE REPRESENTED!

LEGISLATIVE VOICE

At the local, state and national levels, BOMA represents your concerns. From local code and real estate issues, to national legislation on issues such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, Indoor Air Quality and Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), BOMA protects your interests. Through professional lobbying efforts, BOMA International influences legislation and represents your interests before federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Justice Department.

ADVOCACY

BOMA is the largest commercial real estate organization making its voice heard locally, throughout central Ohio and before the United States Congress. Industry issues ranging from property rights to tax reform, from utility deregulation to indoor air quality, from building codes to window washing.

LOBBYING

City, state-wide and national BOMA volunteers and staff continuously monitor legislative activities and lobby on issues potentially impacting commercial real estate.

LEGAL INPUT

BOMA Ohio, BOMA Columbus and BOMA International staff provides all BOMA members with valuable support affecting daily operations.

REGULATORY

A myriad of local, state and national agencies, commissions, and bureaus are continuously monitored to insure that regulatory actions affecting commercial real estate have input from our industry. BOMA Columbus as a member of BOMA Ohio benefits from the legal council on retainer to BOMA Ohio. Quarterly meetings keep members up to date on the most important issues facing the commercial real estate industry.

Legislative Updates

In 2014 BOMA Columbus through the Legislative Committee worked with the City of Columbus on its goal of reduced energy consumption of 20 % by 2020. The following provides the actions of the committee participants.

Columbus Energy Challenge: BOMA Legislative Committee

Task force representatives Molly Leach of NAI Ohio Equities & Rob Beckwith of Schneider Electric

Like many other major cities, the City of Columbus is working toward the goal of 20% energy usage reduction by the year 2020 within commercial buildings. In order to achieve this goal, the City of Columbus put together a task force made up of non-profit sustainability groups, government green team leaders, commercial property managers, building owners, and developers.

BOMA Columbus has played an integral role on this task force, working hand in hand with the City to hone the requirements of the program in a mutually beneficial manner.

The primary goals of BOMA Columbus were to keep the benchmarking program voluntary, rather than mandatory, to increase the minimum sf threshold up to 50,000 sf, and to protect the identities of building owners who do not wish for their energy usage information to be disclosed. We are proud to say that over the course of five weeks, BOMA Columbus was successful in negotiating all three of these items. Those who wish to publish their building address and energy usage may do so, and those who do not wish to disclose this information can still participate by entering their data into EnergyStar Portfolio Manager. The City of Columbus will be able to pull trend information on an aggregated report, without the disclosure of specific building addresses.

The Columbus Energy Challenge kickoff event was held April 22^nd, 2014. The goal was to keep participation in the program voluntary. BOMA building managers who are not currently utilizing EnergyStar Portfolio Manager were asked to enter their buildings endergy usage information into EnergyStar beginning in April, 2014.

With the change in 2017 of the administration this program appears to now be on hold. We thank everyone that participated from the initial committee meetings to the building managers that voluntarily entered their data. We will monitor the program to let our members know if it should become active again.