Large Building Owners to Submit Benchmarking Data by May 1

Local Law 84 of 2009 requires all large buildings in the city to annually measure and publically disclose their energy consumption. LL84 standardizes this process and captures information with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) free online benchmarking tool called Portfolio Manager.

These large buildings include private sector buildings that are larger than 50,000 square feet, and two or more private sector buildings on a single lot that are larger than 100,000 square feet. For water data collection, covered buildings that had an automatic meter reader (AMR) installed for at least the entire year of 2014 are required to benchmark water in addition to energy usage.

To check if your building is covered for energy benchmarking, check the following link for the 2014 LL84 Covered Building List: http://www.nyc.gov/html/gbee/html/plan/covered_buildings_list.shtml.

If you believe your building should or should not be on the list, you can email the New York City Department of Finance at benchmarking@finance.nyc.gov to dispute building square footage or the number of buildings on a tax lot for both LL84 and LL87 lists. Include in your email the building’s borough, block, and lot numbers; contact name; contact email address or telephone number; and reason for your square footage dispute.

If you miss the May 1 deadline, you have an opportunity to comply before the next quarterly deadlines of Aug. 1, Nov. 1, and Feb. 1. The DOB is authorized to issue violations for any property on the Covered Buildings list that has not provided a benchmarking report by May 1 deadline. Failure to benchmark will result in a violation and a penalty of $500. Continued failure to benchmark by the subsequent deadlines of Aug. 1, Nov. 1, and Feb. 1 will result in additional violations on a quarterly basis and a penalty of $500 per quarter with a maximum of $2,000 per year.