As Marsha Maytum, FAIA, notes in her letter, the annual face-to-face gathering of the AIA COTE Advisory Group at AIA in Washington was book-ended by meetings with House and Senate leadership on Capitol Hill.
On Monday morning, February 25, and Tuesday afternoon, February 26, AIA Federal Relations staff joined COTE AG members in conversations with senior staff for Speaker of the House Representative Pelosi (D-CA); Senate Minority Leader Senator Schumer (D-NY); Majority Committee staff from Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chaired by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK); Representative Sean Casten (D-IL), who serves on the new House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis; Chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO); Senator Grassley (R-IA); and Senate sponsor of the Green New Deal, Senator Edward Markey (D-MA).
These meetings were great opportunities for AIA COTE to share our legislative priorities and offer our support and expertise to House and Senate leadership on a number of issues including building energy efficiency, planning for resilience, and design excellence. We were encouraged by the degree to which House leadership has prioritization climate change, and also by the belief expressed by both parties and in both branches of Congress that improving the energy efficiency of the nation’s buildings was important work. We left behind our proposal for a new tax depreciation plan that would incent investment in building energy efficiency and descriptions of the 2018 COTE Top Ten winning projects.
Senator Markey’s staff was especially appreciative of the AIA’s quick endorsement of the Green New Deal as a “legislative framework.” One of the staff members characterized the non-binding resolution as a “request for proposals”: a framing that the AIA clearly understood and appreciated. Our discussion with Markey’s staff – as with many of the other meetings I attended – became focused on what we as design professionals knew was achievable. In follow-up, we will work with AIA staff to provide examples of projects, practices, and public policies from across the nation that we believe point the way to a zero-carbon future.
In other advocacy news, my seat on the newly-reconfigured AIA Board Government Advocacy Committee will certainly become an opportunity for the Committee on the Environment to more effectively influence Institute-wide public policy. We are currently drafting our 2019 advocacy priorities and – given the successes we had in 2018 working with AIA Government Relations and Advocacy staff – we are making them more ambitious. This year, we hope to be working to promote the inclusion of buildings (and the AIA) in any infrastructure bills that may take shape in 2019 and will strive to elevate the subjects of community preparedness and resilient design to a national priority.