How an Eagle County cohort is creating a climate action blueprint for mountain towns

The Eagle County Building Code Cohort is leading the way among mountain towns in crafting climate-conscious building codes that work toward the goal of reducing emissions by 50 percent by 2030. The cohort crafted a new set of 2021 building codes that go above and beyond new state standards that kicked in on July 1, 2023, and are slowly being implemented throughout the county. 

Derek Place, a building official in the town of Avon’s community development department, and Kim Schlaepfer, a senior associate of climate mitigation and resiliency planning with Lotus Engineering & Sustainability, presented together at the 2023 Mountain Towns 2030 summit in Vail on Oct. 18 about the Eagle County Building Code Cohort’s progress thus far. 

“Building codes are one of the most incredible policy mechanisms that we all have access to in any community, in any state, in our mountain communities, and they can really help us solve the problem of plugging up that hole (of emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases),” Schlaepfer said.

Building codes already hold relevance within a number of climate-related fields, with ties to energy use and waste disposal. Building codes are having an increasingly important role in transportation, as well, with rising numbers of electric vehicles. As electric vehicle ownership grows, so too does the linkage of electric vehicle charging to residences and other buildings.

A quick look at the new codes

The main goal of the Eagle County Building Code Cohort is to synchronize the building codes of municipalities throughout Eagle County with each other and with international, national and statewide climate expectations, for streamlining construction and enforcement efforts and bringing the county closer to accomplishing its climate goals.

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The new codes created by the cohort include expanded solar-ready and electric vehicle-ready amendments for residential and commercial code, two options for electric-preferred buildings, efficiency amendments for residential and commercial code for both new construction and existing buildings, and an exterior energy offset program for use of outdoor heating.

The cohort crafted the new code suggestions through a collaboration between experts at Lotus Engineering & Sustainability, Walking Mountains Science Center, a technical code company, a building policy and advocacy organization, and the town of Avon, which is currently the regional leader in innovation in building codes. Once the code was crafted, representatives from the cohort met with regional government staff and leaders, in particular building officials, to hear their feedback on the suggested building codes. Finally, the new codes have been taken to municipalities by staff members to be voted upon by government officials.

Each individual municipality must still adopt the building codes suggested by the cohort for them to be enacted into law. The towns of Avon and Minturn have adopted the code recommendations in full, the towns of Vail and Basalt adopted everything except the existing building efficiency, and the town of Eagle and Eagle County are in the process of considering and voting on the codes now. Gypsum and Red Cliff have not passed any of the new regulations as of yet and participated in the cohort’s process of creating the codes as observers.

Learning from challenges

Getting new building codes adopted requires convincing building officials in local municipalities of the efficacy of the codes and the importance of the end goal.

“They don’t live in our sustainability world,” Schlaepfer said.

Bringing sustainability-minded ideas to Eagle County’s building codes required a willingness to compromise.

“It didn’t feel like we wanted to go into this cohort with a predetermined outcome,” Schlaepfer said. “Of course, we wanted to push them. We weren’t going to be happy with maybe just electric-ready. We wanted to see how far we could go.”

The goal of collaboration throughout the county was the ultimate priority.

“If we were looking for regional alignment, we needed to meet everybody where they’re at,” Schlaepfer said.

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Stakeholders, such as the building industry, can also be difficult to convince of the need to move toward climate-conscious building codes. Implementing the cutting-edge ideas developed by those working in the sustainability field requires pressure from the consumer side.

“It’s supply and demand,” Place said. “If people demand it, (companies) will supply it.”

Using electric vehicle chargers as an example, Place said that as electric vehicles increase in popularity and demand increases for chargers, chargers will (and have, recently) proliferated in Eagle County along the Interstate 70 corridor.

An additional challenge the cohort has run into recently as it pushes for electrification is the ability of the local electrical grid to supply power to increasingly electrified new developments.

“There are areas of the grid that just don’t have any power left, and when you have to put in electric capacity for, let’s say, 100 EV (electric vehicle) chargers, the transformer in that space and the electricity running to that building is just, it oftentimes pushes the utility grid capacity over,” Schlaepfer said.

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Place cited the need to keep in mind the source of the electricity as communities move toward increased electrification and put more pressure on the energy grid.

“If I’ve got to burn more coal to create more electricity, then we’re going in the wrong direction,” Place said. Solar, wind, geothermal, hydraulic were all climate-friendly alternative energy sources Place suggested might be successful in mountain communities.

The next phase

After local municipalities have adopted the 2021 building codes, phase two for the cohort is to achieve the goal of reducing net emissions by 50 percent by 2030. The next immediate step is to work on the 2024 building codes. Creating fire safety regulations that specifically address the threat of electric vehicle batteries is already on the list for the 2024 codes.

At the moment, the 2021 codes regard electric vehicles as having the same fire risk as gas-propelled vehicles, Place explained. However, if electric vehicle batteries are stored near each other and one catches fire, the likelihood is high that all the batteries will follow. Firefighters are extremely limited in their capacity to fight the fire.

“All they can do is cool it, they can’t put it out with the technology we have right now,” Place said.