In its meeting on Monday night, the Newton City Council voted to exempt Newton-Wellesley Hospital from a Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO) that will make buildings report and reduce their carbon emissions over time.
“The hospital, it saves lives, it’s critical infrastructure, so I feel we have to hash out an agreement,” Ward 1 Councilor-at-Large John Oliver said.
Newton’s Zoning and Planning Committee (ZAP) passed BERDO last week, which brought the ordinance to the city council docket on Monday on second call—a process that allows further discussion on an item that a subcommittee already voted on.
ZAP passed BERDO without an exemption for Newton-Wellesley, but its version of the ordinance included a path for the hospital to gain an exemption in the future.
The hospital, however, would have to reapply for that exemption every five years and expressed that conditional immunity was not good enough.
“We don’t feel that that is sufficient clarity to confirm that the City of Newton recognizes the obligations that we are confronting,” John Meserve, a representative for the hospital, said at ZAP last week.
This is because to comply with federal regulations for hospitals, Newton-Wellesley has to keep two sources of energy, according to Meserve.
The hospital uses electricity—a permissible option under BERDO—as its primary energy source. Its secondary source is natural gas, however, which creates more emissions than BERDO would allow.
The hospital’s energy system makes it impossible to switch away from gas as a backup energy source because the alternative would be heat pumps, which could only produce a fraction of the energy that gas provides, Meserve said.
“Thirty percent of our existing load on the steam boilers can be replaced by a heat pump, but 70 percent of the load on those gas boilers will remain until there’s an alternative fuel to natural gas,” Meserve said.
In the event that Newton-Wellesley loses electricity and is forced to rely on gas temporarily, it would surpass the emissions maximum under BERDO and risk fines.
At Monday’s full council meeting, Ward 4 Councilor-at-Large Josh Krintzman proposed an amendment that would exempt the hospital’s existing buildings from BERDO, while also requiring the hospital to create a plan to establish alternative energy sources like heat pumps wherever possible.
“This amendment reflects a discussion that took place after the Zoning and Planning meeting,” Krintzman said. “The Newton-Wellesley Hospital folks and the city folks agreed on essentially a compromise.”
The amendment passed 22–1–1.
A motion to vote on the entire BERDO ordinance failed 11–12–1, so the council will take up the item again when it meets Dec. 16.
“I have a lot of questions, and I don’t want people to be disappointed when I exercise my right to charter the item so I can get those questions answered,” said Ward 4 Councilor-at-Large Leonard Gentile.
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