Good question Mr. Fox, even better policy Mr. Ulman

Ken Ulman is pushing for legislation to mandate green building in Howard County. In addition to mandating the green building, Ulman has also provided financial incentives for developers to build green.

Ulman also wants to require all new buildings of 20,000 square feet or more to be certified in nationally accepted Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, techniques.

Developers who build silver-, gold- or platinum-certified buildings — levels of LEED standards — would receive 25 percent, 50 percent or 75 percent tax credits, respectively, Ulman said.

Greg Fox has a darn good question. He asks “If we incentivize it [building green], why is there a need to mandate it?”

I think the County should mandate developers to build green, incentives or not. If government has any legitimate reason to meddle in markets whatsoever, that reason should be to prevent externalities. The biggest problems with free markets is that firms are motivated to harm public goods (like our clean air or the environment) since the offending firm receives all of the benefits of their actions but shares the costs with the entire community. For example, if I own a chemical company, it might be more tempting for me to dump harmful waste chemicals in a nearby river than to incur costs to dispose of the harmful chemicals at a proper treatment facility. Therefore, governments have a duty to step in and prevent this type of dilemma.

Therefore, while not exactly the same thing as dumping chemicals in our rivers, developers who insist on building environmentally inefficient buildings are effectively asking the community to share in the costs of that decision. Since the economics of building green makes sense, even more so now with additional incentives, I have no problem with the County Government requiring green building.

Plus, these incentives may cause developers to take risks on environmental technologies that they would otherwise shy away from. Developers who are already successfully building green will be able to take risks on even better ways to help out our environment.

Thank you, County Government, for doing something useful with my tax dollars.