Governor Schwarzenegger has vetoed the trio of green building bills which we presented here a few weeks ago. AB 888 would have required most commercial buildings in California to earn LEED Gold by January 1, 2013, while the other two bills (ABs 1058 and 35) were to apply to homes and public buildings, respectively. The Governor’s grounds for the veto were two-pronged; first, he argued that the LEED-driven standards would discriminate against <?xml:namespace prefix="st1"?>California wood products in favor of foreign bamboo. Second, he expressed a reluctance to allow a third party to exert control over state building codes, as was the argument advanced by several California construction industry groups and reported by the Sacramento Bee last month. Still, Schwarzenegger did sign 18 of the Sierra Club’s list of 25 priority bills (72 percent), the highest percentage of his four-year tenure. We’ll be keeping track of whether similar proposed LEED legislation suffers the same fate as these three bills and how California legislators respond to Schwarzenegger’s concerns as expressed in his veto message.

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