Boston's Building-Emissions Board Votes Monday on Letting One Owner Pool Five Buildings Under a Single Carbon Limit

The board that oversees Boston's law requiring large buildings to cut their carbon emissions will vote Monday on whether a single owner may group five of its buildings and meet one blended emissions limit instead of five separate ones, according to a meeting agenda filed with the City Clerk on Oct. 16.

The Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance Review Board, known as the BERDO Review Board, will meet virtually at 4:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 26. The agenda lists an "Application for Building Portfolio from Retals LLC for five (5) buildings in the neighborhoods of Brighton, Downtown, South Boston-Waterfront, and Fenway." It says the application was submitted through what the city calls Pathway 1 and covers office and multifamily housing uses, and that approval "would enable a portfolio-level Blended Emissions Standard for emissions limits compliance."

The agenda does not list the addresses of the five buildings or describe Retals LLC. The board says copies of meeting materials can be requested by email from [email protected] or viewed by appointment at the Environment Department at 26 Court St. Written comments are due by 3 p.m. Monday.

The board will also hear an update on 2026 BERDO annual disclosure and reporting, and will discuss and vote on "Extending Application Deadline for Certain Flexibility Measures to be used in Reporting Year 2027," according to the agenda. The agenda does not say which measures or what new deadline is proposed. Under the board's published schedule, applications for building portfolios and individual compliance schedules are due Sept. 1 for the following reporting year, and short-term hardship applications are due Oct. 1.

BERDO, a city ordinance, requires owners of large existing buildings to report their energy and water use every year and, starting in either 2025 or 2030 depending on building size, to keep their annual emissions under limits that decline over time until buildings reach net-zero emissions in 2050, according to the city's BERDO page. The ordinance covers non-residential buildings of 20,000 square feet or more and tax parcels whose buildings together reach at least 20,000 square feet or 15 units. Reports are due May 15 each year. The city says 5 percent of Boston's buildings account for nearly 40 percent of the city's carbon emissions.

Owners can lower emissions by cutting energy use and moving away from fossil fuels, or comply in part through alternative compliance payments that the city says are invested in Boston's environmental justice communities. The city's BERDO page also shows a current deadline: owners have until Oct. 31, 2026, to buy Massachusetts Class I renewable energy certificates through the city's REC Connector Program to meet their 2025 emissions standard.

A building portfolio is one of three "flexibility measures" that require the Review Board's approval, according to the board's page. A single owner may group its BERDO buildings into a portfolio and comply with a portfolio-wide Blended Emissions Standard rather than addressing each building individually, and all buildings in a portfolio must have the same owner. The other two are individual compliance schedules, which let owners with historical data set a custom timeline that still requires a 50 percent cut from a baseline year by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050, and hardship compliance plans for owners facing an eligible technical or financial hardship.

The Retals application is the third portfolio request on the board's agenda in about six weeks. On Sept. 14, the board took up an application from the Boston Water and Sewer Commission for three buildings in Charlestown, the South End and Roxbury with office, storage and services uses, according to that meeting's agenda. On Sept. 28, it took up a 10-building portfolio from Preservation of Affordable Housing in Roxbury, the Fenway, the West End, Mattapan and the South End, according to the presentation for that meeting.

That presentation shows how a portfolio limit is calculated. Because all 10 of the Preservation of Affordable Housing buildings were multifamily housing, the portfolio's blended standard matched the default multifamily standard: 4.1 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per square foot per year for 2025 through 2029, falling to 2.4 for 2030 through 2034, 1.8, 1.1 and 0.6 in the following five-year periods, and zero from 2050, according to the slides. The slides listed standard conditions for approved portfolios, including timely reporting and third-party verification, and a provision that the board or its designee may inspect any building in a portfolio with reasonable notice.

Portfolios can change after approval. At its Aug. 24 meeting, the board received notice that Harvard University was removing three buildings at 304-370 Western Ave. in Brighton from its portfolio after selling the parcel to UE Brighton Mills LLC on Oct. 23, 2025, according to that meeting's presentation. The slides said Harvard's portfolio would then include 79 BERDO IDs and that its blended standard, 9.7 for 2025 through 2029, would not change.

The Review Board is a nine-member volunteer body. Six members must be nominated by community-based organizations, two may be nominated by any person or organization, and one seat is reserved for the chair of the City Council's Environmental Justice, Resiliency and Parks Committee or a designee, according to the city. Besides ruling on flexibility measures, the board makes funding decisions for the Equitable Emissions Investment Fund and recommends changes to BERDO regulations. The Sept. 28 presentation listed Jessica Boatright as chair and City Councilor Brian Worrell of District 4 among the members.

The board meets on the second and fourth Mondays of each month at 4:30 p.m., according to its 2026 schedule. Its next scheduled meetings are Nov. 9 and Nov. 23. Registration for Monday's Zoom meeting is linked from the city's public notice.