City of Clayton
The Building Energy Awareness Ordinance (2025) aims to assess energy usage and promote conservation, ultimately creating opportunities for operational savings for building owners.
Building Energy Awareness ("Benchmarking") Ordinance
2025 — City of Clayton
In 2025, the City of Clayton passed a benchmarking ordinance requiring all large buildings track and report energy and water use to the City Clayton Building Official. This policy aims to assess energy usage and promote conservation, ultimately creating opportunities for operational savings for building owners.
Building Operations Team
Includes the property manager, facility manager, and/or building engineer, comprises the on-site experts who most closely understand the ins and outs of how a building is performing, how systems are operating, and where opportunities for improvement exist.
As a member of this team, you are the most closely connected with the building’s occupants and, therefore, play a substantial role in communicating among and between stakeholders. This means you need to have ready responses to growing concerns about health and wellness in buildings, as well as interest in building resiliency, efficiency, and electrification.
Get an energy audit.
Hire an expert to conduct an energy audit, if one was not completed recently, to identify all possible areas for performance improvement. This will include analysis of energy demand, consumption, and use patterns, and should cover both base building and tenant equipment and systems.
Ensure the audit team focuses on both potential capital improvements as well as operational strategies. Depending on how in depth your audit is, this can also include information about cost and ROI to aid in decision making.
Develop a strategic energy management plan (SEMP).
A strategic energy management plan should focus on operational strategies for improving existing equipment efficiency, low-cost energy conservation measures that can be easily implemented without ownership approval, and capital planning for larger retrofits and systems replacements.
What You Need to Know
What is Benchmarking?
Benchmarking is the process of collecting, inputting, and submitting data about the total energy and water a property consumed during the previous calendar year. This includes energy sources like electricity, natural gas, steam, and fuel oil. The benchmarking submission must also include descriptive information like the property address and gross floor area.
The data must submitted using the free online tool ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager. This tool tracks and assesses the property’s energy and water use relative to similar buildings.
Buildings not in compliance with the ordinance will be subject to penalties.
Who is Affected
The ordinance applies to “covered properties,” which are divided into two groups. Buildings owned by St. Louis County, the State of Missouri, or the Federal government are not considered covered properties.
– Group 1 Covered Property: This group includes properties owned or partially owned by the City of Clayton that are 10,000 gross square feet or larger.
– Group 2 Covered Property: This group includes properties that are not city-owned and have a total combined floor area of 100,000 gross square feet or more. This also applies to condominiums governed by the same board with a combined area of 100,000 gross square feet or more.
The “owner” responsible for compliance can be the title holder, a net lessee in a triple-net lease, or the board in the case of a condominium.
Deadlines for Submission
Building owners are required to submit their benchmarking reports annually.
– Group 1 Properties: The first benchmarking submission is due by April 1, 2025, and by every April 1 thereafter.
– Group 2 Properties: The first submission for these properties is due by April 1, 2027, and by every April 1 thereafter.
Before submitting, owners must run all information through the data quality assurance tools within the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager to correct any errors. If an owner discovers an inaccuracy in a report, they must submit an updated version within 30 days.
Record Keeping & Enforcement
Owners are required to maintain all records related to compliance, including energy bills and reports, for a period of three years from the submission date.
These records must be available for inspection by the Building Official upon request.
Violations
Violating any provision of this chapter is considered an ordinance violation, and each day the violation continues constitutes a separate offense.
Owners have five business days to appeal to the City Manager.
Exemptions
Property owners can apply for an extension or an exemption from the requirements under specific circumstances, including:
- A demolition permit was issued for the property during the prior year.
- The property had less than 50% average physical occupancy for the year.
- The owner was unable to obtain the necessary data from a utility or tenant.
- The property is primarily used for manufacturing or industrial purposes.
Data Privacy
The Building Official will make the reported benchmarking information publicly available each year. However, an owner’s ENERGY STAR score will not be included in the city’s summary report without the owner’s consent.
Owners can also request confidentiality if they can demonstrate that the release of information would divulge data otherwise protected by law.
The city may share data with utilities or for academic research, provided it has the owner’s permission or the data is anonymized.
Summary
- Energy usage data must submitted using the free online tool ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager. The benchmarking submission must include descriptive information like the property address and gross floor area.
- Covered buildings include non city-owned properties >100,000 sf (Group 2) and city/partially city-owned properties >10,000 sf (Group 1).
- The "owner" responsible for compliance can be the title holder, a net lessee in a triple-net lease, or the board in the case of a condominium.
- The first submission for non-city owned properties (Group 2) for these properties is due by April 1, 2027, and by every April 1 thereafter.
- If an owner discovers an inaccuracy in a report, they must submit an updated version within 30 days.
- Owners are required to maintain all records related to compliance, including energy bills and reports, for 3 years from the submission date. The records must be available for inspection by the Building Official.
- Buildings not in compliance with the ordinance will be subject to penalties. Ordinance violations are constituted as a separate offense each day a violation continues.
- Owners have five business days to appeal a violation to the City Manager.
- Property owners can apply for an extension or an exemption from the requirements under specific circumstances (listed above).
- Benchmarking information publicly available each year. An owner's ENERGY STAR score will not be included without the owner's consent.
