THIS WEEK IN FM
NYC's Energy Code Is No Longer a Future Problem
Local Law 97 enforcement is live. Operators are choosing between two compliance pathways: prescriptive (hit the checklist) or performance-based (prove your numbers). The prescriptive path is faster to evaluate — you either meet the envelope, lighting, and mechanical benchmarks or you don't. The performance-based path is more work upfront, but buildings with recent capital improvements often come out ahead on it. Pick the wrong one and you're either leaving efficiency credit on the table or walking into a $268-per-ton-of-excess-carbon annual penalty that compounds faster than people expect on a mid-size commercial building.
Read: https://www.facilitiesdive.com/news/as-nyc-energy-code-enforcement-begins-operators-face-decision-on-pathway/815214/
The Counterfeit Cable Problem Nobody Talks About
Fake communication cables are showing up in buildings — and they don't just fail, they burn. Counterfeit cabling skips the flame and smoke ratings that legitimate plenum-rated cable has to meet, which means it can turn a contained incident into something that isn't. If you've had any work done by subs you don't vet closely, pull a sample and check the markings against the manufacturer's database. This is a five-minute check that most people skip until they have a reason not to.
Read: https://www.facilitiesdive.com/news/counterfeit-communication-cables-pose-building-threat-trade-group/815080/
OSHA Pulling Back Doesn't Mean You Should
There's a proposal on the table to reduce OSHA enforcement of the general duty clause. Here's the thing: your safety standard shouldn't move because the inspection risk did. Regulatory enforcement is a floor, not a ceiling. If your fall protection program only exists because someone might show up and look at it, that's not a safety program — that's paperwork with a binder.
Read: https://www.facilitiesdive.com/news/keep-protections-in-place-even-if-osha-eases-enforcement-safety-specialist/814911/
THE FIX
Before you hire anyone to tell you which LL97 pathway to pick, run both scenarios yourself.
Most operators default to prescriptive because it feels simpler. That instinct makes sense — it's a checklist, you can evaluate it fast, and you either pass or you don't. The problem is that prescriptive rewards buildings that haven't touched their systems in years. If you've done capital work recently — new chillers, LED retrofits, upgraded controls — performance-based may reflect your actual building better than the checklist does, and your penalty exposure could be significantly lower.
The catch is that performance-based requires 12 months of clean, consecutive energy data and a calibrated energy model certified by a qualified professional. If your BMS is a patchwork of systems that don't talk to each other, or if your utility data has gaps, you're not ready for that pathway yet — and submitting a model built on bad data is worse than not submitting one. So the real first question isn't "which pathway" — it's "do I actually have 12 months of reliable data?" Pull your interval meter data now. If you're missing months or your submeter coverage is spotty, you know where to start.
Buildings where performance-based tends to win: recently retrofitted office towers, mid-size hotels with recent mechanical upgrades, any property where you've made investments that the prescriptive checklist doesn't give you credit for.
Buildings where prescriptive is probably fine: older stock where systems haven't changed, smaller properties where a full energy model costs more than the penalty difference, anything where your data infrastructure isn't ready to support a certified model.
The $268-per-ton penalty is annual. On a 200,000 SF office building running 20% over the carbon limit, you're looking at six figures a year. Do the math before you decide this isn't your problem.
TOOL SPOTLIGHT
UpKeep
https://upkeep.com
The strongest thing UpKeep does is close the gap between the office and the field. The technician-facing mobile app is genuinely intuitive — work orders, asset history, parts requests, photo attachments — and techs who've been getting work orders via text message or paper will adopt it without much resistance. That's not a small thing. A CMMS that sits unused because the field hates it is just expensive software for the office.
Where it runs out of road: reporting. If you're managing a complex multi-site portfolio and need to build detailed KPI dashboards, track warranty recovery, or run asset lifecycle analysis across 50 locations, UpKeep will frustrate you. The data is there; the reporting tools to surface it aren't deep enough. You'll end up exporting to Excel more than you want to.
Who it's right for: a single facility or small portfolio with a hands-on team, especially if your current system is a whiteboard or a shared inbox. Who will regret it: a regional FM managing multiple sites who needs reporting that can talk to a finance team or a capital planning process. For that, you're in IBM Maximo or Archibus territory, and you should budget accordingly.
The mobile app is the reason to pick it. If your team is mostly deskbound, it's not the differentiator.
THE NUMBER
$1.5 trillion
The estimated deferred maintenance backlog across US commercial real estate.
You already know what this feels like. It's the 20-year-old AHU that fails in August, the roof that needed replacement three years ago showing up in ceiling tile stains, the cooling tower that got deferred one more year until it didn't. None of that happened all at once — it accumulated one budget cycle at a time, one capital request that didn't make it through.
That $1.5 trillion number has a use beyond context-setting. If you're fighting for maintenance funding and getting pushback, industry-wide deferred maintenance data is a legitimate lever in a capital request. It frames your ask as part of a documented, systemic problem — not just your building being needy. Pair it with your own condition assessment data and you've got an argument, not just a complaint.
That's Issue #1. More next week.
— Russell
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