Above Grade is a new weekly read for the people who actually run buildings. No press releases, no fluff — just what matters this week and what to do about it.
THIS WEEK IN FM
NYC's Energy Code Is Live. Pick Your Path Before Someone Picks It For You.
Local Law 97 enforcement is no longer theoretical — NYC operators now have to choose between a prescriptive compliance pathway and a performance-based one, and the wrong choice can cost you years of flexibility. The prescriptive path is simpler but locks you in. Performance-based gives you room to maneuver if your building has quirks, which every building does. If you haven't mapped your baseline energy use yet, that's the first call to make this week.
Read: https://www.facilitiesdive.com/news/as-nyc-energy-code-enforcement-begins-operators-face-decision-on-pathway/815214/
That Cable in Your Ceiling Might Not Be What the Label Says
The Communications Cable & Connectivity Association is flagging a real problem: counterfeit communication cables are showing up in buildings, and unlike the real thing, they fail badly in a fire — more smoke, more flame spread. The counterfeit stuff often looks identical until it burns. If your team is sourcing cable through secondary distributors or unfamiliar online channels, it's worth verifying the supply chain before the next project pulls wire through occupied space.
Read: https://www.facilitiesdive.com/news/counterfeit-communication-cables-pose-building-threat-trade-group/815080/
OSHA Backing Off Doesn't Mean You Should
There's a proposal floating to reduce OSHA enforcement of the general duty clause, and some operators will take that as a signal to loosen up. Don't. The general duty clause exists because no specific standard covers every hazard, and the hazards it catches — falls, struck-by incidents, confined space situations — are exactly the ones that kill people. Enforcement pressure dropping doesn't change physics.
Read: https://www.facilitiesdive.com/news/keep-protections-in-place-even-if-osha-eases-enforcement-safety-specialist/814911/
THE FIX
When your team is chasing corrective work orders, the backlog isn't the problem — it's the symptom. The actual problem is usually that nobody has defined what "caught up" looks like. Pick one asset class this month: RTUs, AHUs, fire suppression, whatever's keeping you up at night. Pull every open work order against it, sort by age, and set a 30-day close target for anything older than 90 days. It sounds obvious. Almost no one does it systematically. Getting disciplined about one asset class at a time is how you stop the backlog from becoming a capital request.
TOOL SPOTLIGHT
UpKeep
UpKeep is a mobile-first CMMS built around the reality that your techs are in the field, not at a desk. Work orders, asset history, and PM schedules all live in an app your team can actually use on their phone — which matters when you're trying to get a 58-year-old building engineer to stop using a clipboard. It's strong for mid-size operations with field-heavy maintenance teams. Where it gets thinner is on the reporting and analytics side — if you need deep fleet-level asset intelligence or complex integrations with BAS systems, you'll hit its ceiling eventually. But for teams still running on spreadsheets and printed work orders, it's a real upgrade.
Check it out → https://upkeep.com
THE NUMBER
$1.5 trillion
The estimated deferred maintenance backlog across US commercial real estate.
That number lives somewhere in your building. Every roof you've patched instead of replaced, every aging chiller you've nursed through another summer, every electrical panel flagged in an inspection and then forgotten — it's all in there. The backlog doesn't shrink on its own, and it gets more expensive every year you wait.
That's Issue #1. Glad you're here — there's a lot of noise in this industry and not much signal. We're going to fix that.
— Russell