The State of Alaska is formalizing the repeal of a regulation that would’ve applied to many real estate transactions in Fairbanks and North Pole.
The soon-to-be defunct regulation would’ve required homeowners in much of Interior Alaska’s urban core to pay for an audit of their home’s heating system and energy efficiency before they could sell. It also would’ve required owners selling any building in the area to register wood-fired heating devices, the predominant source of air pollution around Fairbanks, with Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).
The eliminated rule had been a measure related to the regulatory effort to wrangle pollutants in the communities. Air in the federally-designated “nonattainment area” continues to have levels of particulate matter of 2.5 microns or less (PM2.5) that exceed standards set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
According to state Division of Air Quality Director Jason Olds, DEC didn’t want the energy audit regulation in the first place. He said the department views the measure as something that may provide information but that doesn’t directly clean up the air.
“Without real benefit, it just adds sort of a burdensome requirement that slows down home sales and is just informational,” he said. “It doesn’t come with any real emission reductions.”
The DEC introduced the regulation as a compromise while working with the EPA under the Biden Administration. The addition came as part of an effort to appease the EPA after the agency in late 2023 partially rejected the state’s Serious Implementation Plan (SIP), which is meant to improve air quality in the Fairbanks area. The EPA under Biden had found parts of the plan deficient under the Clean Air Act, including its “weatherization and energy efficiency measures.”
But local elected officials and real estate professionals pushed back against the energy audit rule in the updated plan, saying it would hurt the housing market. This year, the EPA under the Trump administration decided the rule wasn’t necessary to comply with federal law, opening the door for the state to drop it from the air quality plan and remove it from Alaska Administrative Code.
The EPA gave final approval to the state plan – without the energy audit regulation – last month. Separately, the state DEC proposed to repeal the rule from administrative code Oct. 7, starting a public comment period that lasted until Nov. 12. The comments on that state-backed effort to nix the regulation overwhelmingly favored getting rid of it, with 16 comments opposing the rule and one supporting it.
Olds said that meant the department’s position on the energy audit regulation stayed put.
“It’s still wildly unpopular. There’s still a lot of negative comments that we received all through this process,” he said. “We had some other sort of supportive comments of the measure, but none of them were really necessarily relevant or change the position that we were at.”
The department’s decision means the regulation will never get off the ground. The requirements had been set to take effect Dec. 31, but according to a memo from the lieutenant governor’s office, their repeal from administrative code is effective Dec. 25.