The Corvallis City Council heard a presentation Thursday, July 18, from the city’s Climate Action Advisory Board, or CAAB, urging the council to require home sellers to disclose a standardized energy score when listing a property for sale — a proposal the board argues is overdue, low-cost, and essential to the city’s climate goals.
The city council work session, held at the Madison Avenue Meeting Room, marked the latest chapter in a years-long effort to motivate Corvallis to join a handful of other Oregon cities that have already enacted mandatory Home Energy Score programs.
What the Climate Action Advisory Board is Asking For
The board asked Council to direct city staff to begin developing a framework for a mandatory Home Energy Score program requiring disclosure at the point of sale. The board was blunt in its written report that a voluntary version wouldn’t work. A voluntary program, the board stated, produces neither market transparency nor the dataset the policy is designed to generate.
Advisory board Chair Brandon Trelstad explained that home energy scores kept surfacing during the board’s broader research into decarbonization, even when the board wasn’t specifically looking for them.
“We’re not going out and asking other municipalities about home energy scores until they said, ‘OK, you’re asking about decarbonization and these other programs, have you done a home energy score? How are you assessing these things?'” Trelstad said. “So it kept coming up as this enabling action to reach other goals.”
What a Home Energy Score is and what it costs
A Home Energy Score is a standardized report developed by the U.S. Department of Energy that rates a home’s energy efficiency on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is most efficient. Like a miles-per-gallon rating for a car, the score is based on a standard assessment of energy-related assets and is designed to allow easy comparison of energy use across the housing market. The report estimates home energy use, associated costs, and provides energy solutions to cost-effectively improve a home’s efficiency. U.S. Department of Energy
The assessment is performed by a private-sector professional certified through the U.S. Department of Energy. An authorized assessor performs an on-site assessment and collects more than 70 pieces of information about the home’s envelope — foundation, insulation, walls, and windows — as well as its heating, cooling, and hot water systems. The process typically takes about an hour.
A Home Energy Score assessment typically costs between $150 and $350 and can be conducted as a standalone service or bundled with a home inspection. In Eugene, the city lists assessments at $150 to $300.
Portland’s 30-month program evaluation reported an average cost of around $125 there, with the city covering the fee for low-income sellers. Otherwise, under all existing Oregon programs, the cost falls entirely on sellers, not the city.
Oregon’s statewide infrastructure for the program is already in place. The Oregon Department of Energy and Earth Advantage, a green building nonprofit, manages assessor certification, scoring standards, quality assurance, and data systems. Any city adopting the requirement could theoretically plug into an existing framework rather than building one from scratch. But availability may largely rest on what capacity incumbent home inspection companies can offer in any given community.
Results in other cities: promising, but direct emission reductions are hard to pin down
The advisory board pointed to Portland’s program as the clearest available evidence the policy works. Portland was the first Oregon city to require the scores, with its ordinance taking effect in January 2018. In its first 30 months, the program generated more than 20,000 home energy scores citywide.
Portland’s 30-month evaluation found that homeowners cited the improvements list as the most useful part of the score, and many used it to determine priority upgrades. Buyers also reported actively using scores when choosing homes. A 2024 Portland analysis found that homes with a score were 10 times more likely to receive an energy efficiency upgrade than homes without one — a figure the CAAB cited as evidence of the program’s behavior-change effect.
Data from Portland’s first year showed the average home energy score was 4.6 out of 10. The CAAB’s written report noted that if homeowners implemented all cost-effective improvements recommended in their reports, they would save an average of nearly 20 percent annually on utility bills. Homes with the lowest scores — 1 to 3 — could save nearly 30 percent annually, and those homes represented nearly 40 percent of all scored properties. Of course, one has to consider what those improvements may cost, and if the improvements are made, or if they’re just used to bargain for a lesser sales price.
How much carbon has actually been reduced as a direct result of the Portland program is harder to quantify. Portland municipal analyses project that the Home Energy Score has the potential to reduce residential carbon emissions 25 percent by 2030 — approximately 5 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent — but achieving that goal would require upgrading tens of thousands of homes annually, a level of consumer adoption that vastly outpaces typical market activity. Portland’s own 30-month report was candid that the score program alone isn’t the ending point, describing it as a foundation for scaling upgrades rather than a direct emissions-reduction mechanism.
Corvallis’s own CAAB report did not project a specific greenhouse gas reduction number attributable to a Home Energy Score program for the city. The analysis focused on removing barriers to efficiency improvements generally, with the score as one tool among several.
Milwaukie enacted its mandatory program in October 2020, Hillsboro in 2021, and Bend on July 1, 2023. Eugene currently has a voluntary program and is debating whether to make it mandatory.
What the council said
Several councilors expressed support for the concept but pressed for more evidence before committing to a mandatory program.
Council President Tony Cadena asked how the present proposal differs from past versions. He also said he would need to see data demonstrating the program actually produces results. He noted the City has limited resources.
“Of the variety of programs that are out there, does anybody have any good information on their actual outcomes?” Cadena said. “Have people, in any significant way, made improvements to their home energy efficiency as a result of having a home energy score that they otherwise would not have got?”
Council Vice President Alison Bowden, and the advisory board’s council representative, said she wanted to know if anything about Corvallis’ housing market would potentially make it respond to Home Energy Score requirement might differently from the four Oregon cities that have already enacted mandatory programs.
Councilor Paul Shaffer said the council argued the council should look at how the scores effects the home buying process.
Councilor Charlyn Ellis argued that home energy scores are fundamentally a consumer protection measure — useful at the point of sale, while other programs like the retrofit clinics serve residents after they buy. Ellis said she believes the scores should be mandated.
Councilor Jim Moorefield said he would seek assurances that the city wouldn’t be in the business of conducting the inspections, and that he would otherwise like more information about who would lead the process – nonprofits, other community organizations and such.
City Manager Mark Shepard, noting Corvallis’s ongoing budget crisis and the possibility of service cuts or new taxes, recommended the council wait until after those financial decisions are made before moving ahead.
The case for — and against
Supporters of the proposal, including the CAAB and the stakeholders it interviewed, argue that the current market is flying blind. Local contractors told the board that many homeowners don’t realize high utility bills can signal building envelope or appliance problems, and that residents lack a centralized or easy-to-navigate toward efficiency resources. The board also argues the program is essentially cost-neutral for the city. They also said Portland’s experience showed the real estate market adapted without disruption and that there is an ample supply of assessors with quick turnaround times.
City staff, however, raised significant cautions in written materials prepared for the session. Implementing a mandatory program would require additional staffing the city does not currently have. Staff also noted that key program details remain undefined — how it would be funded, whether it would be enforced through code, what exemptions might apply — making it impossible to estimate implementation costs. Staff asked the council to clarify whether it envisions an applicant-funded program, a city-funded program, or something else before further work proceeds.
A recurring concern in CAAB’s gap analysis is the landlord disincentive problem. Property owners in the rental market bear the capital costs of energy retrofits but don’t directly benefit from the resulting savings, since tenants pay the utility bills. The Home Energy Score does not resolve that structural tension, though supporters argue that disclosure requirements at minimum empower renters to make informed decisions.
A proposal with history
This is not the first time Corvallis has wrestled with this idea. The city’s 2016 Climate Action Plan explicitly identified home energy performance ratings as a priority strategy — a commitment that, as the advisory board’s report noted pointedly, remains unimplemented nearly a decade later.
In June 2022, the debate became heated. Then-council President Hyatt Lytle abruptly left a meeting after then-Mayor Biff Traber criticized colleagues for initially moving to send the matter to voters. The council voted 5-4 to approve a home energy score ordinance with an April 2023 start date.
But, before implementation could begin, the council reversed course and voted the ordinance down 6-3 in November 2022. Expressed reasons for the decision included a feeling that council hadn’t been sufficiently involved in developing the ordinance and inadequate outreach to impacted parties, particularly the real estate community.
Since then, Corvallis has elected a new council, with several members who ran explicitly on pro-environment platforms. But they, too, want more information before acting — and they’re working with a tighter budget than their predecessors faced. Also, at least four of the Councilors will not be returning in January, having declined to seek reelection. Rumor has it, the final number of council retirees may be larger.
Advisory board member Jennifer Gervais acknowledged Thursday that further research is still needed. The board told councilors the proposal wasn’t intended to relitigate old decisions, but that in searching for ways to reduce the city’s climate footprint, home energy scores kept coming up as a prerequisite to almost everything else.
The council directed the board to keep working. No vote is scheduled.
CAAB Made two other proposals
Besides Home Energy Scores, CAAB is recommending two other initiatives as well.
The board completed an 18-month gap analysis on building envelope efficiency and appliance efficiency in Corvallis, drawing on stakeholder interviews with local contractors, nonprofits, and service providers, as well as a survey of 110 Corvallis residents conducted in fall 2025. The analysis concluded that a lack of awareness about energy efficiency options is the single most frequently cited barrier across all stages of the energy improvement process, therefore the two additional proposals.
Firstly, they recommend expanding the city’s web and print outreach to centralize energy efficiency information for homeowners, renters, and contractors. Secondly, they would like to see the city working with the Corvallis Sustainability Coalition to identify funding for an area coordinator to expand home retrofit clinics to renters.
City staff indicated concerns about redirecting staff and financials resources in a time of projected budget shortfalls. It is unclear if nonprofits could undertake financing any of the three CAAB recommendations.
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