Part of the Okanogan wildfire complex flares up on August 21, 2015 in the hills near Omak. The fires, which killed three firefighters and critically injured another, threatened homes and communities throughout the area. (Photo by Stephen Brashear/Getty Images)
The state agency charged with developing codes for commercial and residential buildings in Washington says a new law took away its power to update rules protecting homes from the threat of wildfires.
Members of the state Building Code Council are now turning to the Legislature to ask for that authority back.
Last year, the council approved new codes for homes in the wildland-urban interface – areas between cities and rural lands that are becoming more susceptible to large wildfires. But those codes sparked controversy after builders, cities and environmentalists said they were too expensive, confusing and based on faulty maps.
The Legislature then passed a bill earlier this year to push back implementation of those codes until new maps highlighting wildfire risk were drawn. The bill also put specific code language in state law, which can only be changed by the Legislature.
The council says that provision takes away their ability to make future updates to the code. On Friday, the council approved a letter to lawmakers asking them to restore the council’s power to change the codes for homes in the wildland-urban interface.
“The Legislature overreacted and put guardrails on the Building Code Council that are not going to produce good codes,” councilmember Kjell Anderson said at Friday’s meeting. “The council needs the ability to modify the codes.”
The way the current law is written, the council can only adopt parts of the International WUI Code as is, or nothing at all, and, according to the council, there’s no ability for them to amend those codes to meet Washington-specific needs.
“It completely stops code progression as far as new technology, new material, any options to make things work in a more affordable or efficient way,” councilmember Angela Haupt said.
The letter was a request of Democratic state Rep. Davina Duerr, chair of the local government committee, who asked the council to provide her with more information on their concerns with the new law.
The bill passed during a short, 60-day session, Duerr told the Standard, and there was little time to do a full exploration of all of its impacts. She said the most important thing at the time was fixing the wildfire risk maps, which everyone agreed resulted in too many areas of the state having to follow the costly new codes.
In their request to Duerr, the council wrote that their robust public process for new codes with input from local governments and residents is lost under the new law.
Having the code language set in law, as opposed to in codes amended by the council, “leads to contradiction and confusion and takes away the ability to write good comprehensible code language,” Anderson said.
But critics of last year’s WUI codes say the reason the bill passed in the first place is because the council overstepped, approving new codes that were too overreaching and costly.
Sen. Lynda Wilson, R-Vancouver, told the council that the reason the bill was introduced was because lawmakers believed “wholeheartedly that it was such an overreach.”
She added that the council shouldn’t expect much to change in January, when the Legislature meets for its 105-day session.
“It won’t even be a year that this bill has been enacted,” Wilson said, adding that lawmakers “are not real apt to change something before it is even put into use.”
Duerr said she is not currently working on a bill to rework last year’s law, but the topic could come up again in the next legislative session.
“Right now, I’m just trying to understand what potential issues there are and if other stakeholders would have an issue with making changes,” Duerr said.