Lawmakers’ building code sabotage

Ohmy... what they did. The sneaks. We should have howled in protest. Should have blown our tops before a storm blew Florida’s roof tops right off. But the public and the media — well, me, anyway — hardly raised a whimper this summer when the legislature from the most hurricane vulnerable state in the nation sabotaged the Florida Building Code.

But — come on now — Florida hadn’t suffered a direct hit from a hurricane since 2005. So what was the big deal? Besides, the legislation — lately known as the “Irma Who” bill — was tucked away with a dozen other items in a last minute, chocked-full-of-goodies bill. None of us ordinary chumps were supposed to notice that the new law undid a policy that had made Florida the national leader in storm-safe housing construction.

A killer hurricane, however, can make something as mundane as a building code seem downright urgent. Up until this summer, Florida had upgraded the state building code every three years based on the standards set by the International Code Council, drawing on the latest, proven, best construction technologies.

But developers and builders found all this resilience updating detrimental to their bottom line. So instead Florida has now adopted a maybe, maybe not approach to new construction standards. “We switched from a compulsory, every three years on time system to ‘voluntary’ review and adopt, either in part or in whole,” said a disappointed Leslie Chapman-Henderson, president of the nonprofit Federal Alliance for Safe Homes.

Decisions on whether to update building standards have now been left to the Florida Building Commission, a board dominated by the construction interests. “Voluntary” might as well mean never, said former FEMA Director (and former head of Florida’s emergency management division) Craig Fugate.

Fugate warned the 2017 National Hurricane Conference in April that the Florida legislature was hell bent on abandoning mandatory code upgrades. State builders, he said, were complaining that “updating the codes every three years was inconvenient. “Who’s it inconvenient to?” Fugate asked, rhetorically. “The homeowner who’s going to be paying for a home for next 30 years, that will probably go through one, if not more, tropical systems? Or to the builder or developer who’d like to build faster and cheaper?”

Chapman-Henderson told me that organizations representing architects, engineers, first responders, emergency managers and, tellingly, the insurance industry opposed the new legislation.

“What they are doing is tying themselves to a new system that won’t keep up with science and technology,” Jimmi Grande, senior vice president of the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, told USA Today last month. “That’s what’s scary about it.”

The prospect of higher insurance rates for their constituents didn’t seem to matter to Tallahassee. (Not to mention life and limb considerations.) Building industry lobbyists convinced legislators that this revamp would “protect Florida families by allowing our state to refine its own building code without the intrusion of out-of-state interests.”

What a turnaround. Florida, led by Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, had been upgrading building codes since Hurricane Andrew assaulted South Florida 25 years ago, destroying some 25,000 homes, damaging 101,000 other buildings and killing 40 people.

Back in 2002, Gov. Jeb Bush — “this fiscal conservative Republican I worked for” — oversaw the adoption of a storm-minded statewide code, Fugate said, “because he knew that stronger building codes were the foundation of a growing economy.”

Now, after adding another four million residents to the state population, it has become painfully obvious that Floridians can barely commute to work on our clogged freeways, much less flee en masse from a major hurricane. Storm-resilient homes and close-to-home buildings have become the only realistic refuges in overcrowded Florida.

Unhappily, as Fugate noted in April, that scenario apparently doesn’t fit the building industry’s business model.