Building Code Battle May Be Over Contractors Give Blessing To 1994 Rules

Builders and inspectors are on the verge of resolving their battle over new building codes.

After months of impasse - fueled by misunderstandings and a disagreement over garages - it clears the way for the City Council to adopt the 1994 Uniform Building Code. The council’s Public Works Committee voted Monday night to recommend the city adopt the code. It was the fourth or fifth attempt at dealing with the controversy.

The North Idaho Building Contractors Association endorsed the approval, after months of opposition, with the caveat that Coeur d’Alene enforce the spirit of the law, not the letter.

The City Council has final say on switching from the 1991 building codes to the 1994 version. In the past, protests from contractors have prompted the council to return it to committee for more analysis.

That’s not expected to happen again.

“The essential problem is not that the codes have become very restrictive,” said Mike Jacobs, the city’s chief building inspector. “I would be perfectly content for the code to never change,” Jacobs said. “All it is for us is more work.”

Several meetings between the disagreeing parties has smoothed the waters, both sides say. “We are both working toward the same goal,” said Lori Barnes, executive director of the Building Contractors Association. “That wasn’t the case before.”

Many contractors, engineers and architects admitted some portions of the 1994 code are better than the older version. “After awhile it became apparent that just as pressing on their minds as some specific items in the code was an underlying frustration with the bureaucracy of the process,” Barnes said.

A key issue was garages, both sides acknowledge. Builders want to be able to build smaller garages in order to reduce costs and home prices, but balked at the costs of reinforcing and re-engineering walls.

Where garages used to be 24 feet wide, homes now are appearing with 18-foot garages. The change is necessary in order to build homes that will compete with manufactured homes and other low-cost competitors, said John Johnson of Crescent Homes.

That raised questions about how much contractors could shrink the size of walls that hold the garage door, and still meet standards for stability. The new code makes that easier, Jacobs said.

Area architects and developers also are pushing for the new code. “The architects want uniformity - all of the jurisdictions surrounding us use the 1994 codes,” he said.

Developers want to take advantage of less restrictive rules.

, DataTimes