The City of Houston is about to begin engaging stakeholders in the City’s Construction Code Modernization (CCM) project, designed to build a resilient and sustainable City that can shield us from future shocks and stressors to keep Houstonians safe, healthy, and strong.
Mayor Turner turned to Director Haddock to ask her how to best utilize FEMA funding the City received due to the overwhelming impact Hurricane Harvey had on our built environment. Seizing the opportunity Director Haddock requested that the City, which was just about to implement the 2015 edition of the Construction Codes, move immediately into implementing the 2021 edition of the Construction Codes. It is the intent of Houston Public Works to adopt the International Code Council’s family of 2021 I-Codes as a base code with minimum local amendments that will strengthen the base code and ensure the long-term sustainability of the development community.
The CCM project kicked off in mid-June of 2022 and will take two years to successfully complete the six major tasks to accomplish the City’s goals and objectives. The stakeholder engagement period will begin in December and continue through the end of April 2023.
During the Stakeholder Engagement stage of the project, the public and all internal and external stakeholders including architects, engineers, builders, developers, tradesmen, and technical subject matter experts will have an opportunity to review all codes up for adoption, along with the City employees and Jenson Hughes, the City’s code expert consultants. The public and community stakeholders will be able to submit a request through a digital submission process and have an opportunity to speak with appropriate City employees about the model code or amendment recommendations for a code. There will be weekly meetings to review the proposed amendments and all submissions will be reviewed and reported out by four Task Force Groups that include representatives of the City’s permitting and code experts along with community stakeholders that are subject matter experts in specific codes.
To achieve the aggressive timeline and to ensure the code amendment process captures the needs of the larger community while protecting the health and safety of Houston’s citizens, we have laid out a process that will include a wide array of community stakeholders over a 5-month timeline allowing for public submittal of code amendments and opportunities to present them in person. We have designed the public participation to be all-inclusive and transparent allowing everyone to engage and participate in the Construction Code Modernization project while achieving the City’s objective to adopt the 2021 edition of the Construction Codes by the 3rd quarter of 2023.
For more information, please visit the Construction Code Modernization Project page.
Last updated: Nov. 7,2022