About The Everything Building Envelope Podcast: Everything Building Envelope℠ is a dedicated podcast and video forum for understanding the building envelope. Our podcast series discusses current trends and issues that contractors, developers and building owners have to deal with related to pre and post construction. Our series touches on various topics related to water infiltration, litigation and construction methods related to the building envelope.
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Dan: Welcome everyone to our “Everything Building Envelope” podcast. I am Dan Johnson, Senior Consultant for GCI Consultants, and I will be your host today. I’m excited to have as our guest, Dottie Mazzarella, the Vice President of Government Relations for the International Code Council. Today, our topic is going to be the international building code development and specifically, the International Property Maintenance Codes. So, Dottie, let’s start off by having you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, and then we’ll dig into the topic.
Dottie: Okay, great. Dan, thank you so much. I’m Dottie Mazzarella, as you mentioned, I’m the Vice President of Government Relations for the International Code Council, or ICC. A lot of people know us with just the abbreviation. And I am lucky enough to cover two very important states, New York and Florida. And I just recently moved from New York to Florida, so now I’m going back and forth a little bit, but it’s really just I love my job, and I love working with both states.
Dan: Well, great, Dottie. Sounds like you’ve been primarily on the East Coast, which seems to be where a lot of the building codes have been in real enforcement and are definitely needed. So if you could kind of explain a little bit, what are the international building codes and how are they developed?
Dottie: Oh, sure. I would love to do that. So I’d like to say that the International Code Council is really, we’re the stewards of the code development and creation process. So we have the unique ability to bring together pretty much every affected organization when it comes to any type of building construction and building in or updating in the built environment. So that means labor, architects, engineers, builders, contractors, but then also the regulators themselves.
So the building and fire officials, the code enforcement officials, and then depending on the specific discipline of the code, so the plumbing inspectors, mechanical inspectors. So really anybody involved with that. And that’s not just on the local level, but it’s also the state level. So depending on if it’s a statewide adoption, you’re going to have some type of state adoption entity like a board or a commission, and then also the federal government. We have many federal agencies, FEMA, HUD, you know, the EPA, several organizations or several federal agencies are very active participants in the code development process.
So it’s really just kind of bringing all these groups together who then will propose their code changes, whether it be following a natural or a manmade disaster, a lesson learned possibly from one of those disasters, building collapses, what have you, but it also could be making sure that we are incorporating a new method of construction. So, you know, we often think of the building codes as those, you know,