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Alliance Focuses on Streamlining Overlapping Regulations
A new package of materials from the Alliance for Building Regulatory Reform in the Digital Age is designed to update communities on how to eliminate overlapping and duplicative regulations that increase the costs and slow the construction of residential and commercial buildings.
The CD-ROM report from the alliance, the fourth in a series, also includes information on how state and local governments can improve their effectiveness in dealing with natural and man-made disasters.
“In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, 38 of the members of the alliance — including the National Governors Association, National Association of Counties and the U.S. Conference of Mayors — restructured our initiative and expanded the scope of work of the alliance’s streamlining efforts to focus on actions that can be taken to enhance disaster preparedness, response and recovery within communities,” said Robert Wible, director of the alliance.
NAHB is a founding member of the alliance, which was formed in July 2001 as a private-public partnership comprised of national associations and organizations representing state and local governments, the construction industry and universities concerned with effective and efficient government enforcement of building codes and standards.
The alliance has held a series of meetings this year focusing on streamlining zoning and land use regulations.
The new report from the alliance includes case studies and actions by governments that have:
- Identified and reduced duplicative regulation that has imposed an impediment to the construction of housing and building renovation.
- Enabled communities to speed disaster damage assessment and recovery processes and better share resources with neighbors.
- Identified and applied information technology to streamline codes administration and enforcement processes that reduced the regulatory costs of construction by up to 60% and enabled a state to build a statewide on-line permit processing system.
- Demonstrated initial interoperability of Department of Energy software tools (REScheck and COMcheck) that promote energy conservation in residential and commercial structures.
The CD-ROM also includes the results of several recent cost/benefit surveys that document savings by communities that streamline their building regulatory processes and make use of information technology.
The alliance is planning a national conference in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 11-12 at NAHB’s National Housing Center.
For more information, e-mail Ken Ford at NAHB, or call him at 800-368-5242 x8228.
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