This month, the International Code Council was front and center at two events on Capitol Hill discussing high-performance construction and resilience — timely topics especially important as the U.S. Congress debates the President's infrastructure bill.
On June 6, the Code Council participated in the High-Performance Building Week Hill Briefing. At the briefing, the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) presented recent findings from the NIBS Consultative Council, a group of high-level building community representatives that make recommendations to the President and Congress about how to improve our nation's buildings and infrastructure. Sara Yerkes, a member of the Council and ICC's Senior Vice President of Government Relations, spoke about our need for a skilled workforce, particularly considering the projected shortfall in the building trades in the near future. She urged the U.S. Congress, Department of Education, state and local governments, schools, and industry stakeholders to support technical and trade programs. The Code Council has demonstrated its commitment to training the next generation of building and code officials through mentoring programs as well as certification and training for high school students and military veterans. It will continue to support the building community efforts in this area.
On June 7, the Code Council sponsored the BuildStrong Coalition's 2017 National Thought Leaders Forum on Disaster Mitigation Resiliency for a Stronger and Safer America. The forum included Members of Congress and representatives of the building community and insurance industries. At the forum, Congressman Lloyd Smucker (R-PA 16th District), Congressman Lou Barletta (R-PA 11th District) and Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) emphasized the importance of smart disaster preparedness and mitigation to help prevent the need for sometimes wasteful disaster response spending.
Major General Warren C. Edwards (Ret.), representing ICC and our resilience-focused subsidiary, the Alliance for National & Community Resilience (ANCR), spoke about the basic need for and benefits of community resilience. General Edwards said, "The argument for resilience is that if your community is on an upward trajectory, whether or not a disaster happens, your community is going to be a better place to live, a better place to invest. And, if a disaster happens, you're going to recover faster... based on your understanding of your vulnerabilities." Edwards continued, "ICC... has come together with a number of organizations, and we're growing daily... to form the Alliance for National & Community Resilience. The purpose is... to create a process to measure communities' resilience across the full spectrum of resilience. Not just infrastructure and buildings, but the infrastructure, economy, society... We want to be able to provide to mayors a simple, usable, practical way to assess their communities and find where their strengths and weaknesses are and give them something to do about it."
The International Code Council, though ANCR, is looking to develop the nation's first whole-community resilience benchmark to allow communities to assess their cross-functional resilience.
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