Page 4 RAIN January 1980 Ow-ner• Builders Reeollstruet • the In May 1979 I traveled to Salem with a friend, Jonny Klein, totestify before the Senate Committee on Housing ,and Urban Affairs on Senate Bill 921, the Owner-Builder proposal. Jonny and I live in Josephine County, in southwestern Oregon, and we a·re members of the county-wide Building Safety Advisory Committee, which drafted the bill. , There are four major building codes in current use in the United States. Each is a thick book, writt~n in technical and legalistic language, setting minimum standards for new construction. They tend to be written by professional building inspectors and oriented to standard materials and methods of construction. The state of Oregon has a tradition of pioneer self-reliance and opposition to governmental interference. When I moved here ten years ago, there were no building codes at all in the rural area where I live, nor in most of the state. However, Oregon is currently also one of the fastest growing states in the coun~ry, and builders of large.unregulated developments engaged in ~hoddy buildip,g practices in the late '60s and early '70s. As a response to this, the 1973 state legislature adopted the Uniform Building Code, written by the International Congress of Building Officials, as a building code governing all new construction in the state. In our county people didn't like, and don't like, the idea-of govemrrie.nt officials coming on our land and telling us how to build our buildings. The situation rapidly became extremely heated because, at the same time that the state adopted the Uniform Building Code, Josephine County, for reasons I cannot imagine, adopted the Uniform Housing Code and the Uniform Code for the Abatement of Dangerous Buildings as county ordinances: These codes, unlike the UBC, set standards for all buildings, those presently in existence as well as those being constructed. They also give'building inspectors the authority to enter any building whenever they feel it is necessary. A lot of people here, from many different backgrounds and economic levels, were angry. For a while it seemed that each day brought a new story of some outrageous thing the building department had done. There was the couple who bought an old log cabin, planning to fix it up, went back to Los Angeles to get their things, and returned to find the cabin red-tagged. (That is, tagged with a sign saying that the premises are dangerous and one is forbidden to enter.) There was the farmer who had cut and peeled the poles to .Code build a pole-frame barn for his cows, and found a building official demanding to inspect him. (Under the present interpretation of the law, that wouldn't happen-currently all agricultural buildings in the state are exempt from permits and inspections.) There was the man I talked to who had come home from work at night to find the place he was currently living in red-tagged. At the worst point, about a hundred buildings in the county had been red-tagged. Local neighborhood groups had been forming in our county even before building codes became such a hot issue. Calling themselves "community associations" or "town councils," they defined a geographical area they thought of as their community, elected representatives, held monthly meetings, and sentletters to local, state and tedera1 authorities, asking to be consulted and informed about what "".as going to happen in their neighborhoods. They were later recogmzed by the county as part !)f the citizen input process mand~~ed by the ~tate Land Conservation and Development Commiss10n, but at fust they were informal, self-generated, and not very welcomed by the county government. . When the county fin~lly scheduled"a hearing a thousand people show~d up for t~e meetmg at the fairgrounds. This was during workmg hours, ma county of 50,000 population! They scheduled alternate speakers, for and against the codes, until they ran out of "pro" speakers. After a few hours the Board of County Commissioners said they had heard.enough, they had changed their minds, a~d could they please go hom_e now. "No," people said, "we came here to tell you how we feel and we want you to listen."
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