City Council Approves Building Codes Updates

At its April 23 meeting, the City Council adopted the 2024 International Code Edition and the 2023 National Electric Code. The adoption of the current codes will bring Addison up to the most currently published building codes and reduce the number of local amendments from what was previously adopted. This will allow Addison to recognize and be consistent with current construction techniques and technology.

Building codes exist to protect the health, safety, and welfare of building occupants. Currently, the International Codes, written and published by the International Code Council (ICC), and the National Electrical Code, written and published by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), are the codes that are adopted by virtually all cities in the United States. Both the ICC and the NFPA publish new editions of their respective codes every three years.

Additionally, the ISO (Insurance Services Office) rating of the Town is affected by the edition of the code adopted by the Town. ISO reduces the scoring when a jurisdiction is more than one code cycle behind the currently published codes. Now that the 2024 codes have been published, any jurisdiction that has not adopted the 2021 or 2024 codes will be graded down when their ISO rating is reviewed and calculated. Addison currently has an ISO 1 Rating, which is the highest possible rating.

You can watch the Council's building code discussion here and read the presentation here.