Introduction
The California Building Standards Commission (CBSC) is responsible for overseeing the ongoing development, amendment, adoption, and publication of the “building standards” provisions of Title 24 (aka, the “California Building Standards Code”) of the California Code of Regulations (CCR), which is divided into 28 separate titles based upon distinct subjects or state agency jurisdictions. CCR Title 24 is reserved for regulations governing the design, construction, and maintenance of buildings, structures, and associated facilities and equipment throughout the State.
While some construction professionals tend to assume that State agencies have always enforced statewide construction codes, it was not until the 1980’s that these bureaucracies and the Legislature fully wrested away from local jurisdictions “home rule” control of their codes-adopting powers.
This educational brief presents an abridged history of the development of this California Building Standards Law. Key resources for this analysis include:
These two prior briefs focused on the City and County of San Francisco’s ultimately doomed decades-long struggles after World War II to fend off efforts by various State and federal agencies to seize statewide control of local jurisdictions’ authority to promulgate their own construction codes.
In contrast, this paper additionally explores this bureaucratic war from the point of view of the final victor, the California Building Standards Commission, which was first empowered in 1980 to take codes-promulgation control from competing State agencies and then, in 1988, was granted full statewide authority over local codes.
Representative efforts to enact statewide codes prior to World War II
The following chronology delineates certain representative efforts, prior to World War II, to promulgate statewide construction codes:
(“This is another example of a separate regulatory authority adopting building standards in its own title – in this case, Title 21.”)
Efforts for and against statewide codes after World War II
With the onset of World War II, any plans by local or state agencies and politicians regarding potential changes in the construction code promulgation process were put on hold. Then, during the subsequent post-war building boom and its associated economic prosperity, more and more local jurisdictions throughout California chose to incorporate all (or portions of) various UBC model code editions into their local codes. Examples include:
(While this new code incorporated multiple provisions from the model 1946 UBC, it also retained much of its independent ‘home rule’ character.)
Meanwhile, as outlined with representative examples below, lobbying efforts within the Legislature to promote single-agency oversight of statewide construction codes similarly increased after the war. In particular, note in the following citations that these political battles were being fought on two distinct fronts: a) with various State agencies that sought to protect their specific areas of authority, and b) with certain jurisdictions (e.g., the City and County of San Francisco) that similarly did not want to cede their ‘home rule’ powers.
“There is no consistent pattern for defining the relative responsibility of the state and of local agencies in enforcing state regulations.”
“The CBSC could not question the substantive provisions of the code if it found technical defects, or that the provisions would have a negative impact on the public. Also, the CBSC had no control over the filing of a building standard with the Secretary of State, and no appeal powers. Because of its limited powers to control the building standard regulatory process, the CBSC was unsuccessful in its attempts to resolve long-standing problems that made it almost impossible for users of the code to understand and comply with it.”
“Building standards continued to be buried in different titles of the Administrative Code – OSHA in Title 8, Health in Title 17, Fire Marshal in Title 19, Hospitals in Title 22, etc. There was no codification of indexing, and these standards were scattered through the 30,000 plus pages of the California Administrative Code. Enforcement was complicated, costly, and in some cases, nonexistent.”
“This is a very serious erosion of the basic home rule philosophy, and appears to be backed by certain minority factions in the building industry who feel that through the intervention of State or Federal governments they can get their materials used to a greater extent…”
“The coming years will see still stronger attempts at a takeover made, which will require the concerted efforts of local government and the building industry to stop the empire building of the State and Federal Governments at the expense of the local public.”
“As a result, there have been serious problems developing with state agencies thru both the Legislature’s code writing activities as well as the activities of state agencies duplicating code enforcement regulations and activities. These include the State Fire Marshal and the Division of Industrial Safety enforcing the California-OSHA regulations.
“Serious concern exists throughout the State of California and including fire authorities over this new development at the state level which will result in serious overlaps and conflicts between local ordinances and state regulations.”
“The Superintendent is active at the national level in all these areas, attempting to eliminate as much as possible the overlapping jurisdictional areas.
“One of the main comments received in the Bureau from users of the Building Code is, ‘Why can’t you use the same Occupancy designations as the Uniform Code?’. We have for some time been concerned with this matter as well as the Code format in general. People in California generally are familiar with the Uniform Building Code. Therefore, our occupancy numerical system is troublesome for someone versed in the Uniform Code’s alphabetical system, which is the same as is used in many other areas.
“Furthermore, there is no reason why a particular article in the San Francisco Building Code does not correspond as to subject with the Uniform Code, and, if possible, even sections should relate if they are on a similar subject.
“To this end an item was placed in this coming year’s budget to hire temporary personnel to effect this transition. This request was supported by the design professions. Unfortunately, it was deleted from the budget at final passage. We will attempt next year to obtain this needed revision …to simplify the use and understanding of our Code by the construction industries.“
“A review of the Building Code is expected to commence early in 1979. This review is expected to compare each section of the San Francisco Code with the Uniform Building Code (which is used as a base by the State) with the expectation of making the San Francisco Code more similar to the Uniform Code as well as clarifying and up-dating it. It is hoped that the professional groups will aid the Bureau in this time-consuming comparison.”
(In short, the greatly empowered California Building Standards Commission was victorious in its 25-year-long political battle to gain single-agency control of the State’s codes promulgation processes. However, as further reviewed below, there still were numerous bureaucratic battles remaining.)
The effective date of these new codes was January 1, 1982 (except July 1, 1982 for new accessibility regulations promulgated by the Office of the State Architect of behalf of the physically disabled).
This new 1984 San Francisco Building Code similarly adopted by reference the model 1979 UBC (with some provisions taken from the model 1982 UBC), in general conformance with the new 1985 State Building Code.
To widespread acclaim, one model building code now controlled all construction projects (except Federal) located throughout the State of California.
Further, the long history of local jurisdictional strife – such as San Francisco’s great building code vs. fire code battle in the early 1980’s regarding the new Moscone Center – had now been substantially (but not yet fully[32]) resolved with the CBSC’s promulgation of the statewide California Building Code and the closely integrated California Fire Code.
Over the following decade, subsequent editions of the renamed “California Building Code” (CBC) published by the Building Standards Commission included:
In 1997, the Legislature (Stats. 1997, ch. 645) modified Health and Safety Code (HSC) Section 17958.7:
“(b) The California Building Standards Commission may reject a modification or change filed by the governing body of a city or county if no finding was submitted.”
“Building Standards Bulletin 99-01” issued by the CBSC on March 17, 1999 advised every local jurisdiction:
In 1994, the leaders of the International Conference of Building Officials (ICBO), Building Officials and Code Administrators International (BOCA), and the Southern Building Code Congress International (SBCCI) formed an alliance as the nationwide International Code Council (ICC) in order “to promulgate a comprehensive and compatible regulatory system for the built environment” by merging the regional Uniform Building Code, National Building Code, and Standard Building Code into a single model International Building Code (IBC).
In particular, here in California, the demise of the historic ICBO’s model codes initiated a multiyear political turf war between building officials supporting the new ICC model codes and the fire chiefs, who supported an alternate, and not yet even published, model building code, “NFPA 5000 – Building Construction and Safety Code”, still being written by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).
In December 2000, this newly constituted Building Standards Commission voted to reject the various ICC codes (including the 2000 IBC model) being proposed for the upcoming 2001 California codes cycle.
Further, because the NFPA 5000 model building code had not yet been finalized, the Building Standards Commission voted to readopt the 1997 UBC model for the 2001 CBC (effective November 1, 2002).
In July 2002, the NFPA finally completed its model Building Construction and Safety Code, which states: “NFPA 5000 is a key document in the collection of integrated consensus codes for the built environment known as the Comprehensive Consensus Codes (C3) which is currently being developed by NFPA and its partners. The first of its kind, C3 is the result of model code and standard developers bringing their expertise together to form one fully integrated, consensus-based code set.”
However, in October 2003, Governor Grey Davis was recalled by the State’s voters. Arnold Schwarzenegger won the recall replacement election on November 17, 2003. In 2004, Governor Schwarzenegger replaced many of the voting members of the Building Standards Commission who had supported the NFPA 5000 model code.
In March 2005 (to broad acclaim from building and code professionals statewide who had concluded that the hastily written NPFA 5000 model was not workable), the newly constituted Building Standards Commission (by an 8-to-2 vote) rescinded its July 2003 adoption of NFPA 5000 and NFPA 1 as the models for next set of California’s building and fire codes. The State’s fire chiefs had lost this turf war.
The Building Standards Commission voted to instead use many of the ICC’s model “International” codes — including its 2006 IBC model — for the proposed new 2007 edition of the California Building Code.
Since the January 1, 2008 effective date of the 2007 edition of California’s many Title 24 construction codes, most (but not all) of these codes have been based upon the model International codes (I-Codes) published by the ICC.
Upon the Commission’s adoption of the model I-Codes, the following editions of the statewide CBC have been published:
CBSC’s procedural requirements for receiving/accepting “express findings”
As noted above, every local jurisdiction (e.g., city, county, or other political subdivision) throughout the State of California, when making any modifications or changes to the “building standards” adopted by the California Building Standards Commission must (since 1997) issue to the CBSC duly-certified (commonly via the local “ordinance” process) “express findings” that “such modifications or changes are reasonably necessary because of local climatic, geological or topographical conditions.”
In 2011, the CBSC reported: “Following are two principal reasons why some of the proposed local amendment ordinances as submitted by local jurisdictions for the current edition of the California Building Standards Code, California Code of Regulations, Title 24, have been found unacceptable for filing.
If challenged in court, local jurisdictions who have not filed with the CBSC such acceptable “express findings” for their code amendments very likely will lose this legal battle.
These risks of legal challenge are particularly acute for those jurisdictions who fail to properly adopt and/or amend per CBSC requirements non-mandatory Appendices to the various Title 24 codes.
Consider, for example, the building standards found within Appendix C (Group U – Agricultural Buildings), Appendix G (Flood-Resistant Construction), Appendix H (Signs), Appendix I (Patio Covers), and Appendix J (Grading) to the California Building Code.
“A local ordinance amendment that relates to the implementation or enforcement of a building standard, such as an amendment to administrative provisions or the adoption of a model code appendix, necessitates an express finding that the amendment is reasonably necessary because of local climatic, geological, topographic or environmental conditions. The amendment also must be expressly marked in a manner to distinguish the amendment text from the published text of Title 24.”
Without doubt, there are local jurisdictions (large and small) throughout California enforcing amendments and revisions to building code Appendices, e.g., Appendix J (Grading), that still have not been expressly filed with and/or accepted by CBSC. These lapses certainly expose these jurisdictions to legal challenges by parties who happen to disagree with local code provisions.
Summary discussion
This memorandum presents an abridged bureaucratic history of the founding of the California Building Standards Commission and its decades-long battles for statewide empowerment and single-agency oversight of California’s construction codes-writing processes. The CBSC’s foes included multiple State agencies (e.g., the Division of the State Architect) and certain ‘home rule’ jurisdictions (e.g., the City and County of San Francisco) that, though still very powerful in their specific areas of influence, had to cede an extensive degree of overall authority.
My previous 2016 paper, An Abridged History of San Francisco’s Bureau of Building Inspection – Part I (1944 to 1992), addressed this storyline from the perspectives of local leaders. This memo takes an alternative look at the same battle lines from the historical viewpoint of the ultimate victor, the statewide CBSC.
The phrase “history is written by the victors” (often miscited to Winston Churchill) is a simple truism: CBSC continues to have a vested interest in painting a rosy history of its past, while San Francisco’s code agencies have no real reason to further memorialize decades-old political losses into the written record. However, it is only through comparing these alternative viewpoints that one can best understand the meaning and intent of our modern codes.
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