Dale Thomure

The aftermath of a natural disaster is a nightmare situation for any community. At that point, when you're facing destroyed homes and businesses, power outages, and scarcity of resources, the only focus is recovery or fixing those emergency concerns.

When most people think of municipal services, they probably don’t think of words like “easy,” “convenient,” or “customer-friendly.” Milpitas, California’s Building and Safety Department is changing that dynamic. Through modern technology, they’re streamlining processes to make them simpler, easier to use, and more accessible to customers and professionals who work with them.

One of the many services ISO’s Building Code Effectiveness Grading Schedule (BCEGS®) program provides is presentations around the country on the program, how it works, and the importance of the classifications to community stakeholders. We do about 20 presentations a year and speak with building industry groups, floodplain managers, emergency managers, building officials, municipal officials, and others.

) program rates the effectiveness and enforcement of building codes in communities throughout the United States.

Roderick J. Sanchez, AICP, CBO Director, Development Services Department In September 2016, the City of San Antonio became the first community in Texas to earn a classification of 1 from ISO Community Hazard Mitigation’s Building Code Effectiveness Grading Schedule (BCEGS ® ). After reviewing San Antonio’s Development Services Department (DSD), ISO was happy to acknowledge the department’s...

In February 2016, ISO Community Hazard Mitigation published our National Building Code Assessment Report , which provided a snapshot of the nation’s building codes. However, that moment in time doesn’t tell the whole story, so we created our National Building Code Analysis —an analysis of each state—and reported on the trends we identified. That analysis, released in October, was, quite frankly...