City to hold two public meetings on adopting the IPMC
The city has scheduled two public meetings on possibly adopting the 2009 International Property Maintenance Code (IPMC) into the Boulder housing code. This is a change that will apply to all residential property owners in the city, unlike the rest of the SmartRegs ordinance package.
The city will hold two “open houses” to discuss the IPMC: At 6 p.m. July 26 at the West Boulder Senior Center, 909 Arapahoe Ave., and at 6 p.m. July 29 at the East Boulder Community Center, 5660 Sioux Drive.
Note that the Boulder Housing Code is generally enforced via a complaint-driven process, but compliance can also be triggered by the process of obtaining a rental license or remodeling or expanding one’s own home.
While many of the code changes are simple, safety-oriented changes, others may require substantial expenditures on the part of a homeowner to comply, and a few others simply may not be feasible for older homes. The IPMC, as with all standardized building codes, was written primarily with newer homes built to current building code in mind.
Reading the proposed changes is a challenge because a reader must flip back and forth between three documents: (1) the 2009 IPMC, (2) but because only certain sections are being adopted verbatim while others are being deleted or replaced by city-authored text, a reader must also consult Attachment A of the SmartRegs draft ordinance, and (3) the list of possible changes to the IPMC provisions included or not included in the draft ordinance as requested by council member Macon Cowles and others at the council meeting on 1 June 2010 and responded to by city staff in Attachment 6 of Agenda item 6a for the 6 July 2010 council meeting (pp. 40-43).
See also the Daily Camera article announcing the public meetings.