Officials from across northwest Illinois met in Rockford Wednesday to discuss creating a uniform building code across the region.
City officials says there were around thirty people in attendance. One of those was Dennis Sweeney, Executive Vice President of the Home Builders of the Greater Rockford Area. He says there were officials from DeKalb and Dixon as well as Freeport and Rockford at the meeting. Sweeney says everyone likes the idea of one set of standards across communities in the region.
“One of the aggravations for architects, sub-contractors and general contractors is that while everybody has codes, and many of the codes are very similar, when you move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction the interpretations change.”
Sweeney says a single set of standards could be good for both builders and consumers.
“Anything that creates consistency among these jurisdictions certainly saves everyone time and money.”
But, he says, the devil is in the details.
“You want to make sure that once those mandates are met, people still have enough money to buy the things they want in their new house, because if they can’t do that, they won’t build a new house.”
Sweeney says he’s encouraged that his group has been invited to be a part of the various committees that will look into creating the standards. Rockford officials say along with builders, they’ve invited representatives from nine counties as well as individual communities within the region to participate in the process of drawing the new standards.
