Posted Dec 8, 2012, 3:05 PM
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Posts: 8,017
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More about the pushback from the trades....
http://www.thechronicleherald.ca/bus...ut-wood-policy
Quote:
Implementing a “wood-first” policy could pose public safety risks, says the president of a national construction organization.
Last week, a report submitted by Peter Stickings, Halifax Regional Municipality’s acting director of planning and infrastructure, asked the city’s environment committee to recommend to regional council that it consider a wood-first policy for municipal structures being built or renovated.
The report said wood building materials “have lower energy, water and air quality impacts than alternatives” and would provide a boost to Nova Scotia’s forestry and lumber sectors, which “are mainstays” of the provincial economy.
While those are noteworthy reasons, Paul Hargest, president of the Canadian Concrete Masonry Producers Association, said he is concerned about public safety.
“Certainly, we’re protecting our industry, but we’re trying to protect the consumer,” he said Friday in a telephone interview from Kitchener, Ont.
“I’m not opposed to wood, I mean certainly everything has its application. But if you’re building schools and you’re building nursing homes, especially with more than one storey, you certainly wouldn’t want to have your mother in the second or third storey of a wood structure that’s on fire in the bottom floor.
Wood-first policies exist in several other jurisdictions including Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The British Columbia legislature passed a wood-first law in 2009.
However, the B.C. Chamber of Commerce is seeking an amendment to that legislation because they are opposed to the government legislating “a preference for one building material, in this case wood, by excluding alternative, viable and competitive, made-in-B.C. and or Canada materials, from the B.C. publicly funded construction market.”
Hargest said he is concerned that politicians are “getting involved in how designers should be designing.”
He said they should not be “heavily sponsoring and promoting it” over another, especially when “it’s an inferior material.”
But Coun. Jennifer Watts (Peninsula North), the environment committee’s vice-chairwoman and the person who requested the report, said any wood-first policy would follow National Building Code of Canada guidelines, which limits the use of wood to buildings of four storeys or less.
“It’s very helpful for there to be a healthy debate within the community and to have information offered, but there is nothing that is going proceed that does not follow” the code, she said in an interview.
Should council implement a wood-first policy, it would be used on municipal facilities “where it’s economically feasible and makes sense to do,” she said.
“It’s not necessarily an either-or, but looking for other possibilities and options with a goal of looking at what are some sustainable options that we can begin to consider that we might not have considered, both from an economic viewpoint but also importantly from an environmental viewpoint.”
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The line in bold text gets to the core of this. Watts is the one who constantly calls for "human scale" development, which is code for 2 or 3 storey buildings. So if her and her crafty friends like MacLellan can slip this past her council colleagues, there will be another impediment to constructing taller buildings in HRM: council can say that any HRM building that does not meet this policy should not proceed, and therefore we get a bunch of low-rise wooden wonders with our tax dollars. This needs to be stopped dead in its tracks. It's OK for Mulgrave or one of the other small burgs in NS to have such a policy because it doesn't matter in those places. It does matter here.
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