A review of Washington’s building codes could affect grades for residential and commercial properties in the city.

City Manager Bobby Roberson, during the City Council’s March 13 meeting, said the review is performed every five years.

The review, performed by the Insurance Services Office, helps determine grades for residential and commercial properties. Working on behalf of insurance companies, ISO uses the Building Code Effectiveness Grading Schedule to recognize a community’s building codes and how those building codes are enforced. Washington has a Class 4 grade for residential properties and a Class 3 grade for commercial properties.

“There has been an ongoing issue on the state level about the state not adopting those code requirements in conformity with the national code, per se. So, it appears there might be an issue when the come in that might reduce our grade,” Roberson said.

The BCEGS program assigns each community a grade for each property classification. A Class 1 grade represents an exemplary commitment to building-code enforcement.

“The concept is simple: municipalities with well-enforced, up-to-date codes should demonstrate better loss experience, and insurance rates can reflect that. The prospect of reducing losses and ultimately lowering insurance costs provides an incentive for communities to enforce their building codes rigorously,” reads a letter from Cynthia Steullet with ISO’s office in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, to Dean Burbage, the city’s chief building official.

“Due to the state of North Carolina being a little slow adopting the building and other technical codes that follow, we’re expected to have a regression possibly to a seven and an eight, respectively, in commercial and residential. What that means is we will not see an increase in homeowners (insurance costs),” Burbage told the council last week. “They take the number of permits we write. They take the amount of inspections we fail. They use some kind of formula based on the total assessed values of buildings located within our jurisdiction and use that to sell information to the insurance companies that set our homeowners’ and other rates.”

Burbage said he was assured by the ISO representative, who visited the city March 13, the latest review would not affect homeowners’ insurance rates because “it’s just a tool that they use to track how well we do our job.”

“It’s just a matter of information, but you need to know about it,” Roberson told the council.

John Rodman, the city’s director of community and cultural resources, further explained the situation: “North Carolina is still using the 2012 code. They haven’t adopted the new code. So, whether that may make a difference, or not, on our rating remains to be seen. What ever would hold true for residential would hold true for commercial.”

The ISO website shows residential and commercial BCEGS grades improved from 2005 to 2015. North Carolina’s BCEGS grades for residential and commercial properties went from five to four during that 10-year period. The average national grades for 2015 were 4.9 for commercial properties and 5.2 for residential properties.

“ISO began implementing the program in states with high exposure to wind (hurricane) hazards, then moved to states with high seismic exposure and then continued through the rest of the country,” reads the ISO website.