ICC consensus procedures revised

The International Code Council is an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) approved standards developing organization. While ANSI regularly updates its essential requirements, which outline the due process requirements for American National Standards, the Code Council has taken the opportunity to revise its consensus procedures to enhance efficiency and reduce the standards development time. The last revision to the consensus procedures was in October 2014.

In December 2018, the Code Council Board of Directors performed a comprehensive review and update of the procedures. Special consideration was taken in how standards committees can be balanced by broadening the spectrum of interest categories. This makes organizing new and re-balancing existing committees more efficiently. One of the new interest categories is a “public segment” category that provides for representation of public groups to consider standard enhancements, which may benefit the public.

Another key aspect is the creation of a project team consisting of the Code Council secretariat and committee members working to resolve items, which may speed up the development process.

The most significant change is in the development process itself. The highlight of the new process limits two rounds of public comment consideration in order to develop the Public Comments Draft that is required to be posted with ANSI.

The intent of the revised process is to allow timely comment consideration resulting in a vetted Public Comment Draft #1 and to possibly reduce the amount of comments on the Public Comment Draft #1 that need to be considered by the committee. The creation and adherence to a work plan schedule is intended to keep the committee focused and cognizant of timely standard completion. Certain standards lend well to a continuance style of maintenance in which issues can be addressed expediently by a standing committee without the time delay in bringing a new committee up to speed during the update process. The new revisions outline a continuance maintenance option. Simply put, the main intent of the consensus procedures revisions is time reduction.

In addition to the consensus procedures revisions, ICC Council Policy CP-12 entitled, ICC Standards Development, was revised to work in concert with the revised procedures. CP-12 outlines the development of ICC standards based on a demonstrable need and the procedure to request a new ICC standard or maintain an existing one. Again, in the interest of expediting the development process, the revisions will allow for submitting a project initiation notification to ANSI concurrently with Code Council board approval.