River Bend Times

The Clinton City Council considered an ordinance amending their city code around fire alarms, smoke alarms, carbon monoxide detectors and fire extinguishers at their March 28 meeting. These rules would be for new dwellings or other buildings with sleeping quarters and would require all new units to have installed ten-year, battery-operated and interconnected smoke detectors in each sleeping room, outside each sleeping room and on each story of the dwelling.

Carbon monoxide detectors must be placed in similar fashions, in lesser amounts.

"The property maintenance code does not have the exemptions, we have added those in from the residential code," Eli Voss, code official of Clinton, said during the meeting. "Property maintenance code says if you do any work, whether you take it to the studs or not, if you have a basement or an attic, you put in hard wire. So we're taking exemptions from the residential code and making it just for permitted work, which then, when we looked at it, it triggered any permitted work. If you ran electrical wire, that's a permitted job, then that would, by rights, trigger you to have hard wire."

If the work is associated with plumbing or mechanical systems, he said, that is where the third exemption would come in to eliminate the trigger. In answering questions, he explained the code was created to work with the property maintenance code for upholding standards of living and ensuring they would provide adequate fire safety.

Fire Chief Joel Atkinson had a lot of input on these regulations, making a lot of changes and additions to best serve and protect the community, make things easier for fire department personnel, and be clear and understandable within the code.

Among discussions, the council examined the code, which requires older buildings to update their wiring systems to fire alarms if they decide to do an electrical upgrade project in the building, and determined that if property owners are doing very small projects with wiring, such as putting in a new water heater and upgrading the wires specifically just to that heater, they won’t be required to do the full upgrades.

This decision comes as council members determined many may choose not to upgrade the new connection to appliances to avoid the requirement and did not want to be the cause of any unsafe connections.

With lengthy discussions surrounding the rules, council members ensured they lined up with much of their residential and property codes and made sense for the community and any upgrades or purchases that might happen.