For such an excruciating, technical and obscure issue, the recent debate over ice damming, its cause and remedy — and a now-eliminated building code requirement for protecting residential roofs — soared from an argument for housing affordability, to warnings of climate change, to an appeal to the heights of human rights.
It happened over two meetings of the Oklahoma City Council, on Aug. 2 and Aug. 16. Nearly 20 construction and roofing experts spoke for nearly two hours, four of them twice. They gave pros and cons of requiring that a special ice and water barrier be installed on every new house and every house getting a new roof, of whatever vintage.
Oklahoma’s winter weather, tolerable enough until it’s not, loomed large.
Ice damming is when snow melts on a roof, then the runoff refreezes at the roofline or gutter, and ice builds up. When it melts again, water collects on the roof behind the dam, backs up under shingles and flashing, and causes leaks and interior damage.
The requirement for a barrier was in place in city code, then, after the two meetings, it wasn’t, but not before the home-building industry lined up against one of its own trade groups, the roofers, with an insurance rep, an adjuster and a property manager weighing in, but no one, among the witnesses, strictly representing homeowners.
No one “strictly” because both sides said they had homeowners’ interests at heart.
The flap arose thanks to an apparently unauthorized letter stating that installing the barriers was required to meet code, sent to the city by a staff member of the Oklahoma Uniform Building Code Commission, a state body made mostly of people in the construction business.
The commission gives state lawmakers and local governments guidance on how to adopt local versions of various internationally recognized construction codes. In July 2019, the commission approved an updated local version of the International Residential Code for One- and Two-Family Dwellings, 2015 Edition.
That September, the city council adopted it. In December, based on the errant letter, the council added the underlayment as a required protection against ice damming.
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Not long ago, Mark Stonecipher, council member for Ward 8, filed a resolution to have the council take it back and delete the requirement.
Homebuilders and others in favor of eliminating it insisted that ice damming virtually never happens here, although some did acknowledge that it did in February 2021, when heavy snow lasted for days because the temperature stayed below freezing. They said that was something like a 100-year snowstorm.
“We have sleet. We have freezing rain. We have snow every once in a while, and that stuff is normally gone in a day or two,” said Todd Booze, a retired homebuilder and developer who is now a consultant. “You know Oklahoma City weather. Our average January temperatures are like 40 degrees, and so it doesn’t stick around on the roofs for ice damming to occur. You have to have enough snow buildup to sit on the roof and go through multiple freeze-thaw events to where it can actually melt and push back up underneath the shingles.”
Booze said ice damming protection is something of a luxury during a time of already-soaring home prices.
“Every industry trade group that is involved in building a house could come up and say, ‘Hey, we could do something that’s a little bit better. It’s only going to cost $1,000,’ ” he said. “Think what (that would do) to a market that’s already suffering an affordability crisis in our community.
“The industry is all about building durable, safe homes, but we’re not about just adding and layering on things on our houses that unnecessarily drive up the cost of housing in Oklahoma City.”
Roofers and others in favor of keeping protection against ice damming in the code said ice damming does happen here, a lot, and that the ounce of prevention, a few hundred dollars to $1,000 or more that installing a barrier costs, is worth the pound of cure to be avoided — the thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars, in roof and interior repairs.
Oklahoma City has had 17 winter emergencies in the past 18 years, with ice dams occurring on homes in 2007, 2009, 2015, 2020, 2021 and 2022, said Gerry Weir, owner of Village Roofing & Construction.
“We have a history of local damage from the effects of ice damming. You are compelled to … help protect the citizens of Oklahoma City,” he told the council.
Not all winter roof leaks are due to ice damming, noted Chris Cline, owner of Cline Construction OK.
“What this issue is about is ice and water around the eave and perimeter of a home specifically,” Cline said, and it doesn’t happen if a roof is installed properly with adequate insulation.
It came down to a he said/she said debate.
Civil engineer Chris Ramseyer said Oklahoma City is too far south, “about 200 miles from where ice damming is actually going to be an issue.”
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Greg Cannon, owner of Coppermark Public Adjusters, said, “We’ve seen these ice dams occur on an insurance-claims basis year after year, most notably in 2011 in February,” and more recently last October and last February.
Over and over, a homebuilder would insist that ice damming is rare here, and a roofer would insist that it happens often. But older homes are more likely to have it than new ones because they have less ventilation and poorer ventilation, said roofer J.R. Emrich, owner of Reroof America Corp. and Metro Roofing Co.
Councilmember Todd Stone, of Ward 4, president of Dub Stone Construction, pointed out that eliminating the code requirement wouldn’t mean that homebuilders and buyers, and roofers, and homeowners, couldn’t decide on their own to install a barrier. He said a builder could add a barrier and use ice dam protection as a selling point.
Debate went to a second city council meeting on a motion by Nikki Nice, Ward 7, and seconded by JoBeth Hamon, Ward 6. Both seemed skeptical of the builders’ concerns over costs. Pros and cons of the barriers unrolled in the same split vein on Aug. 16.
After hearing from the two trade groups on opposite sides of the question, the Oklahoma Home Builders Association and Oklahoma Roofing Contractors Association, Stonecipher said he was still for eliminating the code requirement. Councilmember David Greenwell, Ward 5, said that “buyers should decide what they want.”
Nice was not happy.
“I want to continue to say I am not an expert in this and am highly pissed off that we have to have this type of discussion, because of my lack of expertise in this issue, when we have a commission and a committee that make these types of decisions for us,” Nice said.
Since the errant letter from the Oklahoma Uniform Building Code Commission staffer wasn’t actually approved by the commission, Nice wanted the council to send the issue back to the commission to make the decision.
“As a city council member, yes, we do have oversight on those things,” she said. “But I’m not a roofer. I’m not a contractor. I’m not a developer. And I do not want to make that type of decision when we have a body that can, (and) that helps us in making those types of decisions.”
Councilmember James Cooper raised several points in an effort to put a human face on the issue.
“I keep hearing in politics this idea of ‘the forgotten person,'” Cooper said, and listening to the debate caused him to remember one: an older woman who called his office needing information and access to social services, but with no internet and no cellphone, so he couldn’t email her or text her.
He went on: “So what did I do? I biked from this building, which as you all know on the outside says ‘Dedicated … to the perpetuation of good government.’ Good government. That’s the language from 100 years ago on the outside of this building. For the perpetuation of good government, they dedicated this building to the good people of Oklahoma City. So what did I do? I biked from this building to NW 36 just past Portland in the heat and sat in this woman’s home as she brought me towel after towel after towel to wipe away the sweat.
“Ward 2 is for everybody, but make no mistake, it has a range of people from working class to people like that resident who lives on Social Security to people who live in luxury homes, and I have to always think about all of them. But she is the forgotten person because technology has forgotten her. She does not have access even to these services that we provide as a city. … So that’s one thing guiding my vote today.”
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He said he lived his second point huddling for warmth in February during the ice storm.
“I sat in a building I love (that is) 100 years old … my apartment,” Cooper said. “And I brought every afghan, blanket, quilt, you name it, for my cat, Marion, and myself, and for two weeks we bundled up. And my office received emails from where where they were like, ‘I’ll bet Councilperson Cooper has power.’
“I’m not wealthy. I don’t bend government to my needs. I’ll bend government to all of Ward 2 and our needs. It’s on the building itself. It says what those words ask of us. If we did not have (certain standards), more people would be experiencing what I felt viscerally, painfully, chillingly, that day. My cat never really gets under covers. She did that time.”
Cooper’s third point: “Climate change is real,” he said, and “it was the No. 1 issue my middle school students brought up to me. Climate change. Racism was right there beside it. Middle schoolers. They brought that to me (when) I asked them, ‘What should we be learning about?'”
He went on: “I’m glad there are elected officials who are doing what they can right now to try and mitigate the harm that climate is doing to our state, our residents, our livelihoods, our planet. I’m so glad that people are making those moves, but we (should have been) making those moves decades ago. And we’re catching up. Unfortunately, we have not (yet) done that. I just can’t see moving away from the current protection for our people. Protection for our people.
“I will not, 100 years from now, wherever my spirit or energy may end up, I will not — let me put it this way: I will rest in peace knowing that the person in the building we build right now will have the sort of protections that I did not have in my apartment in February of 2021. That’s what good government does. We protect our people, all of our people. And I’m not convinced removing this will do that.”
At the end, the council was unpersuaded, sided with the homebuilders and voted 6-3 to remove the code requirement for an roof ice and water barrier to protect homes against ice damming, on Stonecipher’s motion and Greenwell’s second. Others voting to remove the regulation were Stone; Mayor David Holt; Barbara Young, of Ward 3; and Bradley Carter, of Ward 1.
Hamon, Nice and Cooper voted against.
Senior business writer Richard Mize has covered housing, construction, commercial real estate, and related topics for the newspaper and Oklahoman.com since 1999. Contact him at rm***@ok*******.com.
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