As co-sponsors of National Preparedness Month, NCSBCS and AMCBO have invited U. S. Department of Homeland Security’s Director of State and Local Government Coordination, Matt Bettenhausen, to serve as the keynote speaker at the September 29 afternoon program on Homeland Security - Best Practices. The keynote address will cover the National Response Plan and the National Incident Management System.

In the second workshop session on September 30, a panel of state and local building code administrators will share best practices for responding to and recovering from manmade and natural disasters. Serving on that panel are the Building Commissioner for New York City, Patricia Lancaster; the Building Commissioner for Richmond, Virginia, Claude Cooper; New Jersey Assistant Director of Codes Administration, Cynthia Wilk; and Maryland Director of Codes Administration, James Hanna.

National Preparedness Month September 2004 is sponsored by over 80 national associations, public and private sector groups in an effort to provide information to the public on actions that can be taken to prepare for natural and manmade disasters.

Other featured speakers at the joint NCSBCS/AMCBO annual conference include:

• Dr. Shyam Sunder, Deputy Director, Building and Fire Research Laboratory of the U. S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, who will provide an update on the NIST World Trade Center Disaster Report that is due to be released in December.

• Bryant Applegate, Director of the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Initiative on Affordable Housing.

NCSBCS represents state chief building officials and AMCBO represents the building commissioners of the nation’s largest cities and counties. Presentations for the annual conference program will cover a wide range of other issues of importance to elected officials, the construction and information technology communities, and building regulatory personnel.

These programs include:

• High-Rise Retrofit - How jurisdictions are balancing public safety and rebuilding neighborhoods.
• How to successfully address changing demographics and codes administration and enforcement (bilingual workforce, pending massive retirements of government personnel).
• Funding effective codes enforcement and community development in times of tight budgets.
• Pending federal regulations that may impact the construction industry and state and local governments.
• Effective approaches towards coordinating state and local construction codes and standards in response to regional disasters.

On September 30, the program includes the Fourth National Forum on Building Smarter in the Digital Age, which brings together the information technology industry with state and local building regulators and the construction industry. The Forum will include hands-on demonstrations of hardware and software now available for use in codes administration and enforcement and provides a look at actions being taken to make such hardware and software interoperable.

The NCSBCS/AMCBO annual conference starts on Wednesday, September 29, and runs through Friday afternoon, October 1, 2004. The annual conference theme is "Are You Prepared for This?" A special one-day registration fee of $100/person has been set for building regulatory personnel, construction and information technology industry, and elected officials who would like to attend the program.

The registration fee for the full annual conference is $300 for NCSBCS and AMCBO members and $400 for non-members. The hotel cut-off date for the special group rate of $129 at the Marriott City Center is September 8, 2004.