NEW BRAUNFELS, Texas — The New Braunfels City Council will likely adopt an ordinance that would require certain nightclubs and bars to be up to fire code.
- New ordinace would require banquet halls, bars to be up to fire code
- Some groups concerened with sprinkler system costs
- City may give a four-year grace period to comply
This would require business owners to retrofit sprinkler systems, which can be costly.
The types of buildings that need to be up to code are those with A-2 usage, meaning nightclubs, bars, restaurants, or dance halls with a capacity load of 300 or more, and where there's alcohol consumption on site.
New Braunfels' Building Official, TJ Grossi, said the updating of the code all stems from the 2003 Station Nightclub fire in Rhode Island that killed a hundred clubgoers and injured 230 more due to pyrotechnics on stage igniting flammable materials inside. Even if the buildings themselves in New Braunfels are non-combustible, what's inside could be.
"Furniture, carpeting, stuff of that nature that will burn, and what the sprinkler system is intended for is to make sure that there's safe egress out of a building during a fire," Grossi said.
If approved, the ordinance would update building codes to reflect the 2018 International Building Code. That would also update the city fire code requiring the installation of sprinkler systems of existing buildings.
There's five businesses in New Braunfels that will be affected: Wurstfest, Comal County Fairgrounds, Conway's Dance Hall, the Elks Lodge, and the Fraternal Order of Eagles. In 2010, Gruene Hall, the city's most popular dance hall, voluntarily agreed to retrofit a sprinkler system inside.
At a recent New Braunfels City Council public hearing, president of the Fraternal Order of Eagles Billy Craft raised concerns about the requirement to retrofit their building with sprinklers.
"We're a nonprofit organization of people helping people. If we have to pay $50-, $75-, $100,000 we couldn't keep paying our own bills at this point," Craft said.
Grossi said he estimates the cost of retrofitting would be around $7 per square foot.
"The majority of the concerns that the business owners have obviously is financial. This is not something that they had thought they would have to do. Many of them didn't plan for it," Grossi said. "None of them would ever say that they didn't have a care for life safety or the patrons of their business, it's just a planning aspect."
Businesses like the Fraternal Order of Eagles that may rarely host 300 or more people may be able to apply for an appeal to lower the building's capacity in order to not have to retrofit a sprinkler system. Craft said he would like to appeal to have the capacity lowered to 299. He said over the last five years at the Fraternal Order of Eagles, they've only gone over 300 people one time.
"If we put as many people as what our building is supposedly rated for, none of them could actually sit down. It would be standing room only," Craft said.
City staffers are recommending giving these businesses a four-year grace period to comply. There would be a year to come up with a plan to submit to the city's fire marshal, as well as three years to install a sprinkler systems.
"A fire sprinkler system is going to go off before a fire department can even get to the building, so what that will allow is the people to get out safely," Grossi said.
New Braunfels City Council has made a motion to more forward with this adoption, and there will be a second and final reading on January 28.