After years of discussion and study, the Portland City Council appears on the verge of again delaying seismic retrofit requirements for owners of unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings.

On Wednesday, the City Council will discuss a proposal that would tread lightly on the vast majority of URM building owners. Earlier versions of the policy, prompted by safety concerns that a sizable earthquake could devastate old buildings in the Portland area, generated strong pushback from property owners.

Wednesday’s agenda item directs city staff to develop “implementation steps” for mandatory seismic retrofits and return before the City Council within a year.

If enacted within a year, the draft policy from Mayor Ted Wheeler and Commissioner Chloe Eudaly would give most URM building owners 20 years to complete renovations. It also would not require walls to be tied to floors.

“Mom-and-pop owners have raised legitimate concerns about how the previous ordinance (proposal) may affect their financial stability,” Wheeler stated in a news release. “I take those concerns seriously, and my amended resolution accounts for those concerns while still increasing seismic safety in the (most) vulnerable populations in our community.”

Wheeler’s and Eudaly’s policy would allow owners of class 3 and 4 buildings 20 years to complete seismic upgrades. Class 3 buildings are noncritical buildings with more than 10 occupants, while class 4 buildings are noncritical buildings with zero to 10 occupants. Together, they comprise 94 percent of all URM buildings in Portland.

The exceptions are class 1 and 2 buildings, which include schools, utility buildings and other critical infrastructure. Those two categories encompass only 98 buildings in Portland.

It’s unclear what requirements could be placed on class 1 and 2 buildings. Wheeler’s policy would require city staff to develop code language for a mandatory seismic retrofit program and return to City Council for adoption within a year.

Oregon State University professor Chris Goldfinger will be among those speaking at Wednesday’s council meeting. Goldfinger, a geologist, is a leading expert on the Cascadia subduction zone.

“It’s great that it’s happening, because if we do this, I think we’ll be only the third city in the country to tackle something like this,” he said.

Los Angeles and San Francisco have already tackled seismic retrofit requirements.

It would be “disappointing” if Portland’s seismic retrofit requirements were watered down, Goldfinger said. Governments should mount “as strong a response as possible as soon as possible,” he added.

“It’s a gamble,” he said. “We’re kind of gambling with people’s lives.”

The existence of an earthquake hazard is well established, but the timing is uncertain, Goldfinger said. That makes it a sticky problem for politicians, who have to weigh certain, near-term costs.

“We may not have 20 years,” he said. “No one knows.”

Seismic retrofits can cost millions of dollars. In some cases, the projects simply aren’t financially feasible. The cost to retrofit a building can exceed its existing value, or amount to many times the annual revenue drawn from rents.

Commercial buildings are often given seismic upgrades amid a broader repositioning and later sold. The Towne Storage building, at 17 S.E. Third Ave., underwent a major seismic upgrade in 2016-17 that included installation of concrete shear walls, steel brace frames and new building supports. The building, which dates to 1916, later attracted Autodesk as a tenant and sold last month for $62.75 million, or $630 per square foot – a record for a Portland office property.

The Beaverton School District is planning a seismic upgrade to Aloha High School that includes roof work to the auditoriums and gymnasium. The total project cost for the buildings totaling 260,000 square feet is estimated at $8.2 million, said Aaron Boyle, construction operations supervisor for the school district.

District officials announced last week they had received from Business Oregon a $2.5 million seismic rehabilitation grant that will help pay for the project.

“A lot of the work is in the gymnasium and auditoriums,” Boyle said. “There will be a lot of structural steel in those big-volume spaces.”

The work will go out to bid in the next “couple of months,” he said.

Amid growing concern about seismic hazards, the city of Portland began studying the issues years ago.

Officials held a “kickoff meeting” to study incentives for an unreinforced masonry program on Dec. 10, 2014. In April 2015, the Retrofit Standards Committee issued its report. In December 2015, the city’s Seismic Retrofit Support Committee issued its final report.

Then in October 2017, the city formed a URM policy committee that included developers, building owners, construction executives and others. The group issued its 39-page report in December.

Yet more study is needed, according to Wheeler’s and Eudaly’s proposal.

Wheeler’s resolution calls for formation of a “working group” of URM building owners, tenants and others who will be charged with “further evaluating reasonable seismic retrofit requirements, support, incentives and timelines, for Class 3 and Class 4 URM buildings, and return to Council within a year to report on their findings.”

While the political outcome is uncertain, the geologic hazards are not.

The Cascadia subduction zone has experienced about 46 major earthquakes in the past 10,000 years, according to Goldfinger. Of those, about 20 were 8.8 magnitude or larger, he said.

“The Cascadia fault (line) has gone from completely unknown in 1985 to one of the best-known faults in the world,” he said. “The scientific evidence is about as solid as it could get.”

He added, “We have the hazard part of it pretty well on hand. That turns the camera back to the response side. You know, what are we going to do about it?”

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