Louisville City Council Votes to Exempt Construction Materials for Marshall Fire Rebuilds

Marshall Fire exemptions

The Louisville City Council recently voted to exempt construction materials from the city’s use tax for permits issued for homes damaged in the Marshall Fire and allowing damaged homes to opt out of the city’s 2021 building code when rebuilding. Residents previously recalled Councilmember Maxine Most over her objections to these exemptions, with Most citing environmental concerns.

Rob Zuccaro, community development director, said that the city already has ordinances exempting homeowners whose homes were severely damaged or destroyed in the fire. 

The ordinances passed by the Council on Dec. 19, 2023 give the same exemptions and opt-out options to homes that sustained smoke, heat, water, ash or other damage due to the Marshall Fire.

Zucarro said more than 1,400 homes in Louisville experienced varying degrees of damage from the fire but were not completely destroyed. He said both ordinances will help those homeowners out financially and fill insurance gaps.

“The two ordinances before you really just take those ordinances that were applied to the full loss or the structures that sustained direct fire damage and extends it to any property that had any type of damage from the fire,” Zuccaro said. “These ordinances would extend the use tax exemption and then the opt-out to the energy code.”

The ordinance was amended by the Council to extend the deadline to Dec. 31, 2025, as the deadline was originally Dec. 31, 2024.

“We’re late to the party on this, and I’m sorry”

The deadline was extended after the Council discussed how rebuilding efforts can be drawn out by insurance disputes, financial hardships and not having the ordinance in place for homeowners who did not experience complete loss during the fire.

“We’re late to the party on this, and I’m sorry,” Mayor Chris Leh said.

Several Louisville residents spoke to the Council in favor of both ordinances including Reina Pomeroy whose family home burned.

“I’m a total loss survivor,” she said. “My house was one of the last ones on my block to burn. Some of my neighbors were home a year later. Some of my neighbors are not yet home. The ambiguity for this community, unlike for my situation, is so real. They don’t know what comes next. This industry is so unregulated. There’s very little FEMA and SBA and additional financial support out there for these groups, and it makes it really complicated to find financial assistance, to be able to make it back to zero. Not even better, just to zero.”

Pomeroy told the Council she recently returned from Maui, where a wildfire burned through the town of Lahaina on Aug. 8, causing loss of life, property and cultural landmarks.

“I just returned from Lahaina, Maui that was devastated by the fire,” she said. “That community is looking to us. They’re looking to see what we’re going to do.”

Jeffrey Hart, whose home was damaged, told the Council that he favored passing the ordinances.

Louisville Mayor Chris Leh

Smoke, ash, and mirrors

“Insurance knows there’s no protocol, no set standards much to do for smoke damage houses,” he said. “As such, they’ve been highly resistant to offer coverage for this because the liability incurred myself and numerous of my neighbors have been going through a legal process trying to recover some funds.  After a year-long struggle, my wife and I came to a settlement with our insurance company. The house is not going to be safe to live in until it’s fixed. There’s no doubt about that.”

Hart told the Council as they started demoing his house, they found more damage than expected inside the walls. 

“The entire sections of the installation are black through the entire depth of it from smoke piles bashed between the walls,” he said. “The workers who hate wearing masks, but they recognize the risk inherent with this. I want my family home. I love living in the community, I love living in Louisville. Anything you can do to help us would be greatly appreciated.”

Kimberly Redublado told the Council that her family home is still uninhabitable.

“I’m speaking tonight on behalf of our family of five and for other families with partial loss of homes still struggling,” she said. “We ask that the city has the two ordinances. Our home in Louisville was damaged in the Marshall Fire. No one is living in it. The fire burned homes to their foundations directly in front of us, right behind us and adjacent to the west, maybe 25 feet away from our home. We had apparent burning and water damage. We lost our brand-new landscaping and 30-year-old trees. There was a smell of char and a stunning, horrible smell of chemicals through our home.”

Personal impacts

Jeri Curry, executive director of Marshall ROC, which is the Marshall Fire Long-term Recovery Group spoke in favor of the ordinances.

“Households who have extensive smoke ash and thermal damage are really struggling in the recovery. I’m familiar with the entire landscape of the recovery and these are some of our toughest cases that we see on a daily basis,” she said. “The challenges are similar to those whose homes were destroyed. However, in some ways even more difficult when people question whether them at every step of the way, whether they really did have as much damage, they feel lesser than their home is still standing and so they feel guilty. It’s a wide range of challenges that they’re faced with.”

David Summers of Louisville spoke of the personal impact the Marshall Fire had on families.

“Me and my family were deeply impacted by the Marshall Fire,” he said. “All of our neighbor’s houses burned down. Our house only stands because of the efforts of the firefighters that decided to make our house the line in the sand and were tirelessly working all night to save homes.”

Summers said a neighbor’s house, just 10 feet from his property burned.

“The closest house was 10 feet away from my house that was burned to the foundation, and burned our landscaping, melted the windows, charred the siding on the back of the house and filled all the wall cavities with soot and the ash,” he said. “We had to tear the house down to the bare studs from the outside, remove the siding, sheathing, insulation, and then replaced all that. We were left with a large insurance gap. We were lucky in that we had savings, so we paid out of pocket to get back into our house. We were out of our house for an entire year. We moved back in on the one-year anniversary of the fire. I ask you to pass both of these ordinances. It will help me, my family, it’ll help people get back into homes.”

Mayor pro tem Caleb Dickinson said that homeowners affected by the Marshall Fire were going through various forms of trauma.

He said it was an oversight as the Council believed insurance companies would completely cover homes damaged by the fire and he found it “offensive” that some insurers were bad actors in the situation.

“I think it was a huge oversight on our part and I was on Council, so I take ownership for that. And it was an accidental oversight,” he said.