Smith, Klobuchar Reintroduce Bill to Fund Fire Safety Improvements in High-Rise Apartments

(KNSI) – Minnesota Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith have reintroduced a bill aiming to improve fire safety in high-rise public apartment buildings.

The Public Housing Fire Safety Act, if signed into law, would create a grant program within the Department of Housing and Urban Development to help public housing authorities install sprinkler systems in high-rise apartment buildings nationwide. The legislation stems from a 2019 fire at a Minneapolis apartment building that killed five people. An investigation showed that if the building’s upper floors had sprinklers, lives could have been saved.

“When Senator Klobuchar and I talk to our colleagues about this on the Senate floor and elsewhere as we’ve worked to get this bill passed, we talk about how important it is that everyone should be able to live in a safe place, that we have a responsibility to make sure that these public apartment buildings are safe,” Smith said.

The bill also calls for data collection on the status of sprinkler systems in these buildings. Smith says this would help fill a data gap and monitor the grant program’s impact.

“We don’t know for sure which buildings have sprinkler systems and which buildings don’t have sprinkler systems, so having that data would help us to understand the scope of the work that we have left to do,” Smith.

The lack of sprinklers is more common in older buildings. A federal fire safety law passed in 1992 mandated that newly built residential buildings install fire sprinkler systems. However, apartments built before that law might not be retrofitted with sprinkler systems on every floor.

“We realized that in this apartment building, which is an older apartment building, there are no sprinklers because the building is so old,” Smith said of Cedar High Apartments, which had sprinklers installed on its lower floors but not the upper floors where the fire originated. “That means that the residents there during a fire, many of them elders and people living with disabilities, were just in such a dangerous circumstance. That’s just unacceptable.”

Smith and Klobuchar’s bill comes in tandem with a bill recently passed by the Minnesota House. A bill authored by Rep. Mohamud Noor, whose district includes the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, would require high-rise public apartment buildings to install fully operational sprinkler systems by 2033. Smith said the state legislature is showing good leadership on this issue.

“Our bill would really complement what they’re doing,” Smith said. “They would sort of set a standard for what we need to do in these public apartment buildings. The legislation that Senator Klobuchar and I are working on would help to provide some federal resources to make sure that they can live up to that standard and they can fulfill that promise.”

Smith said she hopes that an upcoming infrastructure bill will include support for public apartment buildings so that they can make these critical improvements. The lack of sprinkler systems is one of many issues that point to underinvestment in America’s infrastructure, Smith said.

“We think about this all the time as we look at the roads that need to be repaired and the bridges that need to be repaired — as we think about how we need to build out rural broadband,” Smith said. “But we also need to think about those public apartment buildings that help keep people sheltered.”

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