Inspector: more than half of recent Frostburg rental inspections lack compliant smoke alarms; council to consider code wording and phased notice

A city inspector reported at a Frostburg work session that more than half of recently inspected rental units do not meet the city's smoke-alarm requirements, and urged the mayor and council to clarify code language and approve a phased compliance approach.

"Of those 56 inspections, 50% or more of them are not in compliance with the smoke alarms," the inspector, Jake, told the council. He said the in-house inspection program has identified a long gap between inspections — an average of about 9.5 years — and cited multiple rental-unit fire fatalities in the city's recent record.

Jake provided examples cited in the inspection packet: 158 East College Avenue (1984, two fatalities), 82 East Main Street (2010, two fatalities), 115 Bowery Street (2014, one fatality), Braddock Estates (October 2021, one fatality) and a July 2024 fatality on Welsh Hill. He said all of those properties were rental units.

Code issue and options: Jake said Frostburg's rental ordinance incorporates the International Property Maintenance Code (IPMC) and that the city's 2014 rental-housing ordinance contains language requiring that "all smoke detectors within a rental unit must be interconnected." He traced earlier history to a 1993 ordinance (1993-7, adopted 07/06/1993) that required AC-powered, interconnected alarms on each level for certain unit types.

Where the IPMC allows exceptions for older homes (battery-powered alarms where wiring is not opened), Jake said the city's ordinance has no matching exception for interconnection, creating confusion for inspectors and landlords. He said radio-frequency (RF) interconnected alarms are approved by the IPMC, the International Fire Code and the International Residential Code and could meet the interconnection requirement without expensive rewiring.

Costs and enforcement approach: Jake gave ballpark cost figures from retail listings: RF-interconnected detectors generally range from about $39 to $59 per unit; a typical apartment may need four or five detectors, making a per-unit cost in the rough range of $150'$300 depending on size and configuration. He also noted manufacturers such as First Alert, Kidde and X-Sense as commonly available options.

Jake proposed a practical enforcement path: continue inspections, mark noncompliant units on inspection reports, send an explanatory notice (staff suggested including it with rental registration or water bills), and give owners time to remedy deficiencies by the next inspection cycle unless a complaint or immediate hazard arises. "I'm not gonna hold you to the 30 days or 90 day," he said, arguing for a reasonable timeline for property owners to comply.

Council and staff reaction: Council members and staff discussed whether the ordinance language was an oversight carried forward from earlier code updates and agreed the city code could benefit from clarified verbiage that preserves fire-safety goals while acknowledging practical limits for older structures. Several council members supported allowing RF-interconnected battery detectors as an acceptable path in buildings where hardwiring would require significant construction.

Next steps: Staff said they will prepare an explanatory letter to send to rental property owners with the registration bills and will circulate the inspector's packet to council for review. No formal ordinance change was adopted at the meeting; council asked staff to draft language options and a timeline for compliance and notification.

Jake and staff emphasized safety as the priority: Jake said he would prefer hardwired interconnection if feasible, but that saturating units with reliable 10-year sealed-battery detectors is preferable to leaving units without adequate coverage.

No vote was recorded in the transcript; staff will return with proposed ordinance wording, an owner-notice template and a proposed compliance timeline.