HousingZone.com talks with David Fetveit, president of the Indoor Environmental Standards Organization, about the IESO's direction, how the mold hysteria has affected the construction industry, and his role in introducing mold legislation at the federal and state levels. This is a follow-up to a 2003 HousingZone interview in which Fetveit talked about the goals of the newly formed IESO and the need for standards in the mold field. Fetveit also is executive vice president of Aerotech Laboratories, an environmental testing laboratory.
HousingZone: What has the IESO accomplished in the past year? Fetveit: We've had a very successful year. We just wrapped up our inaugural conference, which was the first week of February in Las Vegas. It wasn't a huge show, but for a new organization, I think it was overall a success. We got more than 150 attendees, our speakers were all Ph.D.s, CIHs [Certified Industrial Hygienists], and we had a good lineup of instructors.
Last year when I talked with you we probably had 250 members. We've grown to more than 600 members and more than 450 certified inspectors. And to be honest, we're just now starting to gain momentum. We have some high-profile educators who want to offer our certification program through their outlets. One of them is Hondros College in Ohio. They specialize in real estate, insurance, financial services, business administration - really a lot of real-estate-related education.
HZ: Did the IESO's Standards Practice for the Assessment of Indoor Environmental Quality go through the ANSI [American National Standards Institute] process? I remember you saying that the IESO was considering this last year.
Fetveit: The IESO standards loosely follow the ANSI requirements, but going through the documentation and accreditation process is pretty costly. It would be a $50,000 to $100,000 investment, and we just don't have the membership base to take that on.
To give some comparison, the S520 standard just came out within the last couple of months. It's similar to the IESO standards in the fact that's it's a nonprofit group developing an industry standard. The IICRC [Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification] has their name on it, but the IAQA [Indoor Air Quality Association] and several other indoor air quality type groups put together the mold remediation standard.
It wasn't developed by any ANSI-accredited organization, but it is an industry-consensus standard, whereas all of the industry leaders got together and agreed to the terms of the standards and they've published it. They've sold thousands of copies of these standards, which just came out in December.
But their standard is focused on the standard procedure for fixing a mold problem. That's something that complements what IESO is doing. I don't think we would ever want to write a standard about remediation because we're catering to the home inspector type membership base, where we want to teach them standards for assessment and inspection.
HZ: What's the training process for being an IESO Certified Residential Mold Inspector?
Fetveit: It's a two-day course, 16 hours. It gives students some background on the mold industry and general mold contamination issues. Basically, every class reads through the entire collection of standards, explaining and giving the background for every point. Exactly how to take samples, why you're taking samples, some of the limitations to the sampling techniques and then how to do the assessments.
That's the lecture and information portion of the course, and then there's a hands-on portion where they have to follow the standards to take samples, follow the standards to do a pump calibration and be able to demonstrate that they understand the standards and can follow them step by step as far as the sample collection goes. For the assessment standards, they do a mock inspection. It's really an interactive course. The intent was for students to demonstrate proficiency to the standards in the class. Then there's a 75-question test that they have to score 80% on to pass.
HZ: What's on the agenda for the IESO this year?
Fetveit: We had a standards committee meeting at our inaugural conference in Las Vegas, and the purpose was to decide what types of new standards and new certification programs that the industry's demanding. There's quite a laundry list, and we've been trying to narrow them down, but I think the first priority is going to be developing an assessment standard for commercial property, school property and potentially health-care facilities. And then develop certification programs built around those standards.
One of the main benefits our certified inspectors were really asking for is professional liability insurance. Providing this was one of the things we wanted to do when we first formed IESO, so when they're doing a mold inspection, that they have an E&O [errors and omissions] policy that covers them for doing the mold inspections. There are no insurance underwriters right now willing to write that policy.
Early on we had a number of brokers that came to us, looked at the program and said they would do this for us. So we took their name and distributed it to our couple hundred members we had at the time. When our members started calling them up, the brokers would ask for five years of experience, a degree and a lot of other things that our members probably aren't going to have.
I've been working diligently for the past year, and several members of our executive board have been working as well, to working with some high-profile brokers and insurance underwriters that will really take a close look at the program. We've laid out in clear terms exactly what we're looking for. We want to have a policy that's about $500,000, where the premiums are going to be about $2,500 to $3,000, and the only requirement is that they're certified, follow the standards and use whatever type of disclaimer forms or inspection contracts that the insurance underwriter requires.
To me it would be a slam-dunk for these insurance underwriters to make some money and defer the liability. But, number one, insurance companies are running scared from anything that has the M word in it, and number two, they have so many other things going on that they don't really have any motivation to take the time to really, truly evaluate it. I have two high-profile underwriters that have taken the time, we've submitted our materials, and we've had some dialogue.
They have verbally committed to putting some programs together, but I've been working with both for about a year, and they still don't have a program. I'm still going to work to get someone to write these policies as another membership benefit we can offer.
HZ: Do you think the mold hysteria has died down at all since last year?
Fetveit: Certainly, I think it has. I think the hype going away is actually a good thing because the more hype that's out there, the easier it is for insurance companies and other people who have potential liability or money at risk to just run away. Now that the hype is kind of going away and the problems are still there, it's making people pay attention.
It's really sad because there are a lot of people who legitimately have mold problems that have seriously negatively affected their health to the point where they have to move out of their house. And if their insurance company doesn't cover the loss, they have to foreclose on their house. It's almost like losing your house to fire and not having an insurance policy to cover it.
There are a lot of people who are being displaced. As a result, the next thing they do is hire an attorney because that's the only option to potentially save anything. The attorney might then try to find some reason that either the insurance company acted in bad faith or try to argue that it should have been a covered peril in the first place.
That's why we've seen this huge insurgence -- even after the hype has gone away -- of mold litigation going on in a lot of different aspects of the industry against construction companies, engineers, architects and even real estate professionals. So nobody's free and clear of the liability, but the reason that all that liability is out there is because the insurance companies have turned their backs on it. I think that the problem's there, and it's not going away.
Texas passed a law a couple of years ago [regulating mold-related activities that affect indoor air quality], and the final draft of their rules are going to be in effect in the next month or two and start to be enforced in January 2005. There are a lot of other states that have mold licensing and regulation programs in the works. More of that regulation and standardization in the industry is going to legitimize a lot of the real problems that are going on, now that the hype is gone.
No insurance company is going to insure anything unless they can make money, and with no regulation and standardization, the mold issue is open-ended -- they never know what they're going to be in for, so they don't know what to set the premiums at. So once that standardization and regulation come in, then insurance companies can write policies. I think that is going to be one big thing that's going to happen in the next year or two.
The EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], NIOSH [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] and some other federal groups have started doing some research in the last several years really trying to quantify and document how mold negatively affects human health. That's really the big question. That's the first thing that insurance companies try to pull out of their bag -- that mold has been around forever and it doesn't really hurt you. There is some research going on right now, but even in the next couple of months, there are going to be some papers published that are really going to prove that causal link between mold exposure and illness. And coming out of the EPA and NIOSH, which are really respected organizations, the insurance companies can't look away much longer.
Even though the hype has gone down, which I'm all in favor of, the industry is now growing at a healthy rate. It's not out of proportion, people are a little bit wiser, the awareness is still growing, and it's good, scientifically based awareness, not a bunch of wacko stuff telling you that mold is going to kill you and to burn your house down.
HZ: I read on the IESO Web site that you were serving on the task force for the United States Toxic Mold Safety and Prevention Act. What exactly is that?
Fetveit: It wasn't actually a task force. There are two task forces I'm serving on, one in Texas and one in California for state legislation. For the federal bill, and this was two years ago when Congressman [John] Conyers from Detroit wanted to introduce some federal mold legislation. Some of his staffers called me up, and I spent some time in Detroit and Washington, D.C., helping them hammer out the terms of the bill they wanted to take to Congress for approval. It went through its first round, and they were asking for way too much. They wanted every single rental property to be assessed for mold once a year. They wanted a mold assessment for every single single-family property transaction in the country.
You and I know there are about 6 million property transfers a year. Even if there were a $20 or $50 mold test for each one of those, that's billions of dollars, and the mold test would never be that cheap. Those types of things are never going to go through Congress the way they were written. So it didn't go anywhere the first year, which was the 2002 Congress.
Last year, in 2003, they rephrased and changed some of the wording and reintroduced it again into Congress. Again, it got stalled out. Of course, Conyers was crying foul because it's a Republican Congress and Republican president, and so he's saying that it doesn't matter what the legislation is, it won't go anywhere, and he's trying to turn it into a bipartisan issue. Honestly, I don't think the federal bill is going to go anywhere in the hands that it's in. It got several co-sponsors and certainly got some attention. I don't think it's going to go anywhere as far as being enacted into federal law.
But there are certainly a number of benefits that have been reaped by having the bill introduced in the first place and all of the efforts of Congressman Conyers to really bring the mold issue to the limelight and do away with the hype. This isn't hysteria, this is a real issue that's affecting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans. So bringing those issues to the forefront is certainly one benefit of the bill, and I hope he keeps at it. I'll certainly help him as much as I can.
HZ: And for Texas and California, those are just similar laws at the state level?
Fetveit: In Texas, the board is going to approve the rules next month, mid-April, to be in effect by May. That is pretty comprehensive. You can go to the Texas Department of Health Web site and download the current version of the rules. Basically, they're going to license anyone who's doing a mold assessment or mold remediation. You have to be licensed by the state, just like a lot of other professional trades. They have some standards in there for how to remediate mold and test for mold. So that's going to be the first real far-reaching mold-related legislation in the U.S.
California wants to do the same thing. They passed a law several years ago to create a task force to write rules like Texas did, but it was always with the caveat that there was sufficient funding. Of course, as we're all aware, there's a lack of sufficient funding in California. So it really hasn't gotten off the ground at all.
HZ: When you say that Texas requires someone to be licensed by the state, is there any chance that Texas would adopt the IESO standards?
Fetveit: I was sure hoping that they would. It was almost two years ago that I went to my first task-force meeting. The IESO standards are not going to cover everything, because the state wanted to cover remediation, in-depth assessment and a lot of things that IESO does not cover yet. But one of their licensing programs is for an assessment technician, which is exactly what we're certifying with IESO. I said, "Here are some perfect standards, we've got an exam and program, please adopt this." Certainly, IAQA, with all of their certification programs, came in and said they are certifying remediators and indoor environmental professionals, and to grandfather in their people as well.
Texas has been really resistant to grandfathering anyone in, which I think is good overall. If you're going to have a program that means anything, you can't just let everybody in. You need people to prove that they know their stuff. So when this rule takes effect in May, they're giving everyone from May until January to come in and take an exam, pay a fee and then get licensed. After January 1, you have to go through a training program before you take the test and get licensed. So they're kind of grandfathering in the fact that you'll only have to take a test. The Texas Department of Health said they're aware of IESO and our exam and asked if we would be willing to share some of the exam with them or help them develop the exam. From that regard, IESO will have some input, and being certified by IESO will give you an advantage when you go in to take the test. So we're doing what we can to work together with them on that.
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