Fire Sprinkler Incentive Act
The National Volunteer Fire Council strongly supports the passage of the Fire Sprinkler Incentive Act, which would provide tax incentives for the voluntary installation and retrofitting of automatic sprinklers in buildings. This bill would reduce the tax depreciation time on non-residential real property from 39 years to only 15. While this tax incentive may appear sizeable, benefits of passage include lower local fire department costs, increased loan activity, reduced insurance claims and premium costs, larger numbers of retrofitting and installation jobs, and the generation of payroll tax revenue.
The importance of automatic fire sprinkler systems was tragically demonstrated in February 2003 when 99 people were killed in a pyrotechnic fire at a nightclub in Rhode Island. Three days earlier, there was another pyrotechnic fire in a nightclub in Minnesota. That establishment had an automatic fire sprinkler system and the fire did not cause a single injury.
The benefits of fire sprinkler systems have long been known. In fact, the National Fire Protection Association has no record of a fire killing more than two people in a public assembly, educational, institutional or residential building with a complete and fully operational automatic fire sprinkler system. The effectiveness of sprinkler systems in extinguishing fires or extending the time available for firefighters to respond is indisputable. Unfortunately, due to the costs of implementation, there has been little movement amongst property owners to install these systems.
The Fire Sprinkler Incentive Act was not enacted in the 111th Congress and has been reintroduced by Congressmen Aaron Schock (R-IL) and Jim Langevin (D-RI) in the House (H.R. 1792) and Senators Thomas Carper (D-DE) and Susan Collins (R-ME) in the Senate (S. 1035). The bills introduced in the 112th Congress will lower the tax depreciation time from 39 years to 15 years rather than 5 years. This lowers the cost of the bill and is consistent with the tax depreciation schedule for a number of other items. H.R. 1792 and S. 1035 would also create a tax credit for small business that install fire sprinklers in commercial property.
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