The building industry regularly experiences changes with the introduction of new legislation or initiatives. The City of Melbourne is committed to keeping stakeholders updated on these changes.
The following current changes may affect you. Check this site regularly for any updates.
New building safety regulations
Fire sprinkler testing
Greening your building
New building safety regulations
All commercial, public and industrial buildings built before 1994 require an Annual essential Safety Measures Report (AESMR) to be submitted by June 2009.
The report includes a compliance statement confirming that essential safety measures within the building have been maintained for the past 12 months.
The City of Melbourne will be organising information sessions to notify building owners of the new regulations and to ensure that appropriate maintenance, testing and inspection of essential safety measures are carried out with appropriate records and the AESMR can be completed with accuracy. Details on the information sessions will be available on this page soon.
For further information, visit the Building Commission or contact them on (03) 9285 6400.
The Building Commission provides hard copies of the Essential Safety Measures Maintenance Manual at cost, or you can download it from their website by visiting Essential safety measures.
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Fire sprinkler testing
Commercial building owners can save water by switching from weekly fire sprinkler testing to monthly testing as part of a new initiative by the Building Commission, Plumbing Commission and the City of Melbourne.
To help buildings change to monthly testing, a new process has been set up in which the building’s occupancy permit is automatically varied to remove the weekly testing requirement when the building permit is processed by the City of Melbourne. Council will be trialling some of its buildings with this process. The initiative is designed to save water and property owners’ time and money.
Download the Fire Sprinkler Testing fact sheets for more information:
Fire Sprinkler Testing fact sheet (PDF, 344kb)
Fire Sprinkler Testing fact sheet (Text only, 43kb)
Fire Sprinkler Testing – from weekly to monthly (PDF, 177kb)
Fire Sprinkler Testing – from weekly to monthly (Text only, 30kb)
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Greening your building
Owners and managers of older commercial buildings can now contribute to a cleaner environment when maintaining or upgrading plants and equipment.
The City of Melbourne has developed Greening Your Building – A Toolkit for Improving Asset Performance to help building owners and operation managers make their buildings more environmentally friendly.
The toolkit is available at Greening Your Building where information can be found on integrating environmentally sustainable practices during building maintenance, management and/or refurbishment.
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More information
For more information contact the City of Melbourne’s Building Control Group on (03) 9658 9658.