You’ve just spent several hundred thousand dollars on a new roofing system for your district’s schools, and you have a 20-year warranty. You feel pretty secure, right? Not only that, but until recently, the warranty was limited to the value of the roof, but now manufacturers are coming out with a“no-dollar-limit” warranty. Just what that no dollar limit might be may seem a little vague, but it sounds good, right?

The operative word here is sounds. But what is very likely is you’ve been caught in“a shell game,” says Jeff Cacioppo, director of Business Development, Tremco, Cleveland. “The warranty is offered, by design, to create a false sense of security. But the warranty is intended to protect not the buyer, but the manufacturer.”

“The roofing industry screwed up, then continued to screw up,” Cacioppo says. “I believe that what originally went wrong happened by accident, but what keeps going wrong is by design.” To get a perspective of what is wrong with roofing today, most especially as it applies to schools, Cacioppo takes us back in time before the problem began.

“A properly designed, installed and maintained roof system should last the life of the building,” Cacioppo says. “Back then, they had a better handle on what makes a good roof. The quality of construction was much better.”

Part of the change was nobody’s fault. In the past, there was more brick and concrete, which gave buildings stability. The trend has been to use more structural metal, which lends itself to movement and stress on the building.

Also, more equipment (HVAC, etc.) has been put on the roof, and there seems to be more foot traffic. But what’s also happened has been the design of hundreds of different types of roof systems, accompanied by a growth in manufacturers, which, with their various associations, Cacioppo says, “makes them very powerful.”

“At one time, the contractor and the consumer determined the roofing. Now it’s the manufacturer,” he says. What’s the result of these changes? Cacioppo gives a few examples. “Roofing is most problematic in the federal government and schools because there roofing projects are always put out to bid. The federal government has found that roofs on its facilities are lasting seven years, with some lasting only five.

“Thirty years ago, the National Roofing Contractor Association found that the average longevity for a roof was 20 years. The last study they did they found the average was less than 12 years,” he says. “The roofing industry is really screwed up. You can have a warranty for a single-ply system for 30 years, when the roof won’t last 10 years.”

The largest single factor related to this is the warranty. “Warranties are typically filled with exclusions,” Cacioppo says. “A single-ply rubber roof as opposed to a multi-ply build-up will last only about 10 years, but the main problems are not usually in the materials, but in the application. This critical labor factor is usually not covered in the warranty. Nor, is flashing, and 90 percent of the leakage is through the flashings. Another factor not usually covered is movement of the building. There are all sorts of exclusions. A piece of paper will never keep water out of a building,” he says.The big problem with a wet roof system is mold, which creates tremendous health and liability issues. “Once you have a moisture failure in the roof, there is no way of drying it out, and that is the number one source of molds,” Cacioppo says.

Okay, if the problem is usually not the materials, but the applications, why not hold the contractor responsible? “Here is the way this works,” Cacioppo explains. “A contractor may have a contractual obligation to the manufacturer for two years. If, say, 2-1/2 years later, the roof fails, the contractor is home free. So when the superintendent callsthe manufacturer, they send out somebody who says, ‘This is an application failure, part of the exclusion clause.’ Who is left to be responsible,” Cacioppo asks?

Is this cooperation between manufacturer and contractor well understood? “Absolutely,” says Cacioppo. What if the school sues the contractor anyway? “Thumb through the roofing contractor section of the yellow pages and see how often the names change,” says Cacioppo. “As soon as they get hit with a liability suit, they declare bankruptcy and come back with a different name. That’s part of the game.”

Cacioppo says that about half of the school roofs he inspects that are 40 or so years old are, except for a minor repair or so, perfectly sound. And, if maintained as they have been, they could last another 40 years. But common in the industry, he adds, is that roofing contractors will tear out a perfectly good system simply because it’s old, then put in an inferior one, haphazardly, causing tremendous unnecessary expenses. Another trick is to put a new system over the old, but if the old is infected with mildew and mold, the effect is like putting a Bandaid over a cancer.

Where does the designer fit in? “Design is critical,” Cacioppo says. “But an architect may put out a one-page summary for a bid or it may be 50 pages detailing everything from materials to installation to inspection to maintenance. Yet, because the designer is not required to accept liability, he won’t. If he is designing a new roof on an existing structure, he might argue that he should not be held responsible for existing conditions, which lets him off the hook, but leaves the school without anyone to hold accountable,” Cacioppo says. A designer is not likely to accept liability for a new construction either, he adds.

Schools and districts are generally required to be put out to bid jobs that cost more than $25,000, and most roofs cost at least that much. Caccioppo says that about half the states have “Seal Laws” that require a design to be signed off on by the design professional, whether that is an architect, roofing consultant or engineer. But the signature doesn’t render the person liable. Cacioppo calls this one of the many “missing links” in the process. Another missing link, Cacioppo says, is that often a failed roofing system is replaced without the proper diagnosis of what went wrong in the first place, such as an insufficient slope to drain the water (which means that the new system will fail in the same way).

The entire warranty process is basically a hoax, says Cacioppo, because if there was not a warranty, the prevailing standard that would be operative is the Uniform Commercial Code, which stipulates a roof lasting 20 years. “Basically, the warranty is a porous document filled with loop holes through which the responsibility of virtually everybody — from the manufacturer to designer to the contractor leaks through, leaving no accountability.”

So, how can schools and municipalities protect themselves from getting ripped off? Cacioppo recommends having the school solicitor or lawyer comb through the warranty, plus having an inspector make sure every aspect of the application is done properly.

But more concrete solutions are at hand. Cacioppo says that four years ago, Mohaee County, in Arizona, started putting stringent requirements on roofing procurement. The idea was eventually picked up by the American Education Purchasing Association (AEPA), , currently based in Albuquerque, N.M. That organization has grown from 10 states, four years ago, to today’s total of 21. AEPA gets around the low-bid pitfall, because they eliminate the problem of divided responsibility by requiring the roofing company to take full responsibility. And, if a small (AEPA-member) school in a rural area of one of those states has a problem with the roofing company, they are covered because they are a part of the organization. AEPA accepts members from outside those 21 states through “piggy-backing” or through the National Joint Powers Association (NJPA), Staples, Minn., .

Cacioppo says that Tremco had only about three competitors the last time they were involved in one of these AEPA bids. Cacioppo believes there is positive change afoot because the federal government is changing their criteria from the low bid to best value. When asked whether school officials are aware of this positive trend, Cacioppo, who does a lot of public speaking on this topic, says, “Most school professionals are aware of the problems, but not that many are aware of the solutions, as through AEPA and NJPA. My belief is that as the good results begin to show, this solution, and their reaction to it, will snowball.”