Member spotlight
Owen Castellanos on 12 years of building-code advocacy
National Council of Building Officials executive director Owen Castellanos is retiring in March after 12 years as a NANA member, most of them spent pushing code-adoption bills through statehouses.
Owen Castellanos joined NANA in 2014, three years into his tenure as executive director of the National Council of Building Officials. He is retiring from NCBO on March 31, 2027, closing a run in which he became one of the association's most frequent contributors to NANA's advocacy programming.
"When I joined, I mostly wanted the compensation survey data," Castellanos said. "I stayed for the advocacy work, because building-code fights are always local until they aren't."
Twelve years of code fights
NCBO represents 9,200 code officials and inspectors across 31 staff, and its members spend most of their year in state legislative sessions, not in Washington. Castellanos said NANA's advocacy programming gave his organization something it lacked on its own: a way to compare notes with other associations fighting similarly narrow, technical battles.
Statewide code-adoption cycles, which run on a different clock in nearly every state
Preemption fights, where a single state bill can undo a decade of local code work
Workforce shortages among inspectors, which NCBO now tracks against NANA's own compensation benchmarks
NCBO's membership has held at 9,200 for three straight years, a plateau Castellanos attributes partly to an aging inspector workforce rather than to any lapse in advocacy.
"You don't win a code fight by showing up loud once. You win it by being the association that's still in the room five sessions later, after everyone else who cared has moved on."
— Owen Castellanos, Executive Director, National Council of Building Officials
Why NCBO hired a comms contractor
NCBO has posted a six-month communications specialist contract to cover member newsletters and press releases through Castellanos's departure. He said the contract exists because NCBO's own three-person communications function was never built to carry a leadership transition on top of its regular workload.
"We didn't want the newsletter to go quiet for six months just because I'm walking out the door," Castellanos said. "Members notice that faster than they notice almost anything else we do."
What he'd tell a new executive director
Castellanos said he still gets calls from newer NANA members trying to get their first code-adoption bill through a statehouse, and he gives most of them the same advice: find the three other associations in the state who'll lose if the bill fails, and go to the first hearing together.
Show up to committee hearings even when your bill isn't on the agenda that week
Bring a member from the district, not just a lobbyist, whenever a legislator will take the meeting
Track the bill's opponents as carefully as its sponsors, since preemption fights are usually won or lost before a vote is ever scheduled
"None of that is clever," he said. "It's just slower than most people want advocacy to be."
What comes next
Castellanos said he plans to stay involved with NANA as a member after he leaves NCBO, though not in any staff or board capacity. He credited Deputy Executive Director Dominic Ferrante, who also chairs NANA's board, with keeping NCBO's advocacy calendar on track through the search for his successor.
"Dominic doesn't need my seat to keep this association's advocacy work moving," Castellanos said. "That's the actual test of whether twelve years added up to anything: does it survive the person leaving."