He and his wife Joy served as CASBA co-directors for 14 years, about the length of time it took for architect Martin Hammer and other CASBA members to get straw bale construction officially recognized in the International Residential Code.

The straw bale guidelines in the state had just come into being, and they were good, uh, certainly better than not having anything, and they, and they were taken, really borrowed from the Pima County, Tucson, Arizona code that David Eisenberg had developed with Mats Merman and others.

So Martin saw an opportunity.

So knowing that they, they wanted it to change and move into the codes, I saw an opportunity to do that.

Partly from my own needs, from my own work, I just started writing [laughs] um, alternatives or maybe a replacement straw bale code, uh, for the state.