Topic:  Plan Review Programs

Attendees:

Claude Cooper, Chairman, Richmond
Andrew Adelman, Vice Chairman, Los Angeles
Marty Collins, Milwaukee
Suzanne Hanson, Milwaukee
Mark Topping, New York City
Dan Eskinazi, New York City
Florencio Pena, San Antonio
Jeff Starkey, Wilmington
Robert Wible, NCSBCS (Secretariat)

AMCBO Chairman Claude Cooper welcomed everyone to the Association’s monthly call and thanked San Antonio Building Commissioner, Florencio Pena, for leading the call’s major topic on effective plan review programs.

San Antonio
Mr. Pena opened the call by describing the structure of the building plan review program in San Antonio, Texas. He noted that he was interested in working with his colleagues to see if AMCBO can identify a way to measure productivity of plan reviews and share best practices.

Mr. Pena reported that his city has 3,148 new commercial structures, 5,000 total permits and 7,100 new residential structure permits. His building plan review department has three teams. Two commercial plan review teams with 11 plan reviewers on each team. A plan review manager oversees each team. In addition to doing building structures, mechanical, electrical and plumbing, the department also handles landscape, drainage and water and other development standards issues. The department assigns its largest customers one of two plan review managers.

The San Antonio Building Department also has a third team that handles counter permits for minor plans. The codes used by the city include the 2003 IBC, 2003 UFC, 2003 UPC, 2002 NEC, 2000 Energy Code, 2000 IRC and the 2001 Unified Development Code that includes development standards for sidewalks and drainage.

The city offers a preliminary plan review service for which it charges.

Effective January 1, 2005, the city requires that any project over 5,000 square feet must have an architect as contact for the city. Smaller than 5,000 square feet does not require.

Do about 4 plans per week. Plan reviews require an appointment set a week ahead of the review. Plans must be submitted 14 days in advance of the meeting. When possible for smaller projects, the objective is to enable the owner/architect to go through the review and walk out the door with a permit that day.

High-rise and manufacturing facilities won’t quality for access to this program. Generally it takes 37 days to do a review and issue a permit for a building. It takes 21 days for an interior finish project to be reviewed.

The city does between 37 and 40 such plans per month. The walk through plan reviews they do 20 to 25 per week.

Will not do projects under this system for buildings of over 8,000 square feet or where there is a change of occupancy.

San Antonio also has an inter-local agreement with the school systems under which they do plan reviews of school buildings

Questions/Answers:

City does not receive plans electronically; however, 58% of the building permits are issued online.

Several other cities have noted that they do plan turnaround in 20 days. Richmond has a 1-week turnaround on small permits.

Milwaukee
The City of Milwaukee runs a walk-in/walkout small permits program service. The city has 7 plan examiners on their staff. They turn plans around within 15 days on an average. They have a walk-up counter program that does small permits in 15-20 minutes.

New York City has a 5-day goal for first reviews.

Wilmington holds pre-plan submission sessions with the architect to expedite plan reviews.

The AMCBO members discussed the need to look at finding a mechanism whereby different city building department plan review programs can be compared and perhaps a set of common goals or two or three performance measures can be established so they can do apples-to-apples comparison among programs.

Several members noted the growing pressure on building departments by elected officials to require quantity rather than quality in plan reviews.

It was agreed that there should be an effort among the membership to assemble best practices and perhaps establish benchmarks that can be helpful to jurisdictions.

It was further noted that ISO’s current standard for plan reviews is that a plans examiner should perform 220 plan reviews a year, or 5-7 plans a week.

It was noted that in some states (Texas) legislation has been introduced that require a turnaround on plans within a set number of days or the owner gets a refund on the cost of their building permit. In this regard, a court case in Orange County has returned over $4-1/2 million of "excess costs" in permit fees back to owners.

Los Angeles City
The City of Los Angeles has set a standard way of setting plan review fees. They charge a first time review fee of $8,000 ($100/hour x 8 hours of work). This gives the submitter two reviews. If plans require more than two reviews for approval, the city charges $100/hour for additional review time.

It was agreed that a good project for AMCBO would be to look at establishing a uniform methodology for setting a standardized workload and review time methodology to be shared with members.

It was also noted that in terms of homeland security as well as effective and efficient code administration, perhaps the federal government (NIST) might fund research in this area.

Claude Cooper and Robert Wible updated members on the work done by a core work group comprised of AMCBO and NCSBCS members working with the Department of Homeland Security to help DHS understand the critical role that building officials play in the planning for, mitigation, response to and recovery from natural and manmade disasters.

By 2007 all state and local jurisdictions must be in compliance with the provisions of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) or be ineligible for future DHS funds.

Mr. Wible noted that an update report on the core work group’s input efforts was included in the January NCSBCS/AMCBO Members e-Bulletin distributed via email on January 12. NCSBCS also will forward to interested AMCBO members the December 10 submission to DHS of recommended changes to the Universal Task List. On January 17 NCSBCS will submit to DHS input on the Department’s Target Capabilities List as well.

There being no further business to come before the members, Mr. Cooper adjourned the call at 1:15 p.m. The next AMCBO Monthly Members Call will be held on February 14, 2005.