Topic:  Building Department Workloads

Attendees:

Claude Cooper, Richmond
Mark Topping, New York City
Jim Evetts, Charlotte County, Florida
Greg Burgoon, Akron
Tracy Williams, Milwaukee
Steve Kerzan, Indianapolis
Florencio Pena, San Antonio
Chick Czynski, Chicago
Curtis Mann, New Orleans
Robert Wible, NCSBCS

AMCBO Chairman Claude Cooper welcomed everyone to the call and noted the topic of the call was the workload of building departments.

To open the call, Mr. Cooper introduced Jim Evetts, Chief Building Official from Charlotte County, Florida. Mr. Evetts had been invited to participate in the call and share his concern and gather input from AMCBO members on the issues of roof inspections.

Mr. Evetts described the problems being faced by his community as it tried to recover from the devastation caused by Hurricane Charley. The county is faced with trying to do a large number of roof inspections with few inspectors. Mr. Evetts also noted that the county generally does 112,811 total inspections per year and issues 46,847 permits. At present, his inspectors are performing 35 roof inspections per day, and there are approximately 3,500 roofs yet to be done.

Roofing contractors must be licensed in Florida and his department is busy inspecting the repairs from Hurricane Charley. In addition, the County is going through a building boom. There has been a 50% increase in new homes this year. (Last year there was a 45% in new homes over the previous year and the year before the county had a 35% increase over 2002.)

The County Commission has to approve staffing of the building department.

Florencio Pena, San Antonio’s building official, noted that his city had the same problem regarding trying to hire staff when there are huge demands for inspectors caused by rises in construction volume. In his city while the police and fire departments have the authority under city regulations to hire above authorized staffing levels to handle emergency situations, the building department does not. Several other AMCBO members noted that they faced the same situation in their jurisdiction.

Mr. Pena noted they did have authority to hire "temporary employees" but they could only work less than one year. Mr. Evetts said he had 12 temporary employees helping Charlotte County out now.

As to what is a reasonable number of inspections per day to expect for a building department, Claude Cooper suggested 20-25 inspections was reasonable from his years of experience.

Steve Kerzan, Indianapolis, indicated 12 to 18 roofs per day would be a good average. His city does about 7,000 a year on new homes.

Milwaukee and New Orleans do not require inspections for roofs. Mr. Pena noted San Antonio requires permits but they do not do inspections. Overall they do 20-25 inspections per inspectors.

Mr. Kerzan noted that Indianapolis is currently facing a similar situation with a lack of plans review staff.

Richmond, New York City, and Milwaukee will not review plans on the job site. Chicago will do plan reviews on the job site "if warranted." The need for more licensed plan examiners in several cities and in Charlotte County was discussed.

In Charlotte, plan examiners must be certified by the state of Florida. The state recognizes ICC and SBCCI certification programs. Despite an executive order from Governor Bush after the recent hurricanes, Florida does not have reciprocity for contractor licensing with neighboring states because of unclear language in that order. Having licensing reciprocity would certainly speed up roof repairs.

Greg Burgoon, Akron, raised the issue of jurisdictions privatizing plan reviews and inspections. He noted that in Akron they were doing a trial program on allowing builders to do their own plan reviews and inspections. Mr. Evetts said that in Florida they allowed private firms to do inspections and they did follow-up spot checks on the work. In such follow-ups they have seen some problems with private firms performance – some are good and some are bad.

Mr. Cooper thanked everyone for their information on this issue. He asked that if anyone had an appropriate number of roof inspections per inspector to please forward that information to Mr. Evetts in Charlotte County.

Chairman Cooper noted that both AMCBO and NCSBCS members should discuss the issue of privatization of inspections and plan reviews further. Mr. Cooper moved on to review the 1993 Dallas survey on major city code administration and enforcement programs.

Mr. Cooper thanked Steve Kerzan, Indianapolis building official, for sharing an electronic copy of the old Dallas survey with everyone. Mr. Kerzan said that over the years his jurisdiction had found the survey to be very useful in benchmarking their work and thought it might be useful if AMCBO updated the survey.

The benefits of having such data updated and the need to add additional questions to the survey to gather other data relevant to major jurisdiction operations was discussed. Among the additional data items were:

1. Turnaround times for reviewing plans for different types of buildings – complex commercial structures, high-rise buildings, and single family residences (where plan reviews are required).
2. Response time to inspection requests.
3. Number of inspections per inspector for different types of construction.
4. Funding mechanisms for building departments.

It was noted it might be useful for AMCBO members to provide data on the number of structural fires and percentage of damage done to buildings in their jurisdiction (data available from fire department in the city or county).

Steven Kerzan noted that the previous mayor of Indianapolis had made their building department program smaller and increased use of privatization as a way to reduce costs to public. Over the past few years, Indianapolis had gone from 25 field inspectors to 10 (have 8 plus two vacancies). It was noted that the city sees a 19% failure rate on the work being performed by private sector contractors as inspectors under this program.

Mr. Kerzan also noted that his city supports some of its inspection program through levying a charge of $125 for each craft that is not ready for an onsite inspection once that inspection has been called for by the builder/contractor.

A discussion followed on how all of this was reflected in the ISO ratings of a jurisdiction’s codes administration and enforcement programs. It was agreed that a follow-up call on this topic should be held and perhaps jurisdictions could share their current ISO ratings and discuss the ISO rating system.

It was agreed that AMCBO should pursue an update of the old Dallas study and add a few additional questions. Those questions would include the above four items. Mr. Cooper asked for members to think about and get back to him or to the Secretariat, Robert Wible, if they had any other questions they would like to see added to the survey.

To assure that the survey was an apples-to-apples comparison, it was agreed data requests be limited to building plan review and inspection programs in the following code areas: electrical, mechanical, plumbing, structural and accessibility. At the beginning of the survey, there should be a place at the beginning where respondents would note what they inspect and how they do it (e.g., just with government officials or government staff supplemented by private contractors?).

It was noted the survey also should become an item to help promote membership in AMCBO. The survey summary should be available to AMCBO members only plus those jurisdictions responding to the survey.

Chairman Cooper asked that everyone get their suggested additional survey questions into him in the next three weeks so the survey could be undertaken in April and the results made available in mid to late May.

Prior to concluding this monthly members’ call, Mr. Cooper reminded everyone of the AMCBO membership campaign and the need to select topics for the April and May members’ calls. Topics suggested include:

1. Discussion of inspection scheduling processes and fees.
2. Use of multi-discipline inspectors and cross training of inspectors.

At 1:15 the call was adjourned. Mr. Cooper thanked all for their participation with a reminder of the upcoming March 15 NCSBCS/AMCBO Important Issues Call on Aging in Place and Visitability. The next AMCBO members’ call is scheduled for April 8, 2005, at noon Eastern Time.