Customer Compliance Difficulties

Fairfax County’s Department of Environmental Management (DEM)* wanted to assist customers in meeting their legal obligation to comply with land development regulations and the building code, as well as to help them meet deadlines for successful completion of projects.

Optional Preliminary Meetings

DEM now offers optional pre-application, post-submission, and pre-construction meetings to help customers at key stages of the building regulatory process.

Pre-application meetings are an optional service that is provided to customers upon request. Pre-application meetings give the applicant the opportunity to introduce the project to the reviewers and to clarify any questions prior to the first review. Meetings are attended by reviewers from each discipline: building, mechanical, plumbing, electrical, and fire marshal. Reviewers look at the plans and point out obvious code violations or discrepancies so that these issues can be corrected before the plans are actually submitted for a permit. The team of reviewers that attend the pre-application meeting is assigned at the time a plan is submitted for a permit. These meetings help accelerate the review process because the reviewers do not have to spend time familiarizing themselves with the plans.

Similarly, post-submission meetings are offered after a set of plans has been reviewed and the designer needs to address code issues or questions by the reviewers. These meetings have proven to be very helpful in promptly resolving outstanding issues that may have been overlooked or misunderstood if the information was dispersed among the many sheets of a set of plans.

Pre-construction meetings give the inspectors an opportunity to meet the individuals involved in the project, to answer questions, and to offer expertise on the construction process.

RESULTS:

Preliminary meetings aid designers by helping to identify building design components which do not meet the building code, and by identifying details often missing from plans submitted to the County. Some common omissions are fire resistance design numbers and the corresponding illustrations of the design, details on the installation of fire dampers, etc. There is one particular code section that requires a percentage of an exterior wall to be open to qualify as an open parking structure. Often in preliminary meetings, the reviewer can request that the designer provide the actual calculations that were performed, making the review process much more efficient.

Preliminary meetings have exposed major design flaws, such as the placement of a property line in the middle of a building without proper fire protection. If such plans are submitted for review, it would take months to resolve this issue with the contractor is mobilizing on the job site.

Staff time spent in these meetings is offset by reduced review times and, therefore, these services can be offered free of charge. Time and money saved varies from project to project, but the continuous use of these optional programs confirms that designers, builders, and developers consider them valuable tools in the land development process. These meetings have also continued to help customers to meet deadlines for successful completion of projects.

SAVINGS:

It costs DIS (in real dollars, adjusted for inflation) less to issue a permit, review a plan, and perform an inspection now than in 1988. Establishing this program, in conjunction with other customer service initiatives, has meant that it would cost the County $1.5 million less today to handle the 1988 workload than it did 10 years ago.

EVALUATION BY STREAMLINING COMMITTEES:

• The program increases productivity and reduces time, cost, and complexity;
• It gets information to the customer up front.

• It does not establish what is expected from the parties attending the meetings;
• The benefits are not spelled out clearly.

The Streamlining Committees designated this program as a streamlining tool without modifications.

IMPLEMENTATION:

This program was implemented by administrative action of DEM. There is no additional cost associated with these programs and no computer support is needed or provided.

FOR MORE INFORMATION OR ASSISTANCE IN CONSIDERING THE USE OF THIS MODEL, PLEASE CONTACT: