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Buildings and Inspections reports plan-review improvements, expands training academy to address inspector shortfall
Summary
The Department of Buildings & Inspections reported gains in commercial and residential plan-review timeliness after hiring and retraining, but said enforcement and lot-abatement response remain constrained by inspector vacancies; the department’s academy model is producing inspectors drawn from local neighborhoods.
Art Dahlberg, director of the Department of Buildings and Inspections, told the Budget & Finance Committee that plan-review timelines for commercial and residential permits have improved markedly after active hiring and that the department is scaling an in-house inspector academy to address chronic workforce shortages.
Dahlberg said the department’s goal is to complete 90% of commercial plan reviews within 15 days and 90% of residential reviews within 10 days; the department reported strong performance in the first two quarters and said it expects further gains once remaining plan-exam positions are filled. He described a “tier 2” plan-exam tool to route small and medium projects onto a quicker five-day path and said about 40% of plan reviews are handled by a tier-1 customer-facing process that often results in a permit issued at the meeting.
The director acknowledged continued service constraints in reactive enforcement programs: private-lot abatement (PLAP) responses meet a two-day goal roughly 70% of the time and vacant-building responses are around the 60th percentile. Dahlberg said those enforcement functions share staff with housing complaints and other inspections; the department currently has 29 inspectors available for in-field inspections and estimates a fully staffed target of roughly 60 inspectors.
Dahlberg outlined the academy model that hires candidates with interest rather than experience and puts them through a multi-year pipeline of classroom training, mentoring and field supervision. The first academy cohort has produced a retention rate he described as “roughly 77%” through probation; the cohort was about 50% African American and 18% women. A second academy cohort of 25 is scheduled to start next month, and the department plans a continuous recruitment pipeline with central HR.
Committee members asked about the PLAP invoicing and cost-recovery process; Dahlberg said an administrative technician added in late January will expedite invoicing and transfer to county collection when property owners do not pay. On plan-review cycles, the director said the department tracks how many review rounds a submission requires and is implementing phone-based outreach between examiners and designers to reduce repeated cycles.
Dahlberg said fully staffing the inspector corps will take time: academy graduates require multi-year mentoring and the department is preparing to adjust supervisor-to-inspector ratios as new inspectors complete training.
