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Grand jury faults DBI NOV process; director says backlog shrinking and Accela roll-out planned
Summary
The civil grand jury called the Department of Building Inspection's NOV process "broken" and urged streamlining and monitoring; DBI leadership acknowledged problems tied to past staffing cuts, said the open-NOV backlog has fallen to about 1,700, and projected an Accela system roll-out in spring 2014.
The Government Audit & Oversight Committee spent substantial time on Oct. 10 reviewing a civil grand jury report that concluded the Department of Building Inspection's (DBI) notice-of-violation (NOV) process is inefficient and leaves thousands of properties in extended noncompliance.
The grand jury said DBI had as many as 6,000 open NOVs in February 2013 and reported that, in the jury’s two-year sample, 8,875 NOVs were issued and a nontrivial share remained open years later. Jerry Drattler of the grand jury argued that NOV closure rates should be tracked from issue date and monitored by DBI division. "There are 8,875 issued in the 2 years," he said in the presentation, and the jury urged DBI to report elapsed time to closure and to strengthen oversight of Abatement Appeals Board continuances.
DBI Director Tom Huey told the committee he accepted many of the findings, called the NOV backlog "a priority" and credited increased staffing and new processes for dramatic recent reductions. Huey said DBI inherited roughly a 5,000-case backlog when he assumed leadership and reported that current open NOVs had been reduced to "about 1,700." Deputy Director Daniel Lowery described new monthly and biweekly complaint- and NOV-monitoring reports and said the department had reestablished director hearings and doubled code-enforcement staffing.
Supervisors pressed DBI about a civil-grand-jury allegation that monitoring fees had not been consistently collected. The jury cited about $900,000 in uncollected monitoring fees since July 2010; DBI said housing-division staff had been collecting earlier and that other divisions began collecting monitoring fees only recently. DBI told the committee the revenue from monitoring fees flows to the department and will be used for housing- and code-enforcement functions.
On Accela — the permitting and case-management software the city has contracted to use — DBI staff said the package requires local customization and cross-department coordination with Planning, Fire and Public Works, and that rollout would follow staff training. DBI projected a March–April 2014 go-live window and emphasized training as a prerequisite.
The committee voted to file the hearing, requested a list of departments that have benchmarking and NOV-closure data, and asked DBI to return with a timeline for BPR (business process reengineering), Accela implementation and monitoring-report milestones.
