Imagine coordinating the efforts of the staff of an architectural firm, a structural engineering firm, a landscape architect, a civil engineering firm, a geotechnical firm, a surveyor, a septic designer, a general contractor, and a client all to create a cohesive and coordinated set of drawings to submit for a building permit application. This coordination of about 20+ people results in a stack of forms and drawings that must have all the specific information and protocols to be accepted by a building department. If one thing is not the way they want it, the building official turns you away. This results in a wasted day, reprinting hundreds of dollars worth of drawings, further updates to the drawings, and a lot of frustration for the design team and client. At least many of the building departments are now accepting digital submittals.
The building department turns people away from turning in a permit application for many reasons: if a form is missing, not the right number of copies, a drawing is not clear, a drawing is missing, a calculation is missing, or even the size of paper, color of paper, size of text, scale of a drawing, or because the architect’s stamp is photocopied.
Building departments have tried to kick me out for all of these things (many times). They have never succeeded.
Why do they deny people from turning in drawings for them to review? I think it is because if they accept the application, then they have to do the work of reviewing the drawings. They don’t want more work. They earn a salary either way, so they exercise the limited power they have in their lives by turning people away.
I have a lot of experience dealing with this bureaucratic nonsense, and I have learned how to surpass it:
I start out by being nice. I treat the reviewers like a friend. I don’t kiss their ass, but I do treat them like a human. This usually causes them to treat me like a human.
I show up impeccably prepared. There are checklists of what is required to submit for permit review, and there are also ordinances that dictate what the building department must review and approve. We follow these to a T and know them by memory (and hold the building department accountable for it).
When the building department reviewers ask for something in a format we don’t have, I am ready with a simple response: I’m sorry I missed that, but here is the info you are looking for… can you review it based on this format? …or I can also write it or draw it real quick on the plans for you. Usually this works.
If they still deny accepting my plans, this is where I get nasty. I remind them that I have clearly provided the info they requested, and next I ask them this loaded question: “is your request a preference of yours?” They always say: “this is how we have always required it.” This is when I say: “I would love to learn more about that… which codified ordinance are you referring to in your municipal code?” This is when the building plans reviewer starts to stammer, stutter, and get nervous. Then they go and get their manager.
At this point, I tell the manager that I am happy to work around their personal preferences on FUTURE projects, but on THIS project, I expect us both to follow the requirements of the municipal code, to review the required content of the drawings, and I will not accept any other way of doing it than what has been enacted by the municipality into an ordinance. This wins every time.
Then I thank them for being reasonable and working with me. I also thank them for teaching me about the issue.
To use this procedure, you need to know exactly what you’re doing. You need to know the rules forward and backward. You need to know what the reviewers are going to say before they say it, and you need to be ready to fire off a concise, firm response that references the requirements in a way that cannot be argued. When I do this, I know I’m saving my client thousands of dollars in time saved, as well as additional costs of things the building department requests us to add to the drawings. Sometimes these items incur tens of thousands of dollars in construction cost. In a matter of 5 minutes, I’m literally saving my client thousands of dollars - often more than they have paid me to design their whole project. It’s very rewarding to help people in this way, and it also helps to earn the respect from the staff at the building department.
If you’d like to learn more about our design process, visit www.josharch.com/process, and if you’d like to get us started on your project with a feasibility report, please visit www.josharch.com/help