City in need of building inspectors after cuts to fees
Two years ago Ottawa city councillors cut the fees for building inspections because the department that does the work was well staffed and stuffed with cash, and had no idea what was about to hit it.
Next week, the same planning committee that voted unanimously to give builders a break in 2016 will be asked to hire a dozen new inspectors to keep up with overwhelming demand, if that many people can even be found.
“The city is being challenged in meeting its legislated timelines and enforcement activities,” the new report recommending the hiring spree says. That is the sound a bureaucracy makes when it’s screaming.
Our city’s planning department, of which the building inspections branch is the single biggest part, didn’t plan properly and instead of using some of the millions of stockpiled dollars it had to get ready for a lot more work, it convinced councillors to approve cheaper service.
The inspections branch is currently budgeted for about 80 inspectors and 175 total fulltime-equivalent positions, so it’s seeking a big staffing boost. The examinations new buildings and major renovations are supposed to get to make sure they’re safe are done late. Getting plans approved takes longer than it should — longer than it’s legally allowed to take, in more and more cases.
Councillors like Cumberland’s Stephen Blais have worried publicly that the city’s open to lawsuits because inspectors have signed off on shoddily constructed houses they haven’t had the chance to examine thoroughly.
Like most of the planning department, the inspections branch is supposed to pretty much pay for itself by charging “clients” ( builders, whether it’s a homeowner adding a big deck or a major developer constructing a subdivision) for its work. More demand means more revenue means more capacity to hire people, and vice versa.
At the end of 2015 everything was tickety-boo, the city’s planners told councillors at the time, under now-retired general manager John Moser. There’d been a bit of a rush of applications before major revisions to the Ontario Building Code in 2014, so they’d been busy, but the inspectors had kept up and demand was returning to normal. They expected “continued slow growth” in their workload and a shift from large applications like condo and office towers to smaller ones.
All in all, “the branch continues to be well positioned to service building permits and enforce the (Planning) Act and (Ontario Building) Code.”
It had a whole year’s budget, $20 million, socked away in the bank, which was kind of embarrassing. Ottawa’s fees weren’t out of line with other municipalities’, the planners said, but we could cut them 10 per cent and still keep up with demand.
Sounded great. They were wrong about pretty much everything.
The number of building-permit applications shot up 25 per cent in two years. The average application got more complex rather than less.
The newer building code is more flexible, emphasizing objectives rather than formulas and measurements.
That means builders can propose designs that aren’t laid out in the manuals, which means inspectors have to spend more time evaluating them instead of ruling them out because they don’t tick one box on a checklist. The code is also more demanding about features like wheelchair accessibility and fire safety now, so there’s just more to examine in inspections.
In fairness, the number of building-permit applications that will come in is hard to predict. What the new building code would do to workloads should have been more foreseeable.
The inspections branch has added no new bodies since 2015 and its performance has crashed, according to its chief, Frank Bidin. When the city cut the inspection fees, inspectors were hitting deadlines 90 per cent of the time; two years later, it’s 64 per cent. The application numbers keep rising and a change to plumbing regulations is going to mean thousands of extra inspections of non-residential buildings over the next 10 years.
Individual inspectors might be going flat out but they’re overwhelmed.
Tons of overtime is helping but it’s needlessly expensive and not sustainable indefinitely, and the branch now figures there’ll be even more work to do once the light-rail system opens and landowners start redeveloping properties near stations.
The branch needs six more people out doing inspections, four reviewing things and doing other support work, and two dedicated to the plumbing situation, Bidin’s report says.
Whether a dozen qualified people are out there to hire is another question: earlier this year, Moser’s successor as planning boss, Steve Willis, said he had about eight vacancies because there’s a continental shortage of building inspectors, especially ones in the sweet spot where they have experience but aren’t on the verge of retiring. The city still has a job posting up for four intermediate-grade jobs. The obvious solution to such a shortage is to pay more.
Instead, the city cut prices. Now it has a crisis.