Good evening.

Welcome to the Vicea City Council work session.

Today is Monday, September 15th.

I'm Vice Mayor Liz Wynne.

Mayor Brett Taylor is out of town today.

Right now we'll take public comments.

Citizens are now invited to comment on issues within the jurisdiction of the Visalia City Council and items listed on the closed session agenda.

Creative criticism presented with the appropriate courtesy is welcome.

Each speaker will be allowed three minutes, and a timer will notify you when your time is expired.

That's super important.

You all have probably been involved in some of their processes and how we make that work.

And then our building inspection team once permits issued, they are in the field and actively inspecting all new construction.

The division is comprised of four front counter personnel.

Those are three permit technicians, one office assistant who sort of works as a reception for us.

Important to note, two of those are currently vacant vacant.

One we lost to retirement, one went to the state division of state architect.

So we're actively recruiting for those those positions now.

We have a 10-person inspection team.

That's eight regular full-time city employees and two consulting inspectors just to help us keep both up with demand.

And I'll talk about some of the flexibility building inspections can offer us as well when it comes to having uh less than the required amount of people we need in the plan review side a little later.

Then we have administrative staff too, including myself and a financial analyst.

The City Hall East front counter is commonly referred to as our permit center.

We are again staffed with three permit technicians who very happily take in new permits and uh and do a cursory review to make sure they're complete.

Plans are intact, applications uh are there, they take payment.

Um they from then they do what we call permit initialization in our permit system, which sort of logs in the system and starts to push it out to planner view staff.

They also do a bit of a triage to make sure that the application is the correct uh uh type, and to ensure for a minor alteration of a residential home or something, they can actually express those so they go a little faster than getting in the larger plan check queue.

They offer a lot of guidance for uh customers at the front counter, uh ranging from professional development groups that come in and ask some questions on how the city might handle procedures all the way to the homeowner who's just thinking about some type of remodel or solar perhaps.

Um they do a lot of work with uh the inspection team, uh, making sure that the people a lot of times will call and asking for who their inspector is and how helping to interpret maybe some comments and conditions that have been placed on the on the inspection record.

They also that same permit technician team at the front counter, uh, they perform a lot of minor permit review for us.

They issue uh single family dwelling permits that are based off of uh what we call plot plans, which are five-day review time frames.

They issue um pool permits as well, and uh a host of over-the-counter permits where you can come in and actually apply, and they'll issue the same same day while you're staying there, such as HVAC, re-roof, and hot water heaters.

They uh important to note that we offer all of our services that you can do at the front counter, you can actually do those online.

You can submit all of your paperwork through the city's file drop system.

Uh staff that monitors that uh throughout the day, and uh and actually will make contact, do the same type of triage and review, notify the the applicants that to pay to satisfy any permit fees that might be done to in order to route for plan review.

So everything can be done online, and we'll have even more advancements on the online permit side in the future, which we'll talk a little bit about later.

Once the permit is has landed and been checked and then routed for review, the the plan review team takes it from there.

Uh this is that five-person team that's in charge with handling all review for residential and commercial industrial projects.

Um, and on any given day they're working on something as small as a small residential solar, or they're working on a you know 1.5 million square foot industrial building.

They do they do it all, they're they're wide-ranging and very good at what they do.

Uh the one of their obviously big tasks is meeting and managing our our established plan review timelines.

I've got a slide in the back here.

We'll go through those two, but this team really is in charge of that uh those timelines because their their permits are not only reviewed by the building safety staff, they're reviewed by engineering and planning, and then they go through a fire review that's internal to building safety.

Um, so they they sort of uh help uh make sure the engineering and planning are kind of gonna hit their marks and be able to watch it and be able to consolidate and get permits out.

It's a very important team.

They also take numerous calls from the public, mostly uh you know architects and engineers asking for clarifications on on uh on codes and code interpretations.

Many agencies codes aren't written fantastically black and white, they're rather gray.

So each agency sort of interprets things a little bit differently, so they do a lot of work on the phone and through emails to help uh help other architects and engineers out.

Once the permits issued, uh it gets routed out and uh and fees are satisfied by the permit technicians.

Now it's active and capable of being called in for building inspections.

Um that 10-person inspection team uh every day has about 65 to 95 uh stops.

Um each stop is probably on average two inspections.

So they they get called out to look at a couple of different things in most cases.

Sometimes it's four, sometimes it's one, but um it varies widely.

We've had uh on on heavy days, we'll see inspection stops that go well over 100, 115, 120.

We tend to average around 75 to 80 on uh across the board.

They are uh actively inspecting residential, commercial, industrial buildings.

Um these are these are this is a group of people that are every day when it's 105 out, they're in attics, they're on roofs, um, they're on two and three-story roofs, they they do it all.

Um, and so we uh we practice a lot of safety.

We we talk a lot about how to get on ladders appropriately, uh, they have to be tied off.

Um lots of uh of safety parameters for these guys because they're they're doing a lot of work um you know in a lot of different areas.