Builders take inspection complaints to Ann Arbor City Council
At the Ann Arbor City Council meeting Monday, council members heard longstanding complaints from home builders and contractors about the operations of city inspectors.
Maureen Sloan, CEO of the Builders and Remodelers Association of Greater Ann Arbor (formerly the Home Builders Association of Washtenaw County), spoke at the beginning of the meeting and outlined the shortcomings of the city's inspection regime as reported to her by association members.
"One of the big issues is delays in inspections,” Sloan said in an interview after the meeting. “It can take five days or longer … employees that should be working are now sitting idle and losing income.”
“One of the other issues is lack of consistency,” she added.
The builders group and the Washtenaw Contractors Association have been collecting input from their members over the past several months through an online survey.
“The whole idea is to clearly document and show what the problems are,” said WCA executive director Gretchen Waters. “These are not new problems. Maybe they’ll be taken more seriously than when we just complain all the time.”
Waters said inconsistency is another issue with city inspectors. For example, contractors report inspectors proscribing certain fixes, then finding new and different problems when inspecting the original repairs.
“That’s a big concern because it slows down the process, and time is money,” Waters said. “Our perception is that they’re making the process longer than it needs to be.”
Sloan said she will be meeting with Wendy Rampson, the interim planning and development services manager for the city at some point in the near future. But she added that a major change in the builders and contractors strategy is to take their case to the council, not just city staff and administrators.
“We’ve been trying to go through the administration, but that hasn’t been working,” she said. “Our plan is to go to the city council every month.”
Sloan said she hopes that the continuous attempts to bring attention to the matter will result in a new written policy on city inspections.
“We’re just hoping that at some point they understand these delays are unnecessary,”
she said. “It just costs so much more to do a job in the city of Ann Arbor than anywhere else in the county.”
Dan Meisler writes about real estate, banking & finance and other topics for Ann Arbor Business Review.
Comments
Moose
Fri, Jul 24, 2009 : 8:13 a.m.
Ed, as usual, it depends on who you ask. Trakit gets very mixed reviews by regular users (contractors and staff alike) but the people inside city hall who bought and promoted it think it's the greatest thing since Windows 3.0. On the surface, the process may be more visible, but many people feel is is less user friendly and it's a whole lot more expensive than the sorely underutilized previous software. It's a long and convoluted story full of political intrigue (for A2 anyway;-) with a large cast of characters from the sanctum sanctorums of city hall. The changes to Planning and Development Services in the last 10 years really deserve an in depth journalistic study. There's quite a narrative there that clearly lead to todays development events in Ann Arbor.
Moose
Thu, Jul 23, 2009 : 9:59 p.m.
Council seems more concerned with wooing big developers rather than addressing local contractors (who are mostly local business people who pay for permits and insections) concerns about how the development/permit/inspection process works, so they won't get any relief there. But, Ms Rampson, a do it all skilled bureaucrat, might be able to make some changes to the mechanics of the process. So thee is some hope at the nuts and bolts level. As far as the inconsistent inspections... all I can say is that whoever manages Planning and Development Services has a poor track record for hiring people, inspectors included, who can effectively balance serving the permit holder with the interest of the public.