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Morgan Hill, California
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Zucker Systems
Plan Review Completeness
When we spoke with industry representatives their single most significant complaint
was the lack of plan review quality that they were paying for. Those with a long
history of working in the jurisdiction have come to expect that, regardless of what
they do, they should anticipate that their plan submittals will be returned several times
with minor corrections to be made, only to have the later submittals identify major
corrections that were on the original plans but not detected until after numerous
checks. While the developers were most vocal about this problem occurring with their
interactions with Land Development Engineering staff, employee surveys suggest that
this is a “culture” that has been accepted in many of the Departments. Land
Development Engineering staff has indicated their efforts to obtain comments on the
plans that they distribute to other Departments rarely come back with meaningful
comments and in many cases are not returned at all. We are optimistic that in the
future these requests for review will be tracked for both timely turnarounds and
meaningful comments with the implementation of the TRAKiT system.
12.
Recommendation:
Departments that are charged with the responsibility to
solicit comments from other Departments on plan submittals should
utilize the TRAKiT system for electronic reviews and to foster
accountability among the participants.
We believe it is the responsibility of all supervisors to confirm that all plan reviews
are comprehensive based on the amount and quality of information submitted on the
plans. We are aware that sometimes plan corrections will be necessary based on new
information provided during subsequent resubmittals. What customers find
unacceptable is to have new corrections identified during resubmittals based on
information that was available during the initial submittal. Supervisors should
routinely review correction lists that were generated from plan resubmittals to confirm
that new corrections are not being added when those corrections should have been
identified on the original submittal.
13.
Recommendation:
Plan Review supervisors should routinely review
correction lists generated from plan resubmittals to confirm new
corrections are not being added that should have been detected during the
original review.