Development Services Review. Final Report. Zucker July 2016

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.

Morgan Hill, California

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Zucker Systems