Development Services Review. Final Report. Zucker July 2016

62. Recommendation: Opportunities to lead training classes should be given to all staff as a means of encouraging the development of technical expertise and identifying staff for potential future promotional opportunities.

D. P ROCESSING I SSUES

Addressing

The process of establishing addresses is currently assigned to a Development Services Technician in the Building Division. Addressing appears to be a very staff intensive process and frequently results in conflicting information being stored in a variety of databases maintained by various Departments and Divisions. Addresses are currently used for Building Permits, Business Licenses, Engineering Permits and are included in the County Assessor files. Each of these databases has the potential to conflict with the others. For users of the new TRAKiT system to realize its full potential to be able to effectively track and report information, it is essential that the information be accurate. There is a clear need to have the contributing Departments and Agencies develop and implement a standardized set of rules to apply when creating addresses. 63. Recommendation: The Building Official should create a workgroup to establish a standard set of rules to follow when creating addresses. Once a standard set of rules for establishing addresses has been created there will be a need to review the various existing databases that house address information and make the appropriate modifications to reconcile inconsistencies The City’s Information Systems staff will need to be an important contributor to the process of identifying the conflicting information. 64. Recommendation: Staff from those Departments and Divisions that use address information should work with Information Systems staff to identify and reconcile conflicting address information. Inspection Requests The most significant issue we detected during our review of the Building Division has been the Division’s inability to consistently provide next-day inspections. This is a performance standard that we have found to be adopted throughout the country. On one hand we were told that inspections during the busy summertime have been delayed as much as two (2) weeks, while also being told that the Division provides next-day inspections approximately 85% of the time. This wildly inconsistent information could not be reconciled through any activity reports that we were provided. It is our expectation that the implementation of the new TRAKiT system

Morgan Hill, California

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Zucker Systems