Completeness determinations

[Eric]

Does your jurisdiction have criteria for determining when a building permit application is "complete" (i.e., the date your review clock starts)? If so, how simple vs. open-ended would you say your completeness criteria are? If you gave the same application to five different reviewers, are you confident they'd all identify the same completeness date or would it vary substantially across reviewers?

 

[alishna]

Yes, our jurisdiction does have specific criteria to decide when a building permit application is considered "complete. This is important because it marks the official start of our review timeline.
The criteria are fairly straightforward; we check for required forms, fees, site plans, construction drawings, and any reports needed based on the project type (like structural, energy, or zoning info). While the list is clear, there’s still a little room for interpretation, especially on things like how detailed the plans need to be.
If you gave the same application to five different reviewers, most of the time they would agree on whether it’s complete. But in some cases, small differences in judgment might cause one or two reviewers to flag something others might accept. We try to minimize this with checklists and internal training, but it’s not 100% uniform every time.

 

[Eric]

Yes, our jurisdiction does have specific criteria to decide when a building permit application is considered "complete. This is important because it marks the official start of our review timeline.
The criteria are fairly straightforward; we check for required forms, fees, site plans, construction drawings, and any reports needed based on the project type (like structural, energy, or zoning info). While the list is clear, there’s still a little room for interpretation, especially on things like how detailed the plans need to be.
If you gave the same application to five different reviewers, most of the time they would agree on whether it’s complete. But in some cases, small differences in judgment might cause one or two reviewers to flag something others might accept. We try to minimize this with checklists and internal training, but it’s not 100% uniform every time.

Thanks for sharing your experience with this. Sounds like your building department is pretty transparent and consistent when it comes to completeness dates and you never feel strung along by reviewers before hitting that milestone. That's good to hear!

I think there is cause for concern when reviewers are allowed too much discretion or the completeness criteria are too open to interpretation. Under those conditions, reviewers may be incentivized to slow walk the completeness determination, ensuring that processing times reflect favorably on them and their department regardless of how long the application was actually sitting at their desk.

 

[Jeff]

Our Permit Techs review all submittals for completeness prior to the plans being routed to reviewers in various departments. They are very thorough in their review and make sure all documents and plans that are needed for the review are included. We train our Permit Techs on what is needed for various reviews, but sometimes projects get routed that are lacking required docs. We use these instances as a training opportunity to review with the techs what is required and why its important for the reviewers to have all docs/plans for their review.