Code crunch time

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 In late July, Jim Bartl knew the Democratic National Convention would impact Mecklenburg County’s code inspection department.

The question was: By how much?

Bartl, the department’s director for 16 years, said at the time that “the big unknown” was how many DNC-related permits his department would be asked to review just before the convention as people scrambled to finish construction projects in time for the event.

The DNC has created more work for Bartl’s department to juggle. In addition to reviewing DNC permits, his department is also responsible for inspecting Time Warner Cable Arena and other venues that have been altered for the convention.

The DNC also comes at what is normally a busy season for the code inspection department.

“It’s the middle of the summer,” Bartl, who’s from St. Louis, said. “This is when people build.”

Still, as busy as the DNC has kept his department, Bartl said it’s no comparison to 2007, the peak of the housing boom.

“We were running hard to keep ahead of that,” he said. “There were a lot more big projects than now. What we have now is we don’t have as many big projects.

“We have a healthy workload relative to where things were in the valley of the recession. But because they’re smaller projects and a lot of renovation work, that is far more staff-intense than a big project.”

How has the DNC affected your department? We’ve been really fortunate in that the teams we’ve been working with on designated projects have done a really good job. The project on the police command center went through really well. The team on the (Time Warner Cable) Arena, looks like it’s a team that really has their act together; we got the permit pushed out the door before they needed to start the work. Same thing’s true out at the airport.

Are DNC-related permits and inspections being given priority over other requests your department is handling? No. We have a scheduled review process, and this is an example of something people in Meck have that they don’t have in other places. We don’t have a queue. In 2003 we threw out the queue and created what was called On Schedule. But the key is that the architects and engineers have to have their act together enough so they can plan to get in the schedule so that, by working with us early and us reminding them, “OK, if those are your dates, go get in the schedule,” the time is set aside. An architect today that signs a contract with an owner that knows he’s going to deliver drawings to us on Oct. 31 can go in our system and reserve time on Nov. 1.

Have you had to hire extra people to help you get through the DNC? Well, we haven’t looked at it especially as hiring people for the DNC. We added commercial plan-review staff as part of the last round of staff increases. We monitor the demand from month to month, and we look at where the activity is going and where the strain is on the system and then we ask ourselves, “Do we need a reviewer and, if so, what kind of reviewer do we need to stay ahead of it?” So, does it impact us? I guess, since we added positions, yeah. Did we add people just to manage the DNC? No, not particularly just to manage the DNC.

Tell me more about your staffing as it relates to the DNC. We wrestled with a long time to come up with a special-events strategy for things that we think are going to be (part) of the DNC if not being directly related to the four big projects for the DNC. We finally came up with a special-events team strategy, which we call Meck Special Team, and we pulled two particular people out of our commercial-plan review … we assigned them from commercial plan review, to be the key people on that team. And then we backed them up with three part-time positions that we created: We created three part-time positions to back up some temporary assignments that we wanted to make with key people that we felt were particularly well-suited to manage problems that we think are going to hit us as part of the DNC work that occurs as we get closer and closer to the event.

Have the DNC Committee or any Democratic organizations given your department compensation for the additional work your department will have to do? They pay the normal fees that everybody pays. We’re a fee-funded operation. They’re paying fees as a mega-project. Typically, those fees cover themselves, (according to) every study that we’ve done.

Will your office be open during the DNC? Yes. If you want to deal with traffic, we’ll be here. (But) most people do business with us virtually.

When the DNC is over, will you be ecstatic? We’ll take a couple of days to catch our breath, and then we got stuff that we’re working on that’s really, really important to us. We got focus group work that we’re going to do with customers to be sure we understand the last report that was given to us. Customers have said they want to work to improve auto-notification. We got a couple of big technology projects that we’re trying to advance, the virtual plan room that goes along with electronic-plan submittal, and other things.

ROBERTS can be reached at [email protected].