The new enforcer: Patrick Granson will take code enforcement helm after Bartl’s retirement

When Jim Bartl announced his retirement as director of the Mecklenburg County Land Use and Environmental Services Agency’s Code Enforcement Division, officials launched a nationwide search to find his replacement.
As it turns out, the right man for the job was just two doors down the hall.
Patrick Granson, the current director of Permitting and Plan Review, has been named to lead Code Enforcement.

Granson began his career with Mecklenburg County in 1990 as a plan review facilitator and has served in several capacities, including building inspector, core process supervisor and project manager, just to name a few.
“I am very fortunate,” Granson said. “I consider myself as having grown up with Mecklenburg County.”
According to LUESA director Ebenezer Gujjarlapudi, Granson will assume his new post Sept. 1.
Both Gujjarlapudi and Bartl have sung Granson’s praises. Granson says he’s honored and looks forward to building on what Bartl helped establish in code enforcement.
Granson holds a bachelor’s degree in business from Belmont Abbey College and professional certifications too numerous to list.
A couple of his favorite titles, however, are husband and dad. Granson and his wife, Susan, are going on 24 years of marriage and share two daughters, ages 16 and 19.
In addition to spending time with the girls going to “activities and shows,” Granson said he enjoys his time away from the job sites in a little place up North that he calls “The Farm,” where he can be outdoors, hunt and fish.
Both Granson and Gujjarlapudi sat down with reporter Heath Hamacher recently to discuss code enforcement and Granson’s new position. That conversation appears below, lightly edited for clarity and length.

What experience or knowledge do you bring to the position that can help shape the department?
Granson: I’ve spent the last 26 years as a code official in Mecklenburg County, working in the field as an inspector, as a plan reviewer, and various levels of management, including the director of Plan Review and Permitting, most recently. That experience and institutional knowledge allows me to be aware of the challenges and opportunities staff face from the front line all the way to the director level. Add to that a business administration degree and a lifetime spent in the community, and I feel like I am well-positioned to understand how the department’s needs and mandates mesh with the needs of our customers. While our mission is one of enforcement, I truly believe we can be partners in building a Charlotte-Mecklenburg that is not only thriving, but safe and code-compliant.

What is the vision that you all have for code enforcement?
Granson: The vision is to build an environment that’s safe for the people who live here, work, play and visit and also to make sure all the construction meets code compliance for North Carolina. Also, beyond that, is collaboration between our agencies and our department. Making sure that we work in a seamless environment and we’re partners and help serve our customers in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
Gujjarlapudi: The last couple or three years we have been working diligently on enhancing our customer service profile in the community. We are kind of the baseball umpires; we call balls and strikes, that’s it. We can’t make up stuff. The state establishes a building code and we make sure the plans either meet it or not and the construction meets it or not. The only thing we can do that is under our control is ensure that the service is provided in a way that is customer-friendly, keeps our customer’s end goal in mind and let them go from concept to completion in the shortest amount of time possible. Patrick has been instrumental as part of our customer service enhancement efforts the last couple of years. We want to continue it and also we pride ourselves in being a continuous improvement organization. That means we never sit back and say we’ve arrived. Expectations continue to evolve, so we are always evolving to provide the service to the best of our ability. Safety is always No. 1; customer service is a close No. 2.

What do you see as the biggest challenges you’re currently facing?
Granson: I think some of the biggest demands that we have facing us right now are maintaining growth, of meeting the industry’s expectations of inspections, plan review and permitting, with the finite resources that we have available. We’re partners with our agencies now, so we’re really strongly focused on partnering with our agencies to make a seamless environment for our customers. That’s where we think our biggest challenges are right now.
Gujjarlapudi: Part of it is working with the six towns and the city. Each of them have their own organizational structures, they have their elected officials, they have their mayor, they have their respective organizations – so we’re kind of a collaborator to make sure that we’re fair across jurisdictions. But one of the things that is different with code enforcement with the county versus code enforcement across the nation is we have our own citizens advisory board called the Building Development Commission. It’s actually an appointed board by the Board of County Commissioners that pretty much provides input – they meet on a monthly basis. We work with them in setting our goals for response. You can’t staff-up to provide instant service because you’ll need a thousand people. We issue almost 350 permits a day and we do over 1,100 inspections a day, so there’s no way in the world that people would want us to pay the fee that it would cost us to staff up to that where they could get instant service, so we work really closely with our advisory board to make sure, because we are fee-funded and our customers actually pay the fee, we are meeting their requirements and goals in relation to the fee that they’re paying. Our customers constantly are in our wheelhouse telling us what we do well, what we can do better and also telling us, “This is what we need, guys, can you help us get it?”

What desired changes have you found difficult to implement?
Gujjarlapudi:: From my perspective, we are limited in one sense by availability of people in the marketplace. One of our challenges is because of the booming industry there are only so many people that we can right now hire. So it’s been a little bit difficult to find qualified candidates to help us meet the demand that we think we need with the positions that we have. Because you are competing with the same pool of candidates that the private industry is. The people we have that are qualified to help us do our job are also the people the private industry wants to hire so they can help them be in compliance. That becomes a little bit difficult in that … we may limited as to how much we can compensate people. But that does not mean we are underperforming. Staff has done overtime, evenings and weekends to meet our customer’s expectations.
Granson: I think another thing that we’re doing now is working with the unified development group, made up of leadership between the city and the county. What we’re trying to understand about each other is those ordinances and things like that to better understand what we could do to better service our customers … as a unified group as a city and a county.

According to the permit website, the number of permits issued has been dropping in the past few months after a steady rise after the recession. Are we seeing a cooling off in construction?
Gujjarlapudi: While the numbers may be down, let me just contextualize it a little bit. If you want to change the HVAC unit in your house, you pull one mechanical permit and one electrical permit. If you’re going to build a 50-story tower in uptown Charlotte, you would pull one building permit, one mechanical permit, one electrical permit and one fire permit but the scales are entirely different. While a permit number gives us a general idea of which way the industry’s trending, one permit may take a thousand times more effort than another permit. It’s one of the many factors we look at … it does not stand in isolation.
Granson: I think when you look at the scale of the permit issuance you really have to pay attention to many variables. We look at those trends and evaluate those trends but we … feel like it’s very strong currently in residential and commercial and still see market growth.

What types of construction are going strong; what types are not?
Granson: Multifamily is still strong and we see indicators from the Charlotte Chamber that they will continue to be strong in Mecklenburg County and the six towns, but our residential single-family growth is maintaining a good growth line. So, I will tell you that the one that stands out currently is multifamily, but our residential single-family homes are picking up steam, too.
Gujjarlapudi: Part of it is driven by … where the money flows and what you see permitted today may have been approved a year ago so you see if the city of Charlotte approved building an apartment complex last year it may have just taken them this long to kind of get their plans together … so there’s a lag there but also the market is going to drive what’s being built. Right now it appears there’s an appetite for a bunch of apartments. But who knows in a year from now it may single-family because the apartment dwellers just may want to go the suburbs and buy their own homes.

Are there any state laws on the horizon that will affect your regulation of construction?
Gujjarlapudi: There’s always going to be some movement in the legislature to help a constituency that they think needs assistance wit,h but right now we don’t have anything on the horizon that we are particular tracking, but what usually happens is something suddenly pops up. No Legislature tells us what they’re planning to do a year in advance. We just wait and we hear of something that may be concerning then we will alert our executive team in the county manager’s office and they have a lobbyist on hand who will help us get some clarity or provide input to make sure it’s not detrimental to our operations.