New solar technology hits City Hall in the pocketbook
(sub) New solar technology hits City Hall where it hurts
By Kevin Herrera
Daily Press Staff Writer
CITY HALL — While it likes to promote Santa Monica as a sustainable city that goes out of its way to embrace alternative fuels, for nearly two years, City Hall has failed to find a full-time employee responsible for signing off on solar projects, according to interviews with contractors and city staff.
The lack of a permanent plan checker, coupled with the lack of experience with green building requirements on behalf of contractors and building inspectors, has created a backlog of projects needing approval. This has reinforced Santa Monica’s reputation for being a bad place to do business, contractors said.
“I think Santa Monica has very good intentions, but like always, they have developed a system that is so complex and administratively burdensome,” said Noah Golden of Golden Energy, a Santa Monica-based solar energy-systems consultant. “They want to be supporters of solar, but they go about it in a very contorted way, relying on contract employees.”
Or in the case of mechanical, electrical and plumbing, just one contract employee.
Dan Macy left Santa Monica in December 2005 for a similar job in Newport Beach. Macy said that he would have preferred to stay in Santa Monica, but City Hall refused to match Newport Beach’s offer, so he left.
The following month, City Hall came calling. They were in desperate need of a plan checker with Macy’s qualifications, given that the position was very technical and demanded a lot of expertise. Macy was one of a handful of people in the state who could perform all the tasks required, city officials said.
“I said, ‘Sure, for 30 days,’” said Macy, who is in Santa Monica just two days a month, but takes plans home to approve over the weekend.
“Soon, 30 days turned into 90 days, and 90 days turned into a year, and now here we are approaching two years.”
“You lose that expertise and the flexibility you have with permanent employees,” Golden said.
Realizing that there is a problem, Planning Director Eileen Fogarty, who was hired roughly one year ago, and her staff have worked diligently on finding permanent replacements for Macy. Fogarty said she is close to breaking up the position into two and advertising those vacancies in hopes to have two new employees within the coming months.
It is Fogarty’s goal to cut down the time it takes to approve plans and inspect projects. Fogarty is also assigning inspectors to certain areas of the city so that they remain dedicated to specific projects in their jurisdiction instead of being transferred to other projects, which has created confusion and inconsistency in the past.
39C,“One of the complaints I heard from the public when I came here was that they would get one person in the field who would give them the OK on a set of five things and not on a set of six,” Fogarty said. “They would fix the six and then get another inspector who would say they were OK on six, but not on one through five. By changing this, we have cut down in next day inspection times considerably.”
In fact, city planners and inspectors are meeting all performance goals or have surpassed them in the last quarter, Fogarty said. The next step is to shorten those performance goals to get an even quicker response. Wait times at the customer service counter are down to 20 minutes, and next day inspections are up from 70 percent last year to 100 percent this quarter.
“We are making progress in these areas and we will continue to look at ways to be more efficient,” Fogarty said. “I think there is some good news here.”
Taking a shine to it
All this comes as City Hall’s Energy and Green Building Program Office prepares to celebrate the first anniversary of Solar Santa Monica, a program designed to make solar reasonable and affordable for a large percentage of residents. The program links residents and preferred solar providers together, ensuring that residents receive a good price.
Through the program, 300 kilowatts of electrical muscle have been added to the city’s grid and another 500 are expected in the coming year, said Susan Munves, director of Solar Santa Monica.
“This is double the capacity we had when we first started,” Munves said.
The popularity of solar is clear, but the ability to get it installed quickly isn’t.
While the lack of a permanent plan check is a contributing factor to delays, contractors said, there is also the issue of adapting to new technology.
In the beginning of Solar Santa Monica, many contractors were coming to City Hall with inadequate plans, forcing Macy to make changes himself at first, and then eventually reject them because he was receiving too many that were not up to code.
3A1,“We started to find out that we were having a lot of problems,” Macy said. “People weren’t following the plans correctly, and that created a lot of field inspections that ultimately slowed the process down. A lot of the contractors coming into solar are from traditional construction and do not have the electrical background, which is why we had a lot of plans coming back. Things are getting better now, and instead of it taking three or four weeks, projects are getting done in a week.”
Plan checkers and inspectors are also having to adapt, Munves said. Building and Safety is working with the Santa Monica Fire Department to develop a standard checklist for green projects.
“The city has to be clear of what it expects so the contractors are able to deliver installations that meet our standards,” Munves said. “I guess you could say we’ve had a bit of a learning curve (but) we have been successful in spite of ourselves.”
“Soon 30 days turned into 90 days, and 90 days turned into a year and now we here approaching two years.”
Dan Macy, contract employee responsible for checking all plans having to do with electrical, mechanical or plumbing.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 30, 2007. Read the original PDF.