Great info from all! Sorry for this long-winded rant;
So, CA Title 24 is over 4,548 pages, last I checked. I agree, we need to meet code, no matter what. But making that efficient on the plan review side is another matter. As an architect, I would love to fill out a 10 page matrix for "commercial restaurants" or "assembly" or "Research Facilities". But this needs to come from the jurisdiction as their due-diligence. I'm in SoCal, and every town is different in their enforcement, forms, bulletins, policies etc. It's not uncommon for the first submittal being sent a boiler plate "corrections" list. An obvious indicator, that they pretty much didn't even look at the drawings that were submitted. The second submittal, you get 14 pages of comments. The third submittal, after you thought you had addressed all 14 pages thoroughly, they "find" new corrections somehow (oh also, you're incurring thousands of $$ in printed drawing sets every time). In the meantime, the contractor is twiddling his thumbs waiting for the permit, and the client is pointing at the architect saying "boy, this guy is incompetent", we should have a permit already! If the thorough "check" needs to be done, bldg depts need to make it efficient for us and for yourselves! Then the architects can focus on making better drawings that are easier to check. Obviously, there are bad and good actors in all these roles, but I just feel like here in SoCal it's a mess. We've got this bloated code, so how do we deal with that efficiently? We need SoCal plan reviewers to step-up and guide that process, but that's not happening. Even just the building application form is always one-size-fits-all. Doesn't matter if you are building a Hospital or a house....fill this out, it's all the same to us....? And God forbid we do ANYTHING digitally. This is why we have plan review expediters setting up shop in the city - that ought to be a warning sign to any city building/planning dept. that things are so highly inefficient for us (architects/contractors) that we are willing to pay someone to deal with it. Many cities in the US are already on a fully digital plan check system. Hell, even New Orleans (as corrupt of a city as it is) is 100% digital plancheck now.
Tmurray - Thanks for that Matrix, I agree this should be furnished uniformly by each city as part of the building application.
Mark Handler - is the LARUCP helping anything? Last person I spoke to that permitted in LA said it was a nightmare.
